Charlie Kirk had long been a polarizing figure — you either loved him or hated him. To his admirers aligned with his beliefs, he was a charismatic voice of reason; to his critics, he was too sharp, too abrasive, too impossible to ignore.
Like other firebrands — or, if you prefer, rabble-rousers — before him, from the left or right of the political divide, he drew not only fierce debates but also the kind of rage that tempts bullets as argument enders.
Kirk’s horrific murder last week, ironically while engaging Utah Valley University students in a debate on gun control and mass shootings, will endure as a few seconds of raw, unforgettable video — grimmer than any Hollywood imagining, and far more real.
Just as the Zapruder film etched John F. Kennedy’s assassination into the collective memory of generations, the Charlie Kirk tragedy carries the same permanence — the surreal made real, the one-shot, one-kill handiwork of sniper assassins made public.
In Dallas in 1963, Jackie Kennedy clambered from an open-top car that could not protect her president-husband as he waved to adoring Americans and presented himself in the crosshairs of Lee Harvey Oswald — or, if you believe the conspiracy theories, another shooter poised on the grassy knoll.
In Utah, Charlie Kirk was silenced mid-sentence by a shooter, 200 yards away, perched on a rooftop, like Donald Trump’s own would-be assassin last year who botched the job and handed him a second trip to the White House over Kamala Harris despite his conviction in the New York hush money case.
Some argue that Kennedy’s death was not simply the act of a lone gunman but of darker forces within the state, unsettled by the first and, to date, only Catholic president of the United States. A man they deemed unstable: a playboy reckless enough to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis, and humiliating enough to stain American prestige with the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Where the glib-tongued Kennedy projected a sleek liberalism that promised vigor and modernity to a postwar America, Kirk stood as the embodiment of a resurgent conservatism rooted in faith and absolutes. He spoke unapologetically of religion as the nation’s moral spine, railed against abortion as an assault on life, and dismissed gender fluidity as cultural decay masquerading as progress.
If Kennedy symbolized the hopeful ambiguities of King Arthur’s Camelot (Don Quijote, perhaps?), Kirk embodied the sharpened uncertainties of a fatally divided age — each man, in his moment, a lightning rod for the passions of his time.
Then there was the killing of poor Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, riding in a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina — just trying to build a new life after fleeing war. It could have been anyone: a nine-to-fiver heading home, a student bound for class, or someone simply lost in her phone when tragedy struck. The randomness of the stabbing makes it scary, the not knowing who might be next; the train car becoming terrifyingly ordinary until it isn’t.
The accused: Decarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old homeless man with a long criminal history — 14 prior arrests for assault, robbery, and firearms possession — and documented schizophrenia.
Despite his erratic behavior and repeated arrests, he was released on cashless bail in January, the court deeming a written promise sufficient. His own family said he should never have been freed, given his record and psychiatric diagnoses. Why was he out then?
So, too, with Kirk’s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson. Whether driven by ideology, delusion, or rage, he stands as a symptom of a society fraying at the seams — where institutions fail to catch the unstable before they unleash mayhem.
Kirk, Kennedy and Iryna — all fallen to violence in different forms — mirror a society where power, paranoia, and neglect collide. Across mighty America, streets in Philadelphia, Portland and San Francisco, among many others, reel with the walking dead, veritable zombies of fentanyl, the opioid-ravaged, the lost and broken — a reminder that the country’s worst enemy may be its own unraveling within.