The dry light of the Utah mountains whitens the tight canvas of the marquee erected in the middle of the campus. In the heat barely attenuated by makeshift fans, the students are impatient, around a speaker whom they know perfectly: Charlie Kirk. At 31, the founder of Turning Point USA is a familiar face of American campuses. A tribune that we applaud, that we dispute, that we provoke. His weapon is an effective slogan: “Prove Me Wrong”,, “Prove to me that I am wrong”. This September 10, in Orem, 80 km south of Salt Lake City, he moved once again to battle it out at Utah Valley University.
The air is electric. We applaud each distribution of Kirk, which continues the exchanges. A student launches: “Do you know how many transgenders have participated in mass shootings?” »» Kirk replied immediately: ” Too much “triggering cheers. Another continues: “How many killings have taken place in the United States over the past ten years?” “By counting the violence of the gangs?” »» loose Kirk. The public laughs.
The discussion breaks with a metallic snap, passed on by the surrounding buildings; The echo runs even faster than the ball. A 30-06 Springfield caliber projectile pierces Kirk’s neck; He vacillates, then collapses. Students throw themselves on the ground. “Run, run, run!” »». We believe in a series shooting. In reality, only one shot was enough. In a few seconds, the verbal game turns into a nightmare. Kirk is transported in an emergency to the hospital. Less than two hours later, his death was announced by the president himself: the campus tribune, a juvenile face of Trumpism, did not survive.
On the scene, the investigators discover sockets that say a lot about the state of mind of the assassin. They carry strange messages. Both hateful and demanding. On a socket, you can read: “Fascist hey! Caught ! »» On another: “Bella Ciao”hymn of anti -fascist supporters. On a third, not drawn: “If you read that, you’re gay!” »» These muddled engravings draw the portrait of an author who wanted to transform his gesture into a manifesto, between ultra -language folklore and adolescent excitement. Above all, they underline the drift of political violence which is written until ammunition.
“Cool” conservatism
Kirk was neither an elected official nor a minister. It was more: a perfect target for a fractured America. He had succeeded where the Republican Party had failed for decades by making conservatism “cool” to young people. Crailing hundreds of campuses across the country and forming a pro-Trump student army. His supporters saw him the next generation of the Maga movement. His opponents, an ideological danger to shoot down. We saw Charlie Kirk at work as early as 2019, on a campus of Columbus, in Ohio. He galvanized adolescents in red cap, delighted to brandish their conservative rebellion. In the amphitheater, Trumpism appeared in uninhibited counter-culture. The carefree energy of Trump’s first re -election campaign quickly struck a wall of hatred: that of a left that no longer wanted to respond, but to silence.
For months, alert signals have been accumulating. Turning point events were regularly disturbed. Hostile signs were agitated at each stage of his tours. His loved ones knew that he crystallized a particular hatred, that of an ultra -language convinced that these conservative voices must be silenced.
Vice-president of young Republicans in New York, the oldest and more influential gender organization in the United States, Nathan Berger judges this drama “Gyal”. “Charlie was a good person. It was just an activist even if he had a key role in setting up the Trump 2.0 team. If the radical left attacks a personality really attached to the honest debate and the open dialogue – and they were dealing with Nazi – then it can target anyoneI, he explains to the Tangwall Campagin. The thirst for violence they have displayed since his assassination corresponds to the vitriol they pour against any person located on the right. »» And measure the severity of the event: “This is the highest profile of an assassination targeting an unleashed activist since Martin Luther King. »»
Diffuse radicalization
In UCLA as in Columbia, campuses have given birth to a violent generation, at the crossroads of psychiatry and murderous activism. Propalestinian student demonstrations were a dress rehearsal. This shift is documented: from protest to physical confrontation, slogans to blockages, from occupations to altercations with the police. American universities oscillate between the defense of freedom of expression and the obligation to ensure security. The antifa phenomenon, decentralized and elusive, blurs all responsibility. It is in this climate of permanent agitation, of diffuse radicalization, that the shot left. For Nathan Berger, the time has come: “Campus will have to be purged of this violent leftist rhetoric. »»
A left that no longer wanted to answer, but silence
But how? Since his return to the White House, Trump has not longed to brandish clear threats. To universities deemed lax, he promised withdrawals of federal funding, sometimes several hundred million dollars. To foreign students who are illustrated in pro-hamas or anti-fascist demonstrations, the expulsion and the revocation of visas. To protesters in general, he regularly brandishes the specter of arrest, even imprisonment.
More broadly, its decrees prohibiting the “Critical theory of race” and the“Gender ideology” In federal programs have already started an assumed ideological purge. But behind this firmness, the lawyers recall the safeguards: freedom of expression and autonomy of public campuses.
Charlie Kirk’s death hits the American right head on. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative organization Heritage Foundation and close to the deceased, said it with gravity to the Tangwall Campagin: “His martyrdom must be a turning point (a “turning point”, editor’s note) for our country. »» “Turning point”it is also this injunction addressed to the right: transforming pain into national redemption. For part of the conservatives, Kirk’s death is not only a tragedy: it marks the moment when America must, says Roberts, be “Bought” in order not to “Losing your soul”.
The suspect is called Tyler Robinson, 22, a student from Utah. Large, brown, dry, raised in a conservative family, he was arrested for thirty-three hours after shooting in the county of Washington. It was his own father, a former Sheriff’s deputy, denounced him to the authorities. According to Fox News, citing sources close to the FBI, Robinson lived with a transgender person, being transitioned from man to woman. Charged with aggravated murder, he is detained without surety and faces the capital penalty. It remains to understand how this tidy son has changed.
Charlie Kirk’s body returned to Arizona in Air Force Two’s hold, the Boeing 757 used by the vice-president. In Phoenix, on the sun -crushed tarmac, JD Vance advanced among the carriers and helped lift the coffin. Then the hearse shook towards the Hansen mortuary chapel, north of the city. Along the roads, motionless crowds have massaged, hand on the heart or brandishing signs. Hundreds of Americans have come to greet, in silence or in tears, the passage of a mowed tribune in full youth, now carried as a martyr.
