God help us.
On Wednesday, I watched some of the worst footage I’ve seen in my life. An assassin’s bullet cut down Charlie Kirk, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists and commentators, at a public event on the campus of Utah Valley University.
Kirk was a husband and the father of two small children. He was also a hero to countless conservative college students. And now he’s gone.
Kirk might have been the most successful conservative political personality in America not named Donald Trump. He helped found Turning Point USA in 2012 and built it into the most influential conservative youth organization in the United States.
As Emily Jashinsky, a Washington correspondent for Unherd, put it on social platform X: “Charlie Kirk is a fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. People feel like they know him. This will hit very, very close to home in ways we are not prepared for.”