OBITUARY: Charlie Kirk, 1993-2025

Newsletter #54: Charlie Kirk, Andy Burnham, Danny Kruger

Obituary: Charlie Kirk

October 14th, 1993 - September 10th, 2025

Conservative influencer and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk was graphically and publicly murdered in front of hundreds of Utah’s college students on 10 September 2025. He was shot in the throat while taking questions from the audience, and close-up videos, taken from multiple angles, of the blood pouring out his neck were almost immediately uploaded to social media. Perhaps most harrowing, his young daughters were in the crowd, and tried to run to him after being scared by the gunshots. He was confirmed dead mere hours after the fact.

Thus, quickly and clearly, ended the life of one of America’s most influential, most prominent, and most effective young conservatives. At just thirty-one, he had achieved more for the American Right than most of the institutional Republican Party had in the last thirty-one years. He had a rare set of talents, combining verbal agility, organisational and fundraising prowess, and an earnest belief in a cause he truly believed in. The American Right has lost one of their greatest soldiers, and he cannot be replaced.

Kirk’s assassination comes despite the fact that he was hardly an extreme figure, let alone a violent one. In fact, as was immediately pointed out by supporters and mourners, his entire career had been based around meeting his ideological opponents, debating with them, and trying to talk them over. If he ever lost his composure in these debates — and he seldom did — then it tended to be more amusing than threatening. A 2018 discussion at Politicon saw him shouting at Cenk Uygur: ‘I live as a capitalist every single day!’ Topics ranging from police brutality to illegal immigration, by contrast, never seemed to produce such pique. His politics were relatively standard Trump-Republican fare, even if, as a pundit rather than a politician, he was more willing to opine on judgments such as Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction. Yet as the details surrounding his suspected murderer seem to have shown, these beliefs, and his prominence in representing them, were exactly why he was killed — especially, so it seems, his views on transsexualism.

The combination of his brutal murder and his relatively moderate views has left many wondering about a new phase in American politics. Charlie Kirk’s killing follows multiple attempts on Trump’s life during his campaign, including one that was similarly public. In June, Minnesota legislators were shot in their homes by an anti-abortion activist. Twitter commentators have been quick (or rather hasty) to draw comparison with Italy’s Years of Lead, or Weimar Germany. Matt Forney has proclaimed it ‘the American Reichstag fire.’ Exaggerated as these parallels may be, violence is unmistakably returning as a prominent fixture of American political life. Charlie Kirk is probably the most prominent American political figure to have been assassinated since the ’60s, when controversy over the civil rights movement spurred a similar spate of high-profile killings. What, if anything, will be done about it?

The shock over Trump’s shooting, which he at any rate survived, was dissipated in his victory; for the President, there was also the obvious solution of ever-more security. Charlie Kirk’s assassination is different, and has resulted in a very different commitment to confrontation and action. In a video released soon after the killing, Trump claimed that his administration would find ‘each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity’, including the ‘organisations that fund and support it’. Soon after, he announced the intention to pursue George Soros and his affiliates with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) act. Without needing to be pushed from the fringes, it seems that Trump, backed strongly by Stephen Miller and JD Vance, has resolved to channel the anger at Charlie Kirk’s death into specific legal and political measures.

This is of immense significance, especially given a seemingly ingrained impulse in many western democracies to respond to high-profile political assassinations with vague concerns about ‘social media’, ‘radicalisation’, or even just ‘hate’. The British political establishment witnessed the stabbing of Sir David Amess MP outside a constituency surgery and used it to push through the unprecedentedly draconian ‘Online Safety Bill’, a piece of legislation primarily based around stopping people being mean to politicians on the internet. While this may seem a colossal non sequitur, connecting political violence to social media use seems for many to be a surprisingly easy jump to make. Among a certain genus of (often older) person, the internet has assumed a near-mystical association with chaos and violence. The primary fear seems to be that in the unregulated and unsupervised wilderness of the internet, young people are ‘groomed’ or ‘radicalised’ by bad actors, the exact ideological persuasions of whom are basically irrelevant. This anxiety in turn likely stems from a wider parental unease about not knowing just what those kids are doing on their phone, and is wilfully ignorant of any political context.

As more information has come out about the suspected shooter, many pundits have eagerly interpreted this killing under the same rubric. Looking through Facebook pictures and reading biographical fragments from friends, a narrative emerges of a normal, intelligent young man becoming isolated, uninterested in the ‘real world’ and then almost inevitably falling into ‘radicalisation’. There is nothing that should be compelling about this. Instead of legislation like the Online Safety Bill or nebulous concerns about ‘polarisation’, Charlie Kirk’s death should prompt a muscular response to the coherent political movement whose ideologues provided the motivation and encouragement. Political violence is far older than the internet, and has no meaningful relationship with at any rate vaguely defined ideas of ‘socialisation’. It is a rationally deployed tool of political movements and their activists, not a psychogenic illness. The way to deter it is to show that it will be retaliated against at the political level rather than blithely accepted.

