US right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has died after being shot at a university in Utah.
The US authorities said they have “detained a suspect in the fatal shooting.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said on Wednesday, “The suspect for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody. We will provide updates when able.”
President Donald Trump announced the death of his close ally on Wednesday, hailing him as “legendary.” Trump posted on Truth Social: “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania’s and my sympathies go out to his beautiful wife, Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
Kirk, 31 was an “eloquent spokesman for a younger generation of Donald Trump’s hard-right Republican movement.” He had millions of social media followers who enjoyed his “whip-smart edits and provocative takedowns.”
Kirk’s ideology was “closely aligned with Trump,” and he “backed the US president’s false claims of fraud when he lost the 2020 presidential election” and “used his heavyweight influence to lash out at migrants and transgender people.”
It was during a speaking event in Utah on Wednesday that he was “shot in the neck.”
An audience member at a previous event, Eric Hansen, told AFP that Kirk “brings different ideas to the table,” which are “Ideas that some of us believe in, but are sometimes afraid to voice.”
However, Kyle Spencer, the author of a book on the youth movement Kirk helped found, called him a “charismatic Christian nationalist who essentially acts as a spokesperson for Trumpism and extremist ideas.”
Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA when he was 18, which became “the largest group of young conservatives in the United States.”
It bused activists to Washington on “January 6, 2021,” for a rally that turned into a “mob invasion of the Capitol with the goal of stopping certification of Trump’s election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.”
Kirk did not graduate from university and by 2016, he was a “personal assistant to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.”
He hosted “The Charlie Kirk Show,” a popular podcast where he “fed listeners an unmediated diet of half-truths and conspiracies,” boosting Trump’s “stolen election” claims and “riffing on Covid-19 theories.”
In September 2024, Kirk was “among the first to share allegations that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio,” a claim Trump later “repeated the claim” in a debate.
In a past interview with AFP, Kirk “brushed aside questions about his veracity” and said, “I say we spread the truth.”
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