Front Burner - Fear, fury and Charlie Kirk’s killing

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

American conservative media figure and activist Charlie Kirk was one of the most prominent young voices of the American right. The founder of Turning Point USA, a close ally of Donald Trump, and a figure who helped shape the culture and pipeline of the MAGA movement.On Wednesday, he was shot at one of his trademark campus debate events at Utah Valley University.Will Sommer, a senior reporter with The Bulwark, joins the show to break down the shooting, how rhetoric around the killing is escalating, and how it all connects to the growing atmosphere of political violence in the United States.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. The assassination of conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk has sent shockwaves across the entire political landscape. There is anger. I'm sick and tired of seeing the bullets. They're only going one way. When does a senseless nonsense stuff? Some of the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil. They hate the good, the truth, and the beautiful, and embrace the evil, the false, and the ugly.

And they literally will kill those with whom they disagree just as their predecessor, leftist, Marx, and Stalin and Lenin and Pol Pot and Fidel Castro did. Appeals for calm. Hopefully we can all sit down and say, hey, it's time to take a deep breath. and embrace what we have in this country, but not resort to where it's went. The temperature needs to be brought down in the political environment, and this is a good opportunity to do that. And calls for revenge.

They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. What are we going to do about it? None of this has been helped by the few details known about the assassin, who ended Kirk's life with a single shot fired across the heads of the audience gathered to see him at a Utah University campus. Today, Will Summer is here. He is a senior reporter with the bulwark where he writes the

false flag newsletter. We're going to talk about what we know about the shooting, how people across the political spectrum are reacting, and what this atmosphere of increasing political violence could mean. Will, hi, thank you so much for making the time today. Thanks for having me. So you and I are speaking around 1 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. And I want to start with some of the latest news that was published by the Wall Street Journal. And that is, according to the journal, who say that they saw an internal bulletin.

They're also quoting a source close to the investigation, that the ammunition used in the shooting was engraved with, quote, transgender anti-fascist ideology. Do we know anything else at this hour about this? What immediately came to mind to you when you first saw that information? Well, it's interesting. You know, the idea that there were some sort of pro-trans, anti-fascist messages on the bullet casings, originally came from right-wing commentator, a commentator, Stephen Crowder, who's actually Canadian, I believe, but is now in the U.S. And so he got the kind of the first copy of this intelligence report, but it seems to be very kind of sort of a draft.

And then the Wall Street Journal reported it. But more recently, the New York Times has been cast. doubt on it. They had a law enforcement official who said, you know, this may be kind of a heat of the moment thing that there may have been a misunderstanding here in terms of this report being filed. And so it's a little unclear whether that's accurate. And at the same time, you know, as we're talking just recently, the government put out some kind of blurry pictures of the shooter who appears to be a young man. Right. There's two images. He's wearing like a black ball cap, black long-sleeved shirt, big sunglasses,

seems to you wearing a backpack. I think it's worth talking about some more of the details we do know so far because they seem to suggest that there's like a level of sophistication here. The suspect who obviously remains at large fired from a rooftop about 130 meters away. There was only one shot fired. And the police are saying that he then ran across the boat. building and jumped off the roof. What, what has struck you about how the assassination was carried out? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing here, as we're talking, is that the gunmen still

hasn't been caught as of now. I mean, as you said, I mean, it looks like a very straightforward. As you said, there was one shot. I think law enforcement, at least initially appears to have been pretty flummoxed. They held two different people, and the FBI director at one point said that second person, you know, was a subject in the investigation, and that guy was released. So it appears at least that the shooter managed to evade capture for longer than I think we would expect. Let's talk about the response from the president now. On Wednesday night, he posted this four-minute video message from the Oval Office praising Kirk. Charlie was a patriot who devoted his life to the cause of open debate

and the country that he loved so much, the United States of America. He fought for liberty, democracy, justice, and the American people. He's a martyr for truth and freedom, and there's never been anyone who was so respected by youth. But then he went on to say this. 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.

Also that his administration will, quote, 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 our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country. What are people concerned about, about what, could follow here. Yeah.

