Today, Explained - Charlie Kirk's America

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

The fatal shooting of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk has reignited a debate about political violence, even as authorities search for his killer. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Rebeca Ibarra with help from Jolie Myers, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Miles Bryan, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Noel King. The activist Charlie Kirk speaking at Utah Valley University before he was shot in the neck and killed. Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A manhunt is underway for Charlie Kirk's killer. Law enforcement officials spoke in Utah this morning and gave the latest information. We were able to make a few breakthroughs. We were able to track the movements of the shooter. Starting at 11.52 a.m., the subject arrived on campus, shortly away from campus. We have tracked his movements onto the campus, through the stairwells, up to the roof, across the roof to a shooting location. Authorities say the shooter jumped off the building and fled.

They also say they recovered the weapon used by the shooter. It's a high-powered bolt-action rifle. That rifle was recovered in a wooded area where the shooter had fled. And they released what they say is a picture of a person of interest in the shooting. Coming up on today, explained from Vox, the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk. Support for this show comes from Robin Hood. Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? With Robin Hood, not only can you trade individual stocks and ETFs,

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Investing involves risk, including loss of principle. Securities trading is offered through an account with Robin Hood Financial LLC, member CIPIC, a registered broker dealer. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're getting brutally honest about why reaching your first $100,000 is shockingly harder than getting to your first million. From the details behind how compound interest works to the specific strategies that actually move the needle, including side hustles that pay in 24 hours, and the investment. mistakes that keep people stuck forever, I'm breaking down my exact roadmap for hitting six

figures, even if you're starting from zero with student loans and expensive rent. Plus, we're answering your burning questions about balancing life while saving and what to do once you finally hit the big 100K milestone. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. This is Today Explained. I'm Andrew Procop, senior correspondent Vox. Tell us what happened in Utah yesterday, Andrew. Well, we saw probably the most prominent murder of a nationally known political figure in quite some time in the United States of America when Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, very influential, very popular commentator on the right.

was speaking at a college event in Utah and was shot and killed. Charlie Kirk is kind of, his focus has been on young conservative, mobilization, persuasion, activism. And he's always basically going, been going on college campuses and holding events, trying to debate people, trying to persuade people. to his point of view. So this is just, you know, one in a very, very long list of events like this that he has done on college campuses across the country. What kind of reaction did you see after Charlie Kirk was killed in Utah? I think the mainstream reaction was shock and horror. Again, we've seen really nothing like this that has actually succeeded in killing a major political.

figure in quite some time. There have been many attempts. There have been others wounded, a kind of what people argue is arising trend of political violence that you can trace back 10, 15 years or so. But this was a big, really shocking turn of events. Just the video footage was extremely graphic and went viral on social media, spread everywhere. I think the reaction from the overwhelming majority of people involved in politics was to condemn this to say it was terrible. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that buys us all. This is horrific.

This is awful. And the assassination of Charlie Kirk risks an uncork of uncorking of political chaos. This is not who we are. It violates the core principles of our country. Our Judeo-Christian heritage, our civil society, our American way of life, and it must stop. Then, of course, there were other reactions on the right. They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.

And what are we going to do about it? Democrats own what happened today. You had figures like Christopher Rufo and other conservative activists, including to an extent the president, who before any killer had been identified, decided to blame the radical left and call for a crackdown on radical, what they call radical left groups and organizers of some kind remains to be seen what that will look at. like. We'll find out. Then on the left, I think, you know, there was this tension between, again, most of the prominent people, most, almost every prominent Democrat or a left-leaning commentator that I'm aware of said this is terrible, condemn this. But there is a stray of, you know, joking about this or cheering this on, again, not typically from prominent people, but the closer you get to the sort of, you know,

the populist influencer space or just random people posting on social media, the more common it is. So the, you know, the right is pointing to all of those comments and saying, oh, see, the left wants to murder us all, and we need to do something about it. The calls online for some sort of crackdown. You're right. They were not often specific, but there was a sense of, you know, the left has caused this and something must be done about the left. It's not language that we see every day. You know, that was my read on it. This was a really freighted moment. Were you surprised at how quickly this became polarizing? No, not at all. I think from the very first news report, I had the sense that it was going to be very, very bad. Charlie Kirk is a very, like, he is very close to the Trump family. He is a close friend of Donald Trump Jr., specifically. But he's also very well known among conservative media figures. He helped staff this administration. Like, everyone knows him. in right-wing circles personally, and then millions more people know him parisocially through

his podcasts, through his media appearances, and feel like they know him personally. He has helped this nation advance. He's helped this nation ask questions to each other, and he's helped us get along and do it non-violently, and unfortunately, somebody decided to do something very terrible. A guy who always stood up for his belief to never back down, I mean, he's, he, He was always so sweet. He had a loving family, his wife, Erica, and his two kids who are both under three years old and he left them. You know, he's going to be remembered forever for always fighting for his beliefs and always fought.

