The late Charlie Kirk. Photo source: Turning Point USA.
I happened to be online when right wing Christian Nationalist provocateur Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley State on Sept. 10. I watched horrified as video of the activist’s murder went viral across the world.
Kirk was just 31, and a key figure in the MAGA movement, credited with bringing young Christian college students into the Trump fold during the past decade through his recruiting organization, Turning Point USA, co-founded by Kirk in 2012.
Those who’ve followed Kirk’s elevation on the rising tide of Christian Nationalism floating MAGA’s boat couldn’t help but speculate why someone might take his life. To call Kirk a provocateur is to say he made his living provoking liberals and the left with racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic and transphobic beliefs wrapped in the flag, wearing the cross and presented as inconvenient Biblical truths to impressionable young college students.
Kirk once rejected the Christian Nationalist label but went all-in for Trump’s 2024 campaign. According to The New Republic, Kirk went “full fake fanatic” while riling up the crowd at a Duluth, Georgia, Trump rally last October.
“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates,” Kirk said to cheers. “The Democrat Party is espousing the death of the unborn, the mutilation of our teenage kids, open borders, the destruction of our sovereignty, the elimination of our currency status.”
To be certain, political violence is never justified. Nevertheless, it’s on the rise. President Trump survived two assassination attempts last year. Kirk’s assassination follows the June assassination of Minnesota Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark by alleged killer Vance Luther Boelter, a Christian Nationalist who also allegedly shot and injured another Minnesota Democratic state senator and his wife. He awaits trial on numerous charges, including first degree murder.
So far, we don’t know why alleged 22-year old Tyler Robinson allegedly killed Kirk. If the text messages between Robinson and his supposedly trans roommate are authentic, and they were in a relationship, it’s not too hard to understand why a young man raised by a Mormon family coming to terms with his own sexuality might perceive Kirk, who was at the forefront of the transgender moral panic that has swept the nation for the past several years, as a threat. Understanding the motive doesn’t stop us from condemning Kirk’s murder.
But at this time, we don’t know what Robinson’s motive was.
It feels like we’re at a precarious moment.
Charlie Kirk’s death inspires supervisors’ proclamation
New California State secessionists Ron and Patty Plumb, ROV Clint Curtis and Dist. 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon attended a livestream presentation at Shasta Bible College last Sunday of Charlie Kirk’s Arizona memorial service.
During Tuesday’s Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting, District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon reported that he’d attended a livestream of Kirk’s Arizona memorial broadcast at Shasta Bible College this past Sunday. Harmon referred to the event as a “turning point”.
District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon
Harmon attended the event with New California State secessionists Ron and Patty Plumb, and Shasta County’s new ROV, Clint Curtis.
“It’s hard for me not to talk about the happenings in the last two weeks with Charlie Kirk,” Harmon said.
“What a phenomenal name that he picked for that organization, Turning Point, because I believe it really was a turning point, and it is a turning point for this country, that that, if you didn’t get a chance to watch, you should go back and watch that celebration of life, all, not all, but majority of the heads, President of the United States, Vice President of the United States, and you can name a list, go down from there, that attended that and spoke at it, and it was very impactful to me. I spent, I couldn’t walk away from it, listening to it.”
District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom.
Supervisor Kelstrom attended the Charlie Kirk vigil at Caldwell Park on Sept. 12 and watched Sunday’s memorial on tape.
“And with that, I would like to make a motion on the next agenda that we bring, for October 14th, bring a proclamation that protects free speech and condemns political violence,” Kelstrom said. “So I would like to make that motion now.”
The motion passed 5-0. Trump has already declared a national day of remembrance for Kirk on Oct. 14, Kirk’s birthday.
A News Café supports free speech and condemns political violence, but wonders if Kirk’s memory, and today’s Republican party, are the right vessels for carrying the message.
