On July 13, 2024, I watched as a bullet ripped through the air and whistled past then-presidential candidate Donald Trump before he collapsed live on national television. I immediately hopped onto my computer and began preparing an official statement in response to what I had just seen.
One week later, I listened in as President Joe Biden announced that he would drop out of the 2024 election. Beside me, my phone began blaring with messages and alerts, one of which I had written.
The political landscape that summer was painted in stark shades of blue and red. Political partisanship, it seemed like, had spilled off the debate stage and into regular life in ways previously undreamt of. But political partisanship didn’t stop that July. Instead, it’s become increasingly present and increasingly violent, from the politically motivated shooting of two Minnesota state lawmakers to the aggravated arson targeting Governor Josh Shapiro.
It was this violent divide that drew me to bipartisan politics. I’ve worked on Republican campaigns. I’ve worked on Democratic campaigns. I’ve worked for prominent independent candidates. I’ve learned student outreach strategies alongside conservative organizations, liberal trainings, and libertarian youth groups. Altogether, it got me to the point where I could sit on the front lines of political response.
I wrote my first “For Immediate Release” response when President Trump was shot, and I wrote my second when President Biden dropped out. I had hoped I would never have to write another one again.
On September 10, I wrote my third Immediate Release, focused on the killing of Charlie Kirk.
I work in student politics. Most recently, I served as the lead of the youth committee of a major American Third Party, and, like Kirk, my job is to create college “chapters”. My work has taken me from Rhode Island to California, not unlike the touring that Charlie Kirk continuously did year after year. Through collegiate outreach, I’ve found myself on the opposite end of Turning Point USA multiple times.
I began my work in politics to answer two questions: should students get involved in politics, and, if not, more importantly, how should society go about shrinking our political divide?
The death of Charlie Kirk has made me ponder these two questions again. Like me, Charlie Kirk believed in the value that students bring to political discourse. This remains truer than ever: students deserve to speak at their campuses and schools. Most of my work revolves around the notion that students should be offered opportunities to get involved, whether that’s in policy-writing or options to partake in grassroots protest. As a university, Duke has seen moderate improvements in its political advocacy, from widespread petitioning on behalf of C1 bus driver Luis Alonso Juárez to successful labor contracts from the Duke Graduate Student Union. Still, Duke suffers from extreme political alienation on one end of the spectrum and absolute indifference among most other students. Duke isn’t a politically passive campus; it has multitudes of ways for students to get involved. Rather, Duke tends towards having a passive population, with the large majority of students too career-oriented to engage with political issues. To the first question, students should get involved in politics, and Duke has an imperative to encourage political activism from its entire student population, not just its pre-political majors. As a pre-med student myself, it is a calculated risk for me to get involved in political affairs. Duke’s passivity is symptomatic of a larger structural problem of students feeling alienated by an aging politics. This is something that Charlie Kirk not only understood but aggressively tackled.
Through Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk made it a national mission to involve wide masses of students and was largely successful. Despite my disagreements with much of his political philosophy, Charlie Kirk values student political engagement in ways uncommon to modern political systems. It isn’t controversial to say that Kirk’s active advocacy for students contributed to the creation of a greater culture of youth engagement in politics. His conservative example proliferated extreme growth in the activity of conservative youth (Turning Point now houses political hubs across over 850 campuses), but also likely challenged liberal organizations to do the same. Arguably, Charlie Kirk’s challenge contributed towards the eventual youth-powered movements we see today, from Greta Thunberg’s 2017 climate activism to the rise of young activists like Maxwell Frost, Deja Foxx, and Zohran Mamdani.
It’s difficult to envision how far Kirk’s impact may have extended, but it’s inarguable that he left a profound impact on student politics. As a student activist, Charlie Kirk is simultaneously an adversary, an opponent, someone I despise, and someone I’m inspired by. To this extent, I have respect for his mission. It is also why I mourn his death.
Early sentiments among Duke students seem to reflect the trends above. Everyone is aware of his death (many students even engage with videos of the tragedy), but few students have much more of a reaction than, “Oh shoot, Charlie Kirk got shot”. Broad consensus depicts this event as yet another example of the unnatural tolerance students have developed towards extreme partisanship. Online, individuals have been quick to jump on this “blame game” cycle, with left-leaning rhetoric reflecting an indifference towards Charlie Kirk’s death, and right-leaning rhetoric accusing the left of embracing violent maneuvers. The video itself, graphic and disturbing, is now being used in conversation more as a shocking piece of entertainment value than as a horrific documentation of tragedy. These extremes may seem foreign to the majority of Duke students, but they are revealed in our rhetoric. As student Sherman Criner wrote in his own op-ed, “When political violence claims the life of someone we dislike, notice the formula that emerges with depressing predictability: ‘I think [insert name] was a terrible person, but killing them is inexcusable.’”
The shooting of Charlie Kirk, like the assassination attempt on President Trump a year ago, highlights yet again the consequences of our political division: isolation that, when left to fester, leads to extremism. In this case, the extremism is that we’ve grown to separate body and mind: that the loss of Charlie Kirk’s body from this world can be mourned, even if we don’t mourn his identity, his impact, and his ideas.
To my second question, the answer is simple: conversation. When moderated healthily, discourse leads to understanding and progress. As a youth political leader, I am livid that our political climate produced violence against another young political leader. Simultaneously, I am terrified of what Kirk’s assassination could mean for the greater world of youth politics. Does it mean that those I work with could be next? Will this event discourage students from getting active out of fear for their safety?
Seeing the anonymous comments on Fizz and other social media outlets filled with apathy towards Charlie Kirk’s death imbues me with fear. Mixed with the political climate of Duke University, my worry now is that angry students will refuse to spur their emotions into effective change and productive discourse. Charlie Kirk himself was often described by both supporters and opponents as a champion (for better or for worse) of free speech, frequently attempting to invite disagreement from students. It’d be the ultimate disservice for his death to wane political activism instead of inspiring it. In Kirk’s own words, “when you stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”
Despite a background in medicine, I joined politics to advocate for the issues that I care about. My work has ranged from Brown University to Baylor. Charlie Kirk’s advocacy has reached much, much further. Students belong in politics and deserve to feel safe when they decide to get involved. We bridge our political divisions by taking action. As stated in my Immediate Release, “Political violence has absolutely no home in the United States, nor on campus. We strongly urge students to embrace political differences through conversation—not violence.”
I am a youth political activist, begging both Duke University and the Duke student population to be willing to get angry and talk it out, whether it’s in the classroom, BC Plaza, or at the WU dinner table. Charlie Kirk’s death is a tragedy, especially for the advancement of youth in politics. In the words of Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff, “don’t let your voice get softer.” Let’s let the death of a political activist spur political activism.