I hope that they remember him as not only an influencer, but as somebody who actually deeply cared about what our country was going towards. So on the right, they have experienced this as a traumatic loss of someone they knew. and cared for and are reacting with great anger and emotion about it. But I think we've been seeing our society becoming steadily more polarized between these left and right camps for years now. And history shows us that the end point of such polarization, such us versus them thinking, thinking that half the country is the enemy, the natural end point of it is repression or violence.

And so there is now this kind of call. And again, we'll see whether it amounts to anything. But it is definitely something that more people on the right are feeling comfortable saying. They're saying the left wants to murder us. And so we need to crack down on them. And we'll see how far it goes. But, you know, history is replete with examples of situations like this. going to a very bad place.

What has President Trump said? Well, Trump released a video last night of him speaking in the Oval Office in which he adopted this viewpoint that the radical left was to blame and that he was going to do something about it. He said, for years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass 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. He said that his administration would 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.

First of all, this is a very one-sided narrative of political violence, which has taken place from perpetrators on the left and on the right in recent years. It was just in recent months that a state senator in Minnesota and her husband were murdered by a right-wing activist. Another state senator in Minnesota was shot in that same incident. But the thing about it is that these events generally have been lone wolves or people who have perhaps been radicalized by rhetoric they've seen online, but they aren't part of any formal organization or taking any instructions. And we don't know anything about Charlie Kirk's killer yet, but, you know, if past

cases like this are any indication, then this probably is going to be another sort of lone wolf killer who's not part of an organized group. We'll see. But if that is the case, it is a jump to make the leap from, okay, people have been criticizing us in harsh terms. They've been saying mean things about us, and that's why people are trying to kill us. So what are you going to do? Are you going to prevent them from criticizing you? Is anyone who calls a right winger who says they're like a Nazi is now going to be in trouble for potentially inciting terrorism? I think there's some pretty big First Amendment barriers

to something like that happening. But again, we're in the very early stages of this, so we'll see. That was Vox's Andrew ProCop. Coming up, how Charlie Kirk became Charlie Kirk. towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal. But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are also coming in faster, and those expectations are higher than ever.

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Join us every week on Hacks on Tap on the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hi, this is Bella Freud. Each week on fashion neurosis, I interview highly creative people in the world of fashion, film, art, sport, literature, and music. The format of the show is that my guest lies on the couch and I sit in a chair like an analyst. I know. I ask questions, quite simple things that revolve around how we reveal or hide things through what we wear, how we do or don't draw attention to ourselves. This week I welcome Amelia de Moldenberg, the host of the YouTube series Chicken Shop Date.

One of my friends came up to me, I remember, like on the early days and said, do you mean to dress Frumpy on the date? I said, Frumpy, this is my war trope. Find fashion neurosis on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Today explained is back with Kyle Spencer. Kyle is a journalist and the author of the book, Raising Them Right, the untold story of America's ultra-conservative youth movement and its plot for power. Charlie Kirk was one of the young people she profiled in that book, and in writing it, she got to know him. Charlie grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He attended a public high school. It was going from a mostly white school to a mostly black and brown school. He was in a school. He was in a school. that was very supportive of Obama. His classmates were generally very liberal. He was even early on a conservative. He had issues with what was being taught early on in his classes, believed that in

history and economics classes, he was being taught from textbooks that were overly supportive of liberal policies and that students were not getting enough information on conservative policies. A lot of kids are feeling the effects of what we like to call, you know, with the Washington economy, with a lot of debt plummeting small business with higher regulation and high taxes. We're just trying to re-institute the founding principles, free market fiscal responsibility. He slowly began to create a following by starting a small organization of his high school students and of students from other high schools around him, a place that they could come to if they had concertive ideas and were feeling kind of left

out. That was the beginning of Turning Point USA, which he officially launched after he graduated from high school. I mean, we're starting chapters nationwide with Turning Point USA. And on our website, turningpointUSA.net, you'll see the unbelievable, a positive support we're having from my generation. Using these memes, we're able to engage them in such a unique and exciting way. And at the time, the Tea Party movement was coming alive and he was going all over the state in neighboring states to talk to Tea Party folks. and to raise money. So first he made allies, and then he began very quickly to understand what he needed to do was raise money. And he proved to be very, very gifted and skilled at finding both

people who supported his cause and also people who wanted to financially donate. Tell me about Turning Point USA and how much of a following it grows to have. Charlie Kirk was always a political junkie, and he was always conservative. But what he cared about originally were economics. He cared about what he thought of as a bloated budget deficit of a government which was spending too much money, of taxes that were too high, of a China that what he felt was overwhelming the economic markets around the world and bullying the United States. The great industrial towns of the American Midwest that we decided to close and then we sent all of the capital overseas to China so that they could industrialize. So then we become a vassal state at their own beckoning, that we are subservient to the Chinese Communist Party. And he became very involved in 2016 in Trump's election and also in the Republican Party at the time. And that's when he evolved his views into a lot more of the kind of culture war issues that we knew him for, issues around diversity and equity programs.

DEI is the forceful implementation of racial standarding practice. and racial quotas. DEI is basically saying, we are going to build a college and organization based on hyper-racialization, not on the pursuit of excellence. Issues around reproductive rights. Birth control really screws up female brains, by the way.