I mean, I think broadly, I think Americans are concerned about how much political violence is becoming commonplace in our culture, you know, whether it was the assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi. Drop the hammer. It was a sudden attack captured on police body camera. Tonight, the video showing the moment Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was knocked unconscious, struck in the head with a hammer inside his home. Police confirming this was a targeted attack.

A source briefed on the investigation says the alleged Allen told police when they arrived, we are waiting for Nancy. January 6th, so the assassination attempts on Donald Trump. Take a look at what happened. And now this. And then I think in the shorter term, certainly in the right with the media, there's a lot of talk about this is war. You know, Charlie wanted to do debates, but the time for debate is over. You know, and it makes you wonder, you know, is there going to be some retaliation?

There's certainly a lot of, I think, understandable anger on the right at the same time. You know, it's really unclear what this gunman's motivations were. But I do think more broadly in America, there is, there is alarm at how much political violence we're starting to see. Yeah. Just coming back to some of the reaction from MAGA and the right, you know, of course there was a lot of grief. I watched Megan Kelly and Glenn Bat literally weeping on the air. They're reporting that Charlie has died that he's dead. At the age of 31, which he would have to be if that video is real.

There's no way he survived that. But also, Jesse Waters. This is unacceptable and has to stop. And it has to stop now. And everybody's accountable. And we're watching what they're saying on television. And who's saying what? The politicians and the media and all these rats out there.

This can never happen again. It ends now, Greg's right again. This is a turning point. Libs of TikTok account posted this is war. Like, how widespread would you say that kind of sentiment is right now? Yeah. I mean, I think the idea of a civil war or war has for years been really widespread on the right, much more than I think as an American I would like to see.

But really, in particular, after this Charlie Kirk assassination, I think we're seeing a lot more discussion from people with really big platforms. I mean, you mentioned lives of TikTok. I mean, she's been to the White House. She's sort of a favored influencer of the Trump administration. Stephen Miller, who's, of course, very powerful Trump advisor, is putting out language about, you know, these sort of insidious forces on the left that are undermining the country. And so I do think this assassination has really ratcheted up the political tension in the United States. And unfortunately, because we have so many guns here, it doesn't have to be that there's a whole, you know, like a confederacy or, you know, there has to be a whole military organization. You know, it only takes someone with a gun to continue this violence.

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Like, you can think of a lot of reasons why someone might write that on ammunition as kind of a false flag operation, too. Yeah. I mean, there are, I mean, there are political movements in the United States that, you know, hope to see everything burned to the ground. And they're called, you know, some of them are called accelerationists. Like they sort of see the United States as kind of tottering on the brink and they want to help give it a shove in the hopes that kind of their fascist ideology will emerge in the end. And so, yeah, I mean, you could see, I think, people with a lot of different motivations who might say, well, you know, this might give Donald Trump a pretext for a crackdown on the left. Or as you said, I mean, a false flag operation.

Again, we really, we know so little about the shooter's motivations. And so, you know, like you, I'm hesitant to speculate. But certainly, I think there are a lot of different kind of political ideologies you could imagine being behind the assassination. And just in this absence of information in this information void, tell me a little bit more about how people from across the political spectrum are filling it, because that's also alarming. Yeah, I mean, certainly on the right, I think we're seeing a lot of people jumping to the idea that this was somehow, you know, the product of liberal or left-wing criticism of Charlie Kirk or. people who they would say demonized him. But on the other hand, you know, in the United States, I think we've become so used to, unfortunately, these both mass shootings and political violence in general. And then there's such a jump to see, you know, did the gunmen have like an ideology

that is politically advantageous for me to use as grist here? And, you know, we're seeing already, I mean, not just, you know, online commenters, but we're seeing Republican members of Congress say, you know, this is the fault of the media or this is the fault of Democrats. And so certainly I think the right is seeing this, even before we know the government's motivations, as an opportunity to advance their own cause. Yeah. And then just all sorts of other theories floating around, right? Like that Kirk had called for the release of the Epstein files before he was shot. So maybe that's why he was shot. We deserve to see the entire client list. Every document the government has regarding the Epstein files, we the American people should have on an easy to access website immediately in a very, very quick. quick fashion. I'm pushing for that both privately and publicly, just so you know. That Trump maybe wanted to distract from the Epstein case and that had something to do with it,

