In an era when politics has increasingly become a blood sport, Wednesday’s assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk before thousands of people on the campus of Utah Valley University, was nonetheless a shocking and profane act of violence. 

Kirk, like all victims of gun violence, was someone’s family member — a husband, a father, a son. He was a professed Christian and a provocateur who took his message to places that were often hostile; he welcomed a back-and-forth with those who disagreed with his views. He was a media savant who leveraged his views into the algorithms of young people, particularly men, who have been historically reluctant to engage in politics. Many people who couldn’t have picked Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens out of a police lineup knew Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, the political organization he co-founded to activate young conservatives, played a key role in President Donald Trump’s reemergence from the shadows of Jan. 6 and his return to the presidency four years later.

There is no getting around other elements of his character. Kirk was eager to weaponize  language against some of the most marginalized and vulnerable among us. That fact alone made his calls for respectful debate and elevating “discussion above personal insults” ring hollow.

There was no mistaking how Kirk viewed Democrats, and liberals and progressives more generally: They “stand for everything God hates,” he said last year during a campaign appearance with Trump in Georgia. The transgender community, he proclaimed, were “a throbbing middle finger to God” and an “abomination.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “a bad man,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, public education and federally assisted programs, was a mistake. With Turning Point USA, Kirk published a “Professor Watchlist” and encouraged college students to add instructors who held leftist viewpoints. He recently posted on X: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

In no small part, Kirk helped fashion the world in which we now find ourselves: Divided, angry, mistrustful of our neighbors and their motives, and at the very least, increasingly violent in rhetoric. Kirk did this literally until the end of his life; video footage from the event shows him disparaging the trans community in the seconds before he was shot. 

There was no mistaking how Kirk viewed Democrats, and liberals and progressives more generally: They “stand for everything God hates,” he said last year during a campaign appearance with Trump in Georgia. The transgender community, he proclaimed, were “a throbbing middle finger to God” and an “abomination.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “a bad man,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, public education and federally assisted programs, was a mistake. With Turning Point USA, Kirk published a “Professor Watchlist” and encouraged college students to add instructors who held leftist viewpoints. He recently posted on X: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

In no small part, Kirk helped fashion the world in which we now find ourselves: Divided, angry, mistrustful of our neighbors and their motives, and at the very least, increasingly violent in rhetoric. Kirk did this literally until the end of his life; video footage from the event shows him disparaging the trans community in the seconds before he was shot. 

And yet: His brutal murder is a national tragedy that only the most inhumane among us would deny. Kirk’s wife and two young children will forever be shattered by his death, and the 3,000 witnesses — survivors themselves — who had gathered to hear him speak stand to be traumatized by what they saw. Kirk’s killing puts all of us, left and right, Democrat and Republican, at risk. As a colleague said, “The consequences are likely to be dire for all of us.”

Before Kirk was even pronounced dead — before a person of interest, and then another, was taken into custody and then released, before a possible motive could be found — right-wing influencers and followers were calling for retribution by using the very pronoun they profess to hate. “They,” of course, in this context, was taken to mean Kirk’s murderer, whoever that person is and wherever they may be. It also meant the social forces or “movements” that many on the right wish to hold responsible: Democrats, liberals, progressives, feminists, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people and many others — literally anyone who is not a fully-paid passenger aboard the MAGA train on which Kirk was one of the most skilled and useful engineers.

After his death was confirmed by Trump in a Truth Social post, Laura Loomer, one of the president’s closest advisers, was unequivocal. “They sent a trained sniper to assassinate Charlie Kirk while he was sitting next to a table of hats that said 47,” she posted on X. “The Left are terrorists.” Before Kirk’s death was even announced, she attacked the left as “a national security threat” and called on Trump “to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later wrote, “Only President Trump can take these people down.”

Trump was apparently listening. In his speech on Wednesday night from the Oval Office, he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom,” and parroted Loomer’s rhetoric. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. 

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” he said, “including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

In the hours after the president spoke, Loomer designated Sept. 10 “a Turning Point in the USA. Now, to action.”