Every single one of you need to make sure that your loved ones are not on birth control. It increases depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and it creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women. Second Amendment rights. 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. And how important was he to Trump's success? Like, what role did he play in getting Trump elected? What Charlie really brought originally to President Trump was an ability to communicate very effectively, energetically, passionately and chariastically with young people who charlie and trump and other conservatives really wanted to bring into a movement that was seen before trump and before charlie as very stodgy and old school. Donald trump is on a rescue mission to revive your birthright

one your grandparents and those before them gave everything to hand down to you and listen carefully, everybody. This is why young men are the most conservative that they have been in 50 years. So he branded the GOP and MAGA to young audiences. That was originally his gift to Trump. To all the Gen Ziers watching this convention on TikTok right now, I have a message just for you. You don't have to stay poor. You don't have to accept being worse off than your parents. You don't have to feel aimless and unhappy. You don't have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote. Eventually, Charlie was able to show that he was an excellent strategist, that he could think about ways to bring in older audiences, more diverse audiences.

A lot of the diversity that we're seeing and reading about that the Republican Party has developed inside his follower base, a lot of that was imagined by Charlie Kurt. in 2012, early, early on. He didn't have a formal role in the White House, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't very powerful. I remember a couple months ago when the Epstein files were kind of tearing at President Trump and at the MAGA base, he was the guy who came out and he calmed things down by saying, I'm done talking about the Epstein files.

And many people seem to say, okay, if Charlie's done, we're done too. Yeah, I mean, Charlie has millions of millions of five. who pay attention to him and what he says. On the one hand, Charlie had very radical views, a lot of views that were very far from the moderate positions that are held in this country. But the way in which he discussed those issues and presented them to his public were very folksy,

no nonsense, relatable, conversational. Strong men built the West and won the wars and built the building that we're in right now, and without strong men, then you all of a sudden see civilization, unfold upon itself, and we're seeing that happen in real time. So when Charlie would say things, people would listen to him because he often made a lot of sense to them. He was controversial. A lot of the views he held were views that people found really challenging and dangerous, but he also

was able to convey those views to other people in ways that made them say, hey, I think this guy really knows what he's talking about. I trust him. And what was interesting was, that as his views became more and more conservative, became more opposed to LGBTQ rights. I was born as a man and now I'm a woman. Okay, no, but you don't become a woman just because you dress like a woman. So let me ask you a question. If I wear a disguise or a costume, do I become that thing?

For example, if I dress with a sombrero and start talking to the Mexican accent, do I then become that culture? He became more opposed to diversity programs. He became more convinced that white men were really the victims of racist, in our country. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

He became more and more invested in traditional marriage, in a role for women inside marriages that was very 1950s-esque. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge. The more as he moved to the right on these issues, the more he became interested in a kind of biblical leading of our country, emerging of church and state, the more that he held more conservative views. He actually grew his following with more moderate audiences. And that was really his genius, is that he got young people at a time when they have increasingly turned to podcasters and to social media influencers for friendships, Charlie became their good friend. So I'm not really asking much of a question, but I'm looking for advice. I want to run for Congress in a few years when I become of age.

And I'm just wanting if you have any pointers or direction you can help guide me. You should run. We need more young people to run. We have Turning Point Action, which is not represented here tonight, which is our political arm that would love to help you and train you and pouring me. And now what you'll see is that young people that were supporters knew Charlie, were inside Turning Point USA, worked for him. They are absolutely devastated because he had a kind of cult following.

People really, really adored him and looked up to him. As much as he was feared and disliked outside of his movement, he was just absolutely adored inside and they remain very loyal to him. How do you think Charlie Kirk will be remembered? Charlie Kirk has a stamp on the modern Republican Party that is, really extraordinary. It is, for many of his followers, a terrible, terrible tragedy that he has passed. However, they can find solace in knowing that Charlie Kirk's beliefs, his understanding of how the GOP ought to motivate around the country, and how it ought to acquire followers,

those ideas, those tactics, those strategies, they are embedded in the party now, and that's not going away. You've seen that there is a tremendous amount of politicized rage and fear right now. What do you think we should be prepared for? I think right now you're seeing two sides. You're seeing one part of the country trying to tone down the rhetoric. This was a horrifying event. And we're going to see a big, big push as you're seeing right now, to tone down the rhetoric, to tone down the violence, and to understand what it means. to live in a civil society with rules of law. You have another side that is very enraged, very angry, kind of looking for a fight.

Unfortunately, this sad, sad turn of events is going to be one of the events that ignites more rage and we're seeing already online with some of those folks already calls for, this is war, this is clearly our enemy that has done this. We need to fight back. We need to attack, even as we have no idea actually how this tragedy happened and who is responsible. And I don't think any of us know how this is going to turn out.

But the fact that you have the number of folks who are saying, let's go to war should be very, very alarming to all of us. Kyle Spencer is a journalist and author of the book Raising, them right. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and Rebecca Ibarra with help from Jolie Myers. Amina El Sadi is our editor. Our engineers are Patrick Boyd and Adrian Lilly. Laura Bullard and Miles Brian fact-checked. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Thank you.