The Lede
MAGA Reacts to the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
In Washington, D.C., and online, people mourned the right-wing activist—and some called for vengeance.
By Antonia HitchensSeptember 11, 2025
Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
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Late last summer, I spent the early hours of a weekend morning walking through suburban Phoenix with volunteers for Turning Point Action, Charlie Kirk’s political-advocacy organization. Donald Trump had just been in town for a huge rally, during which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—a surprise guest—endorsed him. Gold streamers made to look like they were on fire exploded from the stage. Many in the crowd were there to see Kirk, who spoke first. “You know you are part of something bigger than yourself,” he said. “You are part of the most exciting, diverse, powerful movement in the history of this country.” He went on, “This movement is about all of us against them.” The next time I saw Kirk, in January, Trump had won the election, and Kirk was hosting an Inauguration Eve party in the basement of a hotel in Washington. Giddy supporters danced under a disco ball. But, even at the height of the exuberance, there were a lot of discussions about the battlefield ahead, and references to how narrowly Trump had escaped death on the campaign trail. On Wednesday, after Kirk was assassinated onstage in Utah, it felt, to many, like the war was here. “People warned him, ‘Hey, Charlie, you’re the most exposed person than anybody in this movement,’ ” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show. “Charlie Kirk’s a casualty of war. We’re at war in this country.” On the House floor, Speaker Mike Johnson interrupted votes to hold a moment of silence for Kirk. Lauren Boebert shouted that they should be praying out loud: “Silent prayers get silent results.” Anna Paulina Luna yelled, at Democrats, “Y’all caused this!”
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I decided to go out. There was a vigil for Kirk at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic church near the Capitol. The service lasted twelve minutes. By the time I arrived, the pews were empty; in the dark hallway outside the nave, I ran into a Senate staffer, who had heard about the vigil in an e-mail blast. “He represented a lot of people, whether you agreed with him or not,” he said, of Kirk.
Outside, two men were talking under a street lamp, holding printed programs. “The vigil used the Sermon on the Mount as a direct comparison between Kirk and Jesus,” one of them, whose name was Ethan, told me. “You could think about him going around the country as a controversial truthteller, spreading the Gospel. Some people will call him a provocateur, and others will call him a prophet.”
“He was one of the nicer people on the right,” the other man, who wouldn’t give his name, said. “I’m concerned about what may follow.”
Ethan responded, “Some people are straight up celebrating this guy’s death right now.”
“It validates the idea that the right is under attack,” the other man said. “Maybe the quiet majority will grow bigger. I could see people saying, ‘I’m not going to put my face out there, because that guy did and he got killed for doing it.’ ”
“I think the real question is whether or not things start online or in real life,” Ethan said.
The other man asked Ethan if he had seen the video of the assassination. Ethan hadn’t. “Fuck that,” the man said. “You should watch it. Do you want to watch it right now?”
Joe Allen, a correspondent for Bannon’s show, happened to be crossing the street alone in the dark. I walked with him toward Pennsylvania Avenue. I thought people might gather at Butterworth’s, a sort of informal MAGA clubhouse, to mourn Kirk. One of the restaurant’s owners told me that he planned to hire armed security the next day. The jubilance of the Inauguration felt like a long time ago. “Be safe out there,” one of the vigilgoers had told me. “I hope this doesn’t turn into a hot civil war.” Allen said, “I feel a dark foreboding. The swelling negative energy . . . and then this, and the constant replay online. Yeah, we’re going to be watching these people die for days, weeks, I don’t know, over and over again. There’s so much callousness and cruelty, and I can already see it building momentum for bloodlust—for revenge, too. If you feel like your tribe is under attack, you draw blood.” He added, “I’m concerned about a strengthening of state power, from Trump all the way down. But, more immediately, potential copycats.”
We paused in front of a storefront where a TV was playing CNN. Trump was onscreen, speaking from the Oval Office. “My Administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after—” The video faded out. “Certainly the President is not sort of calling for calm on all sides,” Anderson Cooper said. Kara Swisher was his guest. “There’s never an opportunity not to have an opportunity to hate,” she replied. “It’s a real weaponization of words.”
Outside Butterworth’s, a man in a suit paced the sidewalk. I overheard snippets of his call: “We’re gonna put a text out. . . . The Democrats . . . ” A group was smoking near the door. “Charlie did everything fucking right,” a person close to the Administration told me. “The entire point was, I’m going to sit down and talk to people and try to change their minds. If you don’t like my ideas, come sit down with me. To quote Charlie, ‘When the discourse stops, the violence starts.’ When someone believes in the system as much as he does, if you’re going to kill him . . .” He went on, “There are malignant parts of the right begging for an excuse. Charlie was the bulwark against that. You have an absolutely fucking handicapped political structure in the U.S.”
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It’s hard to overstate Kirk’s role in American politics, but it’s also difficult to explain to those who don’t follow him. A person who is soon joining the Administration told me that Kirk’s death was a “devastating loss for the conservative movement, in which I feel his importance was second only to Trump—and his long-term importance would have been greater. He was willing to take on subjects that others wouldn’t touch, but he did it as a happy warrior.” A friend who’d covered Turning Point told me that she was struck by how formative Kirk was to a generation of young conservative women. “Charlie had such an influence on how they chose to live,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Charlie is telling me to get married and start a family by thirty, so I’m doing that.’ ” Earlier this year, Jim Banks, a senator from Indiana, wrote, on X, “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.” On Thursday, Kirk’s producer, Andrew Kolvet, said, “He really saw his role as keeping the coalition together.”
The video snippet of Kirk that I remember most is from an event in Idaho, when a supporter asked him when they could finally use their guns. It was 2021. “We’re living under corporate and medical fascism,” the man said. “This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? And that’s not a joke—I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk told the audience to stop cheering. “I’m going to denounce that, and I’m going to tell you why. Because you’re playing into all their plans, and they’re trying to make you do this. That’s O.K. Just hear me out. . . . What I’m saying is we have a very fragile balance right now at our current time where we must exhaust every single peaceful mean possible. I will say this. Idaho has not even started to exercise the peaceful means of state sovereignty against the federal government. Not even close. I’ll give you five things Idaho could do right now.” He asked, “Why don’t we start to use that muscle peacefully?”
Kirk knew as well as anyone that it didn’t always go that way. A clip of him circulated on Wednesday, from an event in 2023. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price,” he said. That evening, on CNN, Mike Johnson was talking about better angels. Elsewhere, the calls were for vengeance. On X, Elon Musk had written, “The Left is the party of murder.” I looked at a few other posts. “Time to do your fucking job and seize power . . . if you want to be more than a footnote in the ‘American Collapse’ section of future history books, it’s now or never,” Sam Hyde, an alt-right comedian, wrote, tagging J. D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, the tech billionaire Palmer Luckey, and Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a private security firm. The pair outside the vigil had referenced the user Captive Dreamer, a popular anonymous MAGA account on X. Kirk “was the last person that still believed in debate,” Captive Dreamer posted. “There’s no more debate. No more discussion with these people. No more chit chat. They need to be crushed—forever.” ♦
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