The Grief and Rising Anger After the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
It was just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday when the motorcade carrying Charlie Kirk’s body pulled out of Timpanogos Regional Hospital in Orem, Utah. Waiting along the route, roughly 100 people who had gathered for an unplanned, impromptu memorial paused what they were doing, stepped into line along the sidewalk, and stood silent as the procession sped away from the nearby mountain slopes and into the falling dark. A group of young “elders” (missionaries) from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filled the quiet air with a slow, somber rendition of Amazing Grace.
Kirk had been on campus at nearby Utah Valley University just hours earlier, headlining the kickoff stop of his planned national “American Comeback Tour.” Authorities allege a sniper positioned himself on the roof of a building roughly 200 yards from the event, took aim, and killed Kirk with a single shot.
My own presence at the makeshift gathering was just as unplanned as the memorial itself. WIRED had dispatched photographer Sinna Nasseri and I to Utah to cover an entirely unrelated story, and we drove to Orem to bear witness and make sense of the chaotic, grief-stricken moment.
Young people made up the vast majority of the crowd outside the hospital, a fact that makes perfect sense: Kirk’s defining legacy was building a brand of right-wing politics that resonated with a generation long written off as uninterested in conservative activism. Kirk was many things: charismatic, politically shrewd, unapologetically polemical, and ruthless in debate. His organization Turning Point USA, built around the mission to “win America’s culture war,” was arguably the right’s most successful new political group of the past decade. A gifted populist demagogue, he targeted trans people, LGBTQ+ people, Black communities, Muslim people, and women with his attacks, and his arguments often relied on misinformation, twisted history, or blatant hypocrisy. Yet because his public events were so often framed as open, even-handed debates—two opposing citizens going head-to-head at the microphone—they felt authentic and genuinely democratic to his base of supporters.
“I really have to thank my Instagram algorithm for introducing me to him,” said 18-year-old Elder Joseph Trunnel, dressed in the crisp white shirt and tie standard for LDS missionaries. “Part of me wanted to be like him, because he was such a genius.” Trunnel added that Kirk inspired him to skip college and attend trade school instead. “I got my barber license, and it’s been working out really good,” he told me. “It’s really made a difference in my life.” His friend and fellow LDS elder Bryce Harding, 19, agreed: “He spoke the truth; he never tried to cause contention.”
That telling of Kirk’s legacy, of course, is far from accurate. Kirk’s entire career was built on stoking political contention. He went toe-to-toe with college student activists in public debates, and challenged high-profile liberal opponents too, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and sharp liberal commentator Sam Seder. On his podcast, he called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor” and endorsed the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Viral clips of his takes flooded social media, helping him dominate right-wing political spaces and cement his status as a leading crusader for far-right values—especially among the rising conservative youth movement.
When I first arrived at the hospital, I ran into a visibly shaken young boy in a green polo, no older than 12. His mother, 36-year-old Whitney Williamson, held his hand tightly as she explained her son had long enjoyed watching Kirk’s videos on TikTok, and after hearing news of the killing, he’d sheepishly asked if they could come to the hospital to leave flowers. “I can step back and say I don’t have the same political beliefs as him,” Williamson said. “But no one deserves to be shot no matter what your political beliefs are. And to be killed on so many livestreams like that? It's horrific. He was someone’s entire world. He’s someone’s baby.”
At the vigil, a man dressed in a full Abraham Lincoln costume called for peace and national healing, tearing up as he delivered a short speech he simultaneously livestreamed to followers on his iPhone. “When Abraham Lincoln was killed, they took his body for almost three weeks on a train ride throughout America to help people’s hearts to turn to God instead of to anger,” he said. Across other parts of the hospital lawn, grief quickly veered into conspiratorial speculation blaming the so-called Deep State for the attack.
Mourners stood huddled in small groups, or alone, crying quietly. One of the vigil speakers captured how local grief was already metastasizing into internet-fueled anger. “This one shot,” he said, “will be heard across the world faster and farther than any one shot has ever been heard—I assure you.”
Utah is most often known for its polite, decorous political culture, led by prominent Mormon Republican figures like former Senator and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Yet even here, under the surface, strains of political radicalism have been percolating for years. Shortly before a 2023 visit to the state from President Joe Biden, FBI agents killed Craig Deleeuw Robertson just a few miles from where Kirk was later shot. Robertson had posted online that he’d heard of Biden’s travel plans and was planning to dig out his ghillie suit and “clean the dust off the m24 sniper rifle.” He was armed when agents arrived to serve him a warrant. Then, at a June No Kings rally in Salt Lake City, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, a fashion designer and innocent bystander, died after being accidentally shot by a group of self-described “peacekeepers.”
As WIRED has previously reported, right-wing figures including former President Donald Trump immediately seized on Kirk’s killing, framing his death as irrefutable evidence that the left is intolerant of open debate. Some of the most worrying comments came from Stewart Rhodes, who pledged to reactivate his militia group the Oath Keepers and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress the American left. At least two members of the far-right militant group the Proud Boys showed up to the hospital. One, a 35-year-old with a braided beard who goes by “Viking,” even expressed shock at the unhinged state of political discourse and violence in America. “Charlie Kirk was the most middle-ground person out of all of them,” Viking reasoned. It did not make sense to him that Kirk would be targeted for assassination. Like many supporters, he had been drawn to Kirk’s carefully cultivated image as a fair-minded debater. “Charlie could take a heated debate,” he alleged, “and turn it into a civil discussion.”
Thirty-seven-year-old Adam Calhoun, who was standing 10 feet away from Kirk when the shot rang out, stood dazed on the hospital lawn, clutching a dirt-stained MAGA hat he had recovered from the scene. He and his wife had driven around the region all afternoon, trying to process the violence they had just witnessed.
As the couple listened to news on the radio, Calhoun grew irate at what he called the “left’s intolerance,” specifically calling out irresponsible speculation from an MSNBC commentator that Kirk could have been killed by a supporter firing a gun “in celebration.” He told me he had never purchased a MAGA hat before, in part because he disliked all the acrimony it spawned, but he pledged to keep this one forever. The killing, Calhoun concluded, “has emboldened me, for sure.” Another woman at the vigil echoed Calhoun’s sentiments to a local reporter: “When it’s your own home, it just kind of ignites something in you even more. It just makes me want to stand up even more and, I don’t know, be even more vocal.”
Twenty-year-old Ethan Mendenhall held the hand of 19-year-old Emma Hasson, who described herself as politically “in the middle” and said she had come to the vigil to express her opposition to political violence. “When things like this happen it kind of sets you back,” she told me. “Even just standing here when they were saying the prayer, I felt vulnerable with my back to the cars. It just makes you feel unsafe.”
Kirk’s body made its final journey to his home state of Arizona aboard the vice president’s plane the evening after the shooting. As of this writing, the killer remains at large.
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