that Israel or Benjamin and Yahoo assassinated him because he'd condemned the Iran war and called out Epstein as Mossad. The evidence shows that every single one of these people, the last couple of decades, that is pushing for a conflict of Iran, has not just failed miserably, has been one of the greatest catastrophes in American foreign policy ever. of lives needlessly lost of Americans, millions of people displaced, trillions of dollar splint. And let's be honest, at this particular moment, we cannot afford this war. And this is no longer just speculation. First of all, the evidence that shows that Epstein was a creation of either Mossad, Israeli intelligence, American intelligence, Saudi intelligence, or maybe he was just

like, I don't know if you saw the stuff that's going around this morning, too. Like, people are taking that video of Trump and, like, questioning if it's even real. the video statement they did from the Oval Office and, like, wondering if it's AI, just the level of paranoia around this kind of stuff right now is really, it's really something. Yeah, I mean, the media environment and the political environment in the United States is really rife with conspiracy theories. And as you said, I mean, there's been so much focus on the Jeffrey Epstein case this summer after Donald Trump tried to close the case kind of very abruptly. You know, people are saying, well, maybe Charlie Kirk asked too many questions about Epstein. or because he had been critical at times of Israel. I have less ability sometimes online to criticize the Israeli government about backlash than

actual Israelis do. And that's really, really weird, isn't it, Megan? There's sort of a whole cottage industry on the American right of saying everything bad that happens is the fault of Israel, you know, and the confluence of the fact that the gunman hasn't been captured and that the shooting appears to have been, at least relatively professionally done, it's raising a lot of questions for people. I just want to talk about Charlie Kirk and his legacy for a little bit now with you. There were moments of silence for Kirk yesterday on Fox News, but also before the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers game. Trump ordered flags across the U.S. at military posts and embassies to be flown at

half staff. You've done a lot of reporting on the mega movement, and Kirk was really kind of this titanic figure in it. I mean, his audience in Utah looked like a college football game. How would you describe what he built over the years and the influence that he had? Yeah, I mean, Charlie Kirk was maybe the most prominent conservative media figure in the United States, certainly I would say, in the top five. And he really came from, he built that over just the course of a decade as a teen conservative activist. When we graduate, from high school this coming June, we're handed a diploma. That's also an invoice for hundreds of thousands of dollars that my generation is going

to have to pay off through interest, high taxes, and a stagnant economy. We hear at SOS Liberty believe that if we do not change the conversation back to us, the kids that are going to have to inherit this debt, that our economy will be stagnant for years to come. And our website, we have really... He hooked up with some donors and they said, well, we should start a new campus and young Republican political organization, and that was Turning Point USA. So I run a national student organization that advocates for free markets and limited government on college and high school campuses across the country.

A lot of our young activists are here at the conference, they'll be wearing red polos, or if you see the big signs that say, I know some people think it's harsh language, but wait to you hear what they say to us. Big government sucks, that's us, and they're walking around. Please engage them. These are the young patriots that are doing the work that is necessary to fight back against the intolerant left on our campuses, so give them some recognition. But then it really accelerate.

from there. I mean, the traditional image of young Republicans in the United States has been one that's very kind of stodgy sort of, you know, old before their time, you know, people kind of boring events. And Charlie Kirk energized that. And he said, well, we're going to have these conferences that are going to be, you know, kind of like big parties. And while in getting people really pumped up about supporting Donald Trump, he created his own sort of media empire with a lot of acolytes under him that was very, I mean, he became a social media figure outside of politics. I mean, I think he got a lot of traction on TikTok. He would go on non-political podcast. And he was also very close with the Trump family. I mean, he worked for one point, at one point for Donald

Trump Jr. And from there, became a sort of advisor and confidant of the Trump family and sort of almost like the sort of Trump representative in right wing media. And so he had a lot of power and a very big audience. Mm-hmm. How personal do you think his death is for the Trump family? I think it's personal. I think unlike a lot of these figures, I mean, I think there are a lot of people in right-wing media that they agree with, that they, you know, may talk to. But I think one of Donald Trump's grandchildren posted on X today that Charlie Kirk was like a, was a close family friend. I had a brief conversation with the president over the phone. He sounded quite upset, quite down about this. He told me it's horrific. It's one of the most horrific things.

