Within minutes of the news that right-wing youth activist Charlie Kirk had been shot on a college campus in Utah, the first accusations began to fly across MAGA social media: someone on the left must have been responsible for this.
Within hours of the confirmation of his death, rage began pouring out. “Congratulations. You have now made a radical out of me,” tweeted Ryan Fournier, a right-wing activist formerly associated with Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA. “You fuckers deserve it.”
Within minutes of reports that the FBI had apprehended a suspect, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh tweeted his desire for justice: “Thank God. Now punish him in the most severe possible way.”
And within an hour of FBI Director Kash Patel admitting they’d released the suspect and that the killer was still at large — and thus, no motive was known — the right’s anger toward the left did not relent.
“[T]his has been a very radicalizing week,” Laura Loomer posted, the conservative activist widely considered to have the most influence in the Trump administration. Shortly before that, she had suggested that the killer may have been sponsored by a foreign government. But that ultimately didn’t matter. “A message to the Left: Debate time is over. You ended it.”
Political violence in the US has been on the rise over the past several years. Lawmakers have been shot in their own homes, a governor’s house was set on fire, and even the spouses of elected officials have been targeted. President Donald Trump was the target of an assassination attempt last summer, and just over four years ago, a mob descended on the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election.
Whenever a conservative is the victim of violence, the MAGA political and influencer elite jump online to call for some sort of retribution against the left — arrests, investigations, and so forth — well before the assailant’s motive has been established.
But Kirk’s death, and the manner in which the 31-year-old was killed, has struck a deeply personal nerve in the right. And it has resulted in some of the most potent bloodlust yet in MAGA world, yearning for a reason to be unleashed at the left.
Personal grief does play an outsized role here. Many powerful Republican lawmakers and media power brokers knew Kirk to some extent, often texting him before casting votes or running social media strategies past him. Some of those relationships date back to when he was an ambitious 18-year-old activist. The Trump family credited him with delivering the youth vote to Trump in 2024, and in an X post, a distraught Donald Trump Jr. called him his “little brother.” Later that day, a moment of silence for Kirk in the House of Representatives devolved into a shouting match between Republicans and Democrats, with Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna — Kirk’s former director of Hispanic engagement at Turning Point USA — screaming at the Dems: “You caused this!”
And the MAGA influencer world, a genre that Kirk was instrumental in creating, was posting extremely hostile retaliation threats against the left. Though MAGA influencers are prone to undermining each other on a regular basis and Kirk was one of their frequent targets, he was still a prominent figure in their midst. They’d see him at social gatherings, get looped into text chains with him, and, inevitably, appear at his Turning Point conferences.
In other words, Kirk was an ally whom the right knew personally — and they took his death personally, in the only way they knew how.
“The Democrats just killed Charlie Kirk today,” Alex Jones said that night on Infowars. “They’re desperate. They’re losing.”
“There’s never going to be another assassin to take out someone like the way they did” with Kirk, MAGA influencer Jack Posobiec told Steve Bannon during a taping of War Room. “Because of what comes next will be swift, quick and it will be retribution.”
Theories abound as to who, exactly, was behind the shooting, compounded by the fact that the shooter was able to quickly flee. Roger Stone floated the possibility that the hit was professionally backed “either by a nation state, rogue elements of our own government or a terrorist organization.” Podcaster Patrick Bet-David went further, suggesting on NewsNation that another country wanted to see the US enter a civil war: “If in the next week an opposing person from the left gets assassinated, you have to know this is happening from an outside source.”
And Candace Owens, who had a famously messy falling out with Kirk and Turning Point, was now floating conspiracy theories on X, doxxing various people seen in campus footage as suspects.
Though all their anger was confined to the internet, the MAGA influencers, like Kirk himself, have incredible sway with the Trump administration, to say nothing of the Republican Party and conservative voters. Whatever they say about Kirk’s death will likely shape the party, and in the absence of someone to blame, where their rage will go.
For now, the rest of the GOP is still trying to process Kirk’s loss itself. On Wednesday night, Greg Gutfeld on Fox News accurately, if inadvertently, summarized the state of their overall confusion. “We don’t know who did this. But I do know it doesn’t help the left. Which makes me think: is it the left? I don’t know. I don’t know. We don’t know.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
