Charlie Kirk, who rose from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster, culture warrior and ally of US President Donald Trump, was shot and killed Wednesday during one of his trademark public appearances at a college in Utah. He was 31.

Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force — rallying the right on a college campus, this time Utah Valley University. His shooting is one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, from the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota to last summer’s shooting of Trump, that have roiled the nation.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on his social media site, Truth Social: “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote.

Videos posted to social media from Utah Valley University showed Kirk speaking into a handheld microphone while sitting under a white tent emblazoned with the slogans “The American Comeback” and “Prove Me Wrong.” A single shot rang out and Kirk could be seen recoiling as a large volume of blood gushed from the left side of his neck. Stunned spectators were heard gasping and screaming before people started to run away.

Kirk was hospitalized in critical condition, before Trump later announced that he had died.

The college said a “single shot” had been fired at Kirk and a suspect was in custody. But a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly later said the person who was taken into custody was not the suspect.

FBI Director Kash Patel later announced that US authorities detained another suspect.

“The subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody,” Patel said on X. “We will provide updates when able.”

Kirk was speaking at a debate hosted by his nonprofit political organization. The event had been met with divided opinions on campus. An online petition calling for university administrators to bar Kirk from appearing received nearly 1,000 signatures. The university issued a statement last week citing First Amendment rights and affirming its “commitment to free speech, intellectual inquiry, and constructive dialogue.”

Last week, Kirk posted on X images of news clips showing that his visit to Utah colleges was sparking controversy. He wrote, “What’s going on in Utah?”

Trump and a host of Republican and Democratic elected officials had decried the shooting and offered prayers for Kirk on social media.

“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot. A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

‘My whole life I have defended Israel’

Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 while still a teenager. The organization has grown into a powerful platform for conservative youth activism, hosting major conferences and expanding into high schools and churches. Kirk became a regular commentator on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, building a reputation as an outspoken critic of higher education, liberal policies and “woke culture.”

Despite early misgivings, Turning Point enthusiastically backed Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal aide to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, during the general election campaign.

Soon, Kirk was a regular presence on cable TV, where he leaned into the culture wars and heaped praise on the then-president. Trump and his son were equally effusive and often spoke at Turning Point conferences.

Kirk, an evangelical Christian, was avowedly pro-Israel and often debated the Gaza war with college students and others in videos shared online. Kirk’s Turning Point USA has maintained ties with pro-Israel organizations and regularly hosted pro-Israel speakers at its conferences. Kirk himself traveled to Israel and praised Trump’s policies regarding the Jewish state, including the 2018 US embassy move to Jerusalem.

After visiting for the embassy’s ribbon-cutting ceremony and again in 2019, Kirk described his visits to the country as eye-opening.

He told a crowd at a Jerusalem bar during his second trip: “I’m very pro-Israel, I’m an evangelical Christian, I’m a conservative, I’m a Trump supporter, I’m a Republican, and my whole life I have defended Israel.”

Kirk at times drew criticism for veering into antisemitism as he discussed matters related to Israel and other topics. In October 2023, just days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Kirk drew controversy after he derided Jewish philanthropy to American universities for “subsidizing your own demise by supporting institutions that breed Anti-Semites and endorse genocidal killers.”

Weeks later on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” he also said that Jewish people control “not just the colleges; it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

Some conservatives decried his comments. Erick Erickson, a Christian radio host, posted on X that Turning Point USA was “looking like not just a grifting operation, but an anti-Semitic grifting operation.” Ben Domenech, the editor of The Spectator, wrote that if Kirk remained the head of his organization, “the right has an anti-Semite problem that will follow them into the coming elections.”

The next month, Kirk defended Elon Musk on his show after the tech mogul responded “You have said the actual truth” to a user who had posted a reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, writing that Jews were “coming to the disturbing realization” that immigrants to the United States “don’t exactly like them too much.”