When politics turns violent
Let’s deal with political violence first. A recent study by the conservative CATO Institute that has been widely circulated since Kirk’s death found that since 2002, 63 percent of politically motivated murders — 391 killings out of 618 — have been perpetrated by right wing terrorists. Left-wing terrorists have killed 65 people, 10 percent of the total, the CATO Institute found.
Right wing activist Mark Kent.
Closer to home, A News Café questions if local extremist Republicans are truly committed to free speech. A News Café publisher Doni Chamberlain has been roughed up twice while attempting to cover local political events. In July 2023, Chamberlain was physically prevented from attending a “Citizens for Freedom” event at the Cottonwood Community Center by right wing political activist Mark Kent. Shasta County Sheriff’s deputies escorted her from the building. In November 2024, a Sheriff’s deputy physically barred Chamberlain from covering progressive activist Jenny O’Connell-Nowain’s removal from the Board chambers during a sit-in protest.
In July, this reporter was barred from a town hall meeting with newly selected ROV Clint Curtis at the Redding Library. The event was hosted by former District 4 Supervisor Patrick Jones, who personally gave this writer the boot from the “private” town hall.
And in December of 2023 I was banned from entering a free townhall meeting that featured infamous national election-denier Doug Frank. The gathering was hosted by then-Shasta County Board of Supervisors chair, Patrick Jones. The event was covered clandestinely for A News Cafe by Benjamin Nowain.
Perhaps no writer for A News Café has taken more crap from far-right wingers than Chico State history professor Shawn Schwaller. Schwaller was targeted by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA in 2021 after he wrote about Bethel Music alumnus and Christian Nationalist activist Sean Feucht’s “Let Us Worship” concert in Washington D.C. that protested against COVID lockdowns. Schwaller learned he was on Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” after receiving an email from Turning Point questioning his curriculum and his articles for A News Café.
Using the watchlist, Kirk’s followers have harassed professors and teachers across the United States for the thought crime of being woke.
“I learned TPUSA was probably going to write a ‘Professor Watchlist’ profile on me when I received this email,” Schwaller said. “I believe that it was my ANC stories cited at the bottom of the profile that got me onto the TPUSA radar.”
“It’s nerve wracking, for sure, to be listed on Charlie Kirk’s ‘professor watchlist,’” Schwaller said. “In a way, it’s also a badge of honor to be targeted by a multimillion dollar far-right extremist nonprofit organization like Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA, because it means to me that I’m doing something right by speaking up for oppressed and marginalized populations, and by speaking out against white supremacist and homophobic bigots. I was targeted by TPUSA when I was pretty vulnerable as a new lecturer at Chico State.”
A social media post by one of Professor Schwaller’s local right wing critics demonstrates the opposite of class.
Schwaller added that the feedback he’s received from local far-right-wing readers is even more disturbing than TPUSA’s attacks.
Kirk’s assassination stunned Schwaller, who thinks it doesn’t bode well for America’s future.
“I was absolutely shocked when I first heard Charlie Kirk had been shot,” Schwaller said. “It immediately felt like things were going to get worse, and that even while violence is as American as apple pie, as folks say, our path as a country got more treacherous. Even though Kirk is a white supremacist homophobic bigot, I never celebrated him being killed for one second. With that being said, I think we need to be real with the fact that Kirk pushed a racist, homophobic, and hateful agenda. I did catch a lot of heat for calling Kirk a white supremacist homophobic bigot on KRCR News. In a comment under a NewsBreak post of the KRCR story, someone wrote in the comment section ‘hope the professor gets some lead.’ ”
Schwaller, who was recently interviewed for an NBC News story on the subject, fears Kirk’s killing, “will go down in history as an event that ushered in a new wave of political violence.”
He thinks TPUSA chapters on college campuses will expand across the country, potentially endangering faculty.
“I know this is controversial, but I think college campuses need to renew the discussion about what constitutes free speech,” Schwaller said. “I do support freedom of speech, but I also think that the definition of speech that ‘threatens public safety’ should be broadened.”
Whether or not the United States descends into a free speech dystopia where political violence is the norm depends on all of us standing up for our First Amendment rights now.
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