I've ever seen. He was a great guy. He was a good man. He was an incredible guy. There's nobody like him. And so again, I mean, he was very close with Donald Trump Jr. And this was a guy who I think was around a lot. Trump would speak at Turning Point USA events. So he's uniquely close to the Trump family. And I think that's partially why, you know, we're seeing things like Donald Trump giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor in the United States. And just in general, I think that this is being seen as striking very close to home. I just wonder if you could talk to me a little bit more about the events that he held on these

college campuses. The vice president, J.D. Vance, described them as places. with open and honest dialogue between the left and the right. Yeah, so Charlie Kirk, one of his sort of the main reasons he rose to fame more broadly in mainstream culture was he would go to these college campuses. And for the most part, I mean, the theory was they were kind of liberal institutions. I mean, in the case of his one this week, I mean, obviously it was in Utah, it's probably mostly conservative. But for the most part, the idea was, you know, Charlie Kirk is going to set up a tent on your campus or give a speech. and then he will debate with mostly liberal or progressive students. Are you a voter?

I am a voter. Oh, so I vote and you vote. So I'm talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of Western civilization. George Floyd didn't die because of the police officer. He died largely because of a drug overdose. But he had his knee on his neck. We all saw the video. But the knee on the neck is actually an approved police technique that police departments taught Derek Chauvin to use.

Do you view democracy as an American value of something that's very important to the fabric of this country? No. Where is democracy? in the U.S. Constitution. Oh, okay. So are you... Hold on. Where is the word democracy?

I don't think the word democracy is in the Constitution. So where is the word democracy in any of the founding? What is a woman? What is that thing? You can't answer the question with the question. And so this kind of, the trope was, you know, it would be like kind of like Charlie Kirk owns, you know, blue-haired social justice warrior. And so this was both, you know, he's bringing the conservative message to these campuses.

He's inspiring the young conservatives or potential. conservatives on campus. He's also getting sort of material for his social media empire because he's getting these kind of epic own clips. That's kind of what this incident this week where he was shot, what that was shaping up to be. Can you take me through his stance on a lot of the fault line issues in America, guns, abortion, campus politics, progressive issues, that kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, Charlie Kirk was really sort of a very mainline Trump supporter. And that includes, I think, sort of changing in the wind. However, Donald Trump felt the movement needed to go. Initially, I think when he started out in the first Trump administration, he was very, or excuse me, even before the first Trump administration, he was very kind of like what we think of as a Tea Party person, you know, kind of a classic Republican character.

But then under Trump, I think he became much, much harsher on immigration. I mean, he certainly used very critical language. I mean, he would often, he would say sometimes, You know, at one point he said, you know, Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. Now, I don't like generalization. Something that he sort of had to walk back. But I think like so much of the Trump movement, he was being pushed further to the right. He was initially very into legal immigration. He said, if you graduate from a United States university with a skill, upon graduation of your diploma, we should staple a green card behind your diploma. diploma. And then further right figures, white nationalists started to attack him and disrupt his

events. And then, you know, cut to this year where he was saying, we need a moratorium on even legal immigration from the third world. So he was really getting into, I would say, much further right kind of things over the course of a decade. Did you just say that white nationalists would come and disrupt his events? Can you tell me more about that? Yeah. I mean, this is kind of a key, I would say sort of a key moment in Charlie Kurt's evolution that I think is often not quite understood

but basically he was what we might think of as a kind of a very almost like pre-Trump figure in a lot of ways in terms of immigration much more open to people of different ethnicities coming to the United States but there's someone in the United States a podcaster named Nick Fuentes