“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” said Kirk on his show, later adding that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

Kirk’s concerns about the erosion of status for white Americans were central to his politics, and he also railed against what he called “Marxism,” efforts to curtail gun rights, and transgender people, about whom he was answering a question when he was shot.

In April 2024, as pro-Palestinian protests against Israel spread through American campuses, Kirk backed Republican crackdowns and urged them also to confront what he called “institutional hatred of white people.”

“I’m loving all the GOP unity against Jew hatred. It has no place in America,” wrote Kirk. “Can we get the same unity about the institutional hatred of white people on campus? It’s even more embedded than the antisemitism.”

After Kirk was given a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention, the Democratic Majority for Israel launched a petition calling on the Republicans to rescind their pick over what they called Kirk’s “long record of antisemitic statements.”

In a backgrounder about Turning Point USA from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL accused Kirk of creating a “vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists” and promoting “Christian nationalism.”

Rejecting the criticism, Kirk long framed himself as a defender of the Jews.

“No non-Jewish person my age has a longer or clearer record of support for Israel, sympathy with the Jewish people, or opposition to antisemitism than I do,” he posted on X in April as part of a rare critique of Trump, challenging the White House’s bid to penalize pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. He said he rejected the idea of punishing people for their speech.

“Once ‘antisemitism’ becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic — the same way the left labeled all kinds of statements as ‘racist’ to justify silencing their opposition,” he said. “Not only that, but all of this won’t even work.”

In a post on X in August, Kirk called on his supporters to reject antisemitism: “Jew hate has no place in civil society. It rots the brain, reject it.”

Kirk also frequently defended Israel in its prosecution of its ongoing war with Hamas. In July, he posted a segment from his show on X in which he defended Israelis against claims that it is starving Palestinians.

Last month, he hosted a discussion with Gen Z Turning Point USA students in which they discussed waning support for Israel among Republicans and rampant antisemitism in the United States.

“As you’ll see, they don’t hate Israel or Jewish people, but they are skeptical about the state of America’s current relationship with the country, and they want to be confident America’s leaders are putting their own country first,” wrote Kirk in a post on X about the discussion. “I have been working hard to help conservative politicians, donors, and friends of Israel better understand this dynamic.”

‘Stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization’

Israeli leaders and Jewish activists, some of whom had developed relationships with Kirk through his pro-Israel activism, reacted with alarm to the news of his killing.

“Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. A lion-hearted friend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not take place.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum, a right-wing American Jewish activist, urged his followers: “Please stop what you’re doing and pray for our friend Charlie Kirk. Many in the Jewish community are reciting chapters from the Book of Psalms, and I ask you to do the same. Something is deeply broken in America. The political violence must END. GOD HELP AMERICA.”

“Charlie has been a shining light in these troubled times for the American Jewish community, and we are deeply saddened at his passing,” the Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement. “All people of good will must condemn this horrific murder and demand justice for Charlie.”

Morton Klein, CEO of the Zionist Organization of America, said Kirk had recently accepted an invitation to speak at the group’s national gala later this year.

“Charlie Kirk was a great man, a personal friend and an ally who loved Israel and the Jewish people,” Klein said in a statement. “I had the pleasure of walking all over Jerusalem with him and sitting for an incredible interview with him on his radio show where for over an hour, Charlie asked great questions to better understand the Arab-Islamist war against Israel, the Jewish people and the West.”

Shooting comes amid rising political violence in US

The shooting came amid a spike in political violence in the United States across all parts of the ideological spectrum. The attacks include the assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband at their house in June; the deadly firebombing of a Colorado parade for the hostages held by Hamas; the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington in May; and a fire set at the house of Pennsylvania’s governor, who is Jewish, in April. The most notorious event was a shooting targeting Trump during a campaign rally last year.

Former Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who was at Wednesday’s event, said in an interview on Fox News that there was a light police presence at the event and Kirk had some security but not enough.

“Utah is one of the safest places on the planet,” he said. “And so we just don’t have these types of things.”