Whether Trump will be able to get a RICO prosecution of either George Soros or anyone near him through the courts remains to be seen. If the scope of the law were broadened to more resemble that of its state of Georgia descendant, in which criminal acts by a single individual can constitute enterprise, and soliciting or coercing an individual is also considered organised crime, this would make winning such cases far easier. However, it remains true that incitement to imminent lawless action is grounds for criminal prosecution including as part of a criminal enterprise (under RICO). It is therefore entirely possible that Trump will not need to expand the scope of existing law in order to gain substantial legal victories over far-left groups, and can make as much of a spectacle of prosecuting them as was made of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Even more difficult than predicting court judgements is the use of the secret services against leftist groups, in part due to the necessarily clandestine nature of much counter-terror policing. COINTELPRO — the effort by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to infiltrate, intimidate and ultimately incapacitate groups deemed ‘subversive’ — was only revealed to the public in 1971, fifteen years after its inception. Even with supposed Trump loyalist Kash Patel now at the head of the organisation, the FBI has also spent much of the last decade being used to intimidate Trump in a brazenly partisan manner, and so is unlikely to be eager to lead any backlash. But this is not to imply that such efforts would be irrelevant. Trump could even use ICE or the US Marshals to investigate protest groups, and build up these organisations in the process.

Charlie Kirk’s brand of being willing to debate all comers, his being shot in the throat on a university campus, and his being head of Turning Point USA all maximised the spectacle of his death. His immense fame, and early mastery of the short-video format, both made him a global celebrity. Just like the September 11 attacks which it came so close to memorialising, his killing is set to become a defining image of its time, and an integral part of the Western political vocabulary. Our hope that it will be remembered as the end, and not the beginning, of an age of violence and instability in American politics will depend principally on the strength of the measures taken to oppose the forces that cheered it on.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal

This newsletter’s agenda: Obituary: Charlie Kirk (free); Andy Burnham’s rumoured coup (free/paid); Danny Kruger defects to Reform UK (paid)

Andy Burnham’s rumoured coup

Anyone who has been paying any attention to British politics in the last few weeks will know that Keir Starmer is tottering, and Andy Burnham is on manoeuvres. The proximate cause is the fallout surrounding the sacking of Peter Mandelson. Mandelson — appointed as US Ambassador by Starmer — was sacked after unsavoury emails between him and Epstein were disclosed. Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein was no secret, though it is still unclear the extent to which Mandelson divulged the nature of it to Starmer before his appointment. Although only one Labour MP (to my knowledge) has seemingly called for Starmer to go (Clive Lewis), there has been a barrage of increasingly negative anonymous briefings.

We have previously noted that Burnham has always been the most plausible alternative to Starmer, not Angela Rayner. That Rayner has managed to blow herself up through her own incompetence has finally made those dissatisfied with Starmer support one, and only one, candidate; it seems that it is for this reason that Rayner’s resignation was, paradoxically, actually unhelpful for him — an end to ‘divide and conquer’ between two rivals.

Burnham, of course, is not an MP. But should a seat in Greater Manchester become available, it would be difficult to prevent Burnham from running, given Starmer’s current weakness. Although it is true that Starmer and McSweeney continue to have an iron grip on the NEC, which controls Labour selections, Starmer would appear extremely capricious given Burnham’s obvious popularity and the evident lack of experience on the Labour frontbench, weakening him further in the Commons. Such an action would in itself be humiliating at a time where Starmer requires more credibility in his own party.

The current rumours are that Burnham will seek to stand in Gorton and Denton, currently held by Andrew Gwynne. Gwynne was sacked and lost the whip after offensive messages were leaked, and there are rumours that he will step down. Even if Gwynne decides to stay, it is surely sooner rather than later that a seat will become available, perhaps as a quid pro quo with an elderly MP that they will be made a lord should Burnham become leader. One option, suggested by The Guardian, is Graham Stringer, the 74-year-old MP for Blackley and Middleton South. Finally, The Independent claims that some MPs propose Burnham swapping positions with Lucy Powell, the MP for Manchester Central and currently the frontrunner for the Deputy Leadership, though this seems highly unlikely.

Yet there is, of course, the question of whether Burnham would even win a Greater Manchester seat if one came up. Electoral Calculus are currently projecting a nearly 75% chance of a Reform gain in Gorton and Denton in 2029, after all. Meanwhile, Blackley and Middleton South is projected at 89% Reform, and Manchester Central is at 49% Reform. Out of curiosity, I looked up the 27 constituencies in Greater Manchester on Electoral Calculus. Of these, Labour currently hold 25, and the Liberal Democrats hold 2; even in 2019, the Tories only won 9 seats here. Yet Electoral Calculus projects that Labour will win just 6 seats (Altrincham and Sale West, Manchester Rusholme, Manchester Withington, Stockport, Stretford and Urmston, Wythenshawe and Sale East) on current polling. The Liberal Democrats are projected to hold Cheadle. The remaining 20 seats are projected to go to Reform. Now, Electoral Calculus is hardly infallible, some of these seats (such as Lucy Powell’s Manchester Central) provoke a ‘surely not!’ reaction, and Burnham will probably have a pretty strong personal vote in his favour (for this reason, I think Burnham would win in many of these apparently unwinnable seats on the projections). Nonetheless, standing almost anywhere in Greater Manchester is not now free of risk for him, and Farage has already warned Burnham of the potential for a ‘humiliating’ defeat. The Daily Mail claims that ‘local sources’ doubt whether Burnham would take the risk — but if not now, then when? If Burnham is to wait until a few months before next May’s local elections, as has been suggested, the polls might have turned even further against Labour. He risks waiting too long, much like appears to have been the case for Jenrick and the Tories.