On Wednesday, 10 September, a gunman shot the MAGA-adjacent activist (and Turning Point USA founder) Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, precisely as Kirk was answering a question from the audience about transgender perpetrators of mass shootings. Bystanders filming on their phones captured the bullet’s impact from multiple angles, including this graphic footage showing a catastrophic wound to Kirk’s neck. Kirk’s private security detail rushed him to hospital, where he was pronounced dead a short time later. He was 31 years old.
The event in Orem was the first stop on Kirk’s planned American Comeback Tour, and it was characterised by very lax security, with only six police officers present. These officers arrested two older men in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. One of them, George Zinn, appears to be a mentally ill libertarian activist who claimed to have shot Kirk even though he did not. Zinn now stands charged with obstruction of justice. Both early suspects were almost immediately cleared of Kirk’s murder and released.
Investigators later determined that the assassin had fired a single bullet from a rooftop 180 meters away from Kirk’s speaking tent. Yesterday they found the murder weapon – a Mauser bolt action .30-06 rifle – in a wooded area along the gunman’s probable escape route. This is an ordinary and quite simple hunting rifle.
In the Mauser were three unfired cartridges and one spent shell casing, all of which were engraved with messages, thus continuing a dubious trend established by Brenton Tarrant at the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019. One casing bore the phrase “Hey fascist! Catch!” followed by a series of arrows (up, right, and thrice down), which is the key sequence used to summon a 500 kilogramme bomb in the game Helldivers II. Another carried the chorus from the Italian partisan anthem “Bella Ciao,” a third said “If you read this, you are gay LMAO,” and the fired cartridge had a reference to a notorious internet gay furry meme.
Yesterday, an increasingly desperate FBI released screen grabs from surveillance footage in the hopes that somebody might be able to identify their suspect.
They also provided surveillance video of the sniper escaping in the moments after the killing – running across the roof of the Losee Center from which he had shot and jumping to the ground.
A few hours ago, U.S. President Donald J. Trump announced on Fox News that police had arrested the probable shooter depicted above. He is a 22 year-old Utah resident named Tyler Robinson. Robinson lived several hours away from Utah Valley University and appears to have cultivated an intense hatred of Kirk. He either confessed or implied his guilt to a family friend, who told his father, who finally turned Robinson in to authorities.
Robinson, who has no criminal record, is being held without bail on suspicion of aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily harm and obstruction of justice.
The activist left, both in Europe and the United States, have spent the 48 hours since Kirk’s death celebrating the shooting, fantasising about which “fascists” they would like to see killed next and in general behaving like a deranged death cult. I have been compiling this material and I’ll provide some of it, and my thoughts about it, in a separate post tomorrow. I did not want that post, full of intellectual refuse, to be my first statement here about Kirk’s assassination.
Kirk was assassinated not as much because he spoke truth to power, rather because a new generation of children listened to him.
A single bullet can only kill one person.
But a word can reach millions.
And that's the real reason the left has become so violent.
My disgust for German media, state-funded and otherwise, has further increased; immediately slapped the "far-right extremist" label on him and started producing ridiculous deception. Those goddamn sheltered PMC don't understand how dangerous this is, they just keep fucking about perfectly secure in the belief they'll always be isolated from consequences.