who's a sort of like a kind of a bizarre almost like Joker-esque figure. He marched in Charlottesville. And he's almost like a mirror image. He's like a much more racist and bigoted Charlie Kirk in that he kind of has his own army of young people. And so basically because Charlie Kirk was perceived as open to immigration during the first Trump administration, Nick Fuente has really riled up his own followers to disrupt Turning Point USA events on campus, you know, yell at their speakers, basically accuse them of being fake Republicans of selling out

white people. And I think pretty clearly as a result of that, Charlie Kirk really backed down on his openness to immigration. This assassination has, of course, brought many to resurface the American debate over guns, especially considering Kirk's own views on them. I'm sure you've seen it a lot, but people online have been really recirculating Kirk's own position, which was that. I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. At the exact moment that he was shot, Kirk was actually debating this issue, right?

He was asked if he knew how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years, and he responded by saying too many. The questioner said five in 10 years and asked, Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years? Counting or not counting gang violence. Great. Hassan Piker, the very popular leftist streamer, who we've had on this show before, both condemned Kirk's killing and tied it to the issue of gun control.

The only thing that could have potentially saved Charlie Kirk from getting shot in the neck was if our administrations, prior to this one and this one as well, actually had reasonable gun control as a policy provision in the immediate aftermath of, I don't know, a hundred other school shootings that took place. This is why... But just can you talk to me about, like, the debate around guns and Kirk's place in it?

Yeah, I mean, Charlie Kirk, I think, you know, he said explicitly what you just mentioned, which is sort of the bargain the United States, in particular the Republican Party has made, which is that because of the Second Amendment, we can't restrict gun ownership. And so we have to accept shootings and in particular mass shootings as sort of a cost of that freedom. And, I mean, that's, he said it explicitly there, but that is sort of the argument that they're advancing and basically that has won the day in the United States. So I would say that it's challenging because, you know, really the gun control debate is more or less over in the United States, at least for the foreseeable future. And the people who want maximal gun ownership have won. And sort of the, as a result of that, you know, we're seeing more, I'd say violence, both political and otherwise.

You know, it is just, obviously, it's something that comes up at these events. But it is also true, I think, that the more guns there are, you know, the more violence we see aimed at all sides. Look, in the last couple of years, as we talked about during this conversation, we have covered a lot of the political violence that we're seeing in the U.S. today and it's really picking up. But I am also quite struck by how quickly people seem to move on from these events, including two assassination attempts on Trump. Do you think that this will have the same kind of reaction and people will be back talking about Epstein by the middle of next week? Or do you think something bigger has happened here? You know, it's interesting. It's a good question because the media environment in the United States is so frenetic and often driven by the

president that it's difficult to say. I mean, I think on one hand, it's very possible that, that, you know, next week there will be a bigger story that crowds this out in the media. On the other hand, I do think that for the right, this is something that they're going to carry with them for a long time, that, you know, I think this has, for them, this is sort of a Rubicon moment that, you know, it's hard to think of something along these lines where where someone who is so prominent and such an inspiration for so many people on the right and a model was murdered. And so it's going to be something that I think stays with them. And I think something that the Trump movement is going to continue referring to, you know, and very possibly in terms of government

policy, you know, cracking down on liberals as well. Like what could that look like? Like when we talk about crackdown on liberals? On the lighter end, I mean, we could imagine. and, you know, Donald Trump was saying, you know, we're going to go after organizations that promoted this. We've already seen the administration go after universities that are perceived as two liberal, saying we're going to cut your grant funding. We're going to make life very difficult for you in various ways. And I think we could see an intensification of that effort. The State Department has asked people to flag, you know, any foreign residents of the United States

they see who are perceived a celebrating Kirk's assassination, presumably with an eye towards their deportation. I mean, frankly, I think it could get a lot worse than that. I mean, but I think that would just be a start. Okay. Well, thank you very much for this. Thanks for having me. All right, that is all for today. Front burner was produced this week by Joytha Shen Gupta, Matthew Amha, Ali Jains,

Lauren Donnelly and Mackenzie Cameron. Our YouTube producer is John Leam. Music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe Locos. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll talk to you on Monday.