In Search of Charlie Kirk
By Femi Olugbile
On Wednesday the 10th of September 2025, at the campus of Utah Valley University, Utah, USA, a young man was shot dead, in the full glare of public attention.
It was an outdoor event, one of series of speaking and debating engagements organised by a body with the rather intriguing name of Turning Point USA.
Watching video footage of the incident a few hours later, by which time it had been escalated to the attention of all the world’s media, was like watching a macabre scene from a horror movie. The young man sat in front of a crowd of young people. They were engaged in earnest discussion. He was wearing a white t-shirt and looked like any regular American kid. And then, in a trice, the blood, and the life, spurted out of his body as his carotid artery was lacerated by the projectile.
The American youth in the white t-shirt was Charlie Kirk. He was thirty-one years old, married, and a father of two children.
The President of the USA, a man not known for empathy, broke the sad news, showing shock in his whole demeanour. He paid tribute to the young man as ‘a martyr for truth and freedom’ and announced that American flags everywhere would fly at half-mast.
The reverberations have continued since, reaching far beyond the shores of the USA. Massive anti-immigration protests in the city of London over the weekend, at one of which eccentric billionaire Elon Musk appeared on a screen to call for the overthrow of the British government, were alleged to have gained impetus from Charlie’s killing. And at Oxford University, the black newly elected President of the Oxford Union, George Abaraonye, who had engaged Charlie Kirk at a debate on ‘Toxic Masculinity’ a few months earlier, was threatened with ‘disciplinary proceedings’ for making unsympathetic remarks on WhatsApp after the tragedy. He was immediately assailed with a deluge of racist abuse and threats on social media.
The grieving widow of Charlie – herself a right-wing activist, was defiant in her angst. In a message to the ‘evildoers’ who assasinated her husband, she said
‘You have no idea what you have unleashed across this entire country, and the world’.
It is only appropriate, in the middle of all of this, to ask the question, and to seek to understand –
‘Who Was Charlie Kirk?’
Charles James Kirk was born on 14th October 1993, in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights, Illinois. His father was an architect, and his mother a mental health counsellor. His parents were active Republicans. He became politically active at a young age. He enrolled at College, but soon became convinced that the best career path for him was to engage in full time activism to transform society.
In 2012, at the age of 18, he founded Turning Point USA.
TPUSA quickly became a prominent organ for the propagation of Right-Wing ideas across the nation. Its style was a direct, ‘take no prisoners’ attack on ‘leftists’, ‘liberals’ and other perceived enemies of of extreme conservatism. It published a ‘Professor Watchlist’ which attacked academics in the Universities who were accused of disseminating ‘Woke’ ideas. It also published a School Board Watchlist, which targeted School Boards accused of approving the use of school textbooks which taught ‘poisonous’ ideas to American children.
Charlie addressed the Republican National Convention in 2016, and worked for Trump’s electoral success, alongside Trump Junior, Eric and Lara Trump.
In 2019, he launched a campaign to recruit one million students for Trump’s failed re-election campaign.
The following year, he wrote a book titled ‘The MAGA Doctrine’, which disclosed that the Republican Party ‘…is no longer a conservative party…but instead a Trump-remade populist party’.
It was revealing insight about a movement that had already crossed a red line to redefine everything, including the Truth, the Law, Right and Wrong, and even the nature and the will of God.
Charlie’s unique value proposition was in not limiting himself to ‘preaching to the converted’ by addressing Republican audiences, but taking the battle of ideas and argument to the strongholds of the enemy. To capture the youth vote, he visited 25 college campuses, home of Gen Z Democrats, to debate and to convince, in a tour he named ‘You’re being brainwashed’. It played a critical role in Trump’s election victory in 2024.
He hosted a radio talk show and a popular podcast.
Neither Truth nor Scruple was Charlie’s forte, sadly. He promoted false claims about black Police assault victim George Floyd, claiming he had died of a drug overdose. He advocated for gun rights, despite children’s deaths in school mass-shootings. He made false claims about COVID-19 and election rigging. He bussed in people to join the January 6th storming of Congress after Donald Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election. He pronounced himself a Christian nationalist, and was disparaging of other races and cultures. He opposed abortion and a rampant LGBTQ agenda. He disdained Dr Martin Luther King Junior, dismissed ‘Black Lives Matter’, and condemned the Civil Rights Act. He questioned the capabilities of black people in demanding occupations such as aircraft piloting, attributing their presence in ‘white’ jobs to unfair advantage through DEI – the Trump-reviled ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ programme.
Watching Charlie from a distance disclosed a talented young man with a gift of the garb, who harped on some truths, such as the dangers posed to the family and society by mainstreaming LGBTQ extremism. But he also told a lot of lies. He recognised no boundaries of decency, reifying an America modelled in the image of Donald Trump, warts and all. He sought to make the white racist core assumptions of MAGA philosophy the essence of the future for the USA and other ‘white’ nations, instead of a transient nationalist aberration.
That the news of his tragic death could impact behaviour as far afield as the streets of London, influencing huge numbers of otherwise normal Britons to join extreme nationalist Tommy Robinson in his ‘Unite The Kingdom’ anti-foreigners demonstration, shows the infectious power of human thought, especially when it is packaged in a passionate melange of home-truths that could truly help to bring about a necessary existential moderation in Western society and its too-many freedoms, mixed with lavish portions of half-truth and cruel, hurtful falsehood.
May the soul of young Charlie Kirk rest in peace, at last.
