Charlie Kirk and America’s Long History of Assassinations
Although the September 10th assassination of Charlie Kirk was horrifying, the death of that young conservative activist was merely the latest in a long history of such high-profile killings in our deeply troubled society.
Just a few months earlier, an agitated gunman had shot and killed Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives along with her husband. Earlier this year, an individual outraged over health insurance policies had killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Robert Thompson. Last year, gunmen had twice unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Donald Trump as he campaigned for the White House. Back in 2017, a deranged leftist gunman had seriously injured House Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise and three others, while a half-dozen years earlier, an equally deranged right-wing gunman had critically wounded Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others.
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In 1972 Arthur Bremmer had shot and permanently crippled presidential candidate Gov. George Wallace, in 1975 Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore had separately tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, while in 1981 John Hinckley Jr. had similarly targeted President Ronald Reagan. In 1978 former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White had killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, while in 1980 Mark David Chapman had shot to death Beatles star John Lennon.
Successful, very high-profile American assassinations had been even more common during the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert both died by assassins’ bullets during those years, as did black leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The latter’s white racialist counterpart was George Lincoln Rockwell, and he too was assassinated in that same decade.
Beginning with President Abraham Lincoln’s killing in 1865, the list of American political assassinations has been a very long one, filling an entire 12,000 word Wikipedia page despite even omitting some of the cases listed above.
Although assassinations have been quite common throughout American history, the reverberations of Kirk’s death still dominate our media headlines nearly a dozen days after the crime, perhaps partly because the killing of a charismatic 31-year-old seemed like such a terrible, senseless tragedy. I am not aware of any past American political assassination in which the victim had been so young.
Prior to his tragic death, I’d paid very little attention to Kirk so the bare facts I knew about him were minimal. After dropping out of college at the age of 18, he had founded Turning Point USA, then spent the next dozen years building it into one of the largest grassroots political organizations in America. As a result, he’d become a hero to millions of youthful conservatives, many of whom regularly listened to his daily political podcast. His stature in Republican circles was enormous and I was shocked to learn that knowledgeable journalists such as Max Blumenthal expected him to eventually mount a serious campaign for the presidency, perhaps even running as soon as the 2028 election cycle.
But when I considered the long list of high-profile American political assassinations in our national history, I noticed that certain aspects of Kirk’s killing seemed to set it apart from the overwhelming majority of the others. A few days after Kirk’s death, I published an article in which I discussed my conclusions.
Meanwhile, the actual circumstances of Kirk’s killing raised all sorts of questions in my mind.
From media reports I soon discovered that Kirk had received many death threats over the years. Therefore, he had taken steps to ensure that he was extremely well protected against any such attack, surrounding himself with a professional security detail while also wearing body-armor. But none of that availed him against the sniper who killed him with a single, well-placed shot, hitting him in the neck from a distance of around 200 yards.
Over the years and the decades, considerable numbers of prominent Americans had been targeted by an assassin’s bullets but almost none of them had ever been killed in such a classic manner. Instead, a large majority of the victims were shot at close range with simple handguns, and the deranged attackers were often immediately apprehended at the scene.
Consider the case of last year’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Robert Thompson by someone angry over health insurance policies, with the corporate executive shot as he entered a midtown Manhattan hotel, totally unprotected against any such attack. Earlier this year, a Minnesota state representative and her husband had both been killed at home by an agitated gunman who merely knocked on their front-door.
Indeed, I would suspect that Kirk was better protected against any lethal attack than well over than 99% of all the American elected officials, senior corporate executives, billionaires, and Hollywood celebrities who constitute the most likely targets. Thus, his killing demonstrated how easily almost any of our public figures could be slain by a determined attacker. Many such influential individuals may certainly take this lesson to heart, perhaps leading them to support severe crackdowns on our civil liberties in order to reduce their personal risks.
Even last year’s two unsuccessful assassination attempts against Trump during his presidential campaign seemed far less professional than Kirk’s killing. In each case, the carelessness and incompetence of the attacker was balanced out by the severe security lapses of Trump’s Secret Service team.
A sniper firing at long range seems the most classic sort of professional political assassination but the last such examples that come to my mind were the 1960s killings of JFK and MLK…Just as with the Kirk assassination, the killing of Kennedy in Dallas also involved a heavily-guarded public figure slain by a sniper who initially escaped…So in many regards, the closest historical parallel to Kirk’s assassination was that of JFK sixty-two years earlier.
When was the last time that an American public figure has been successfully assassinated while wearing body-armor and surrounded by a security detail? It’s been a staple of countless Hollywood films, but I’m not sure it’s ever previously happened in real life. Combine that with the single shot fired and Kirk’s killing might rank as the most professional political assassination in modern American history. That’s a pretty impressive achievement for an agitated 22-year-old pro-tranny activist whose grandmother claims may have never previously fired a gun.
- The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 15, 2025 • 6,000 Words
In the week since I wrote that piece, the widespread claims that Kirk was wearing a bullet-proof vest or body-armor turned out to be mistaken, but I think that the rest of my analysis still stands, with the closest match to Kirk’s killing being the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. But whereas Kirk was killed by a single bullet, at least three shots had been fired at Kennedy, one of which went completely wild, even though the sniper was firing from roughly half the distance.
So all things considered, Kirk’s killing would indeed seem to rank as probably the most professional political assassination in modern American history. Over the decades, I’ve frequently seen examples of very well-protected American VIPs targeted for death by a distant sniper firing a scoped rifle. But all of those scenes had played out in films and television shows, while almost nothing like that had ever happened in real life.
Kirk’s Bitter Rupture with His Pro-Israel Backers
I’d only first begun paying any attention to Kirk two months before his death. A huge national controversy had erupted over Trump’s reversal on his promise to release the government files on Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail ring, and I’d been greatly impressed by the remarkably courageous speech that Tucker Carlson had made at the national convention of Kirk’s TPUSA organization. As I wrote at the time:
Former FoxNews host Tucker Carlson is probably the biggest figure in today’s fragmented media landscape and a crucial supporter of Donald Trump. But he and many others like him have strongly denounced the administration’s reversal on the release of the Epstein files.
The largest youthful pro-Trump organization is called Turning Point USA, and Carlson happened to give a speech to the huge audience at their annual convention a few days after Trump’s decision. He dramatically declared that that not a single person he knew in DC doubted that Epstein had been running a blackmail operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad, and despite that controversial statement his speech drew widespread cheers. This suggests that his remarks—and the positive reaction they attracted—may themselves mark “a turning point” in what had been decades of uniformly pro-Israel sentiments among American conservatives. So ideas once marginalized or considered entirely forbidden may now apparently be freely discussed, sometimes even attracting widespread support, and this may be the most important lasting legacy of the current political firestorm over the Epstein files.
Indeed, given Carlson’s words only the most willfully blind could fail to connect such Mossad operations with the unwavering levels of support that Israel has long enjoyed from our members of Congress. Over the last couple of years, nearly the entire rest of the world has reviled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of modern history’s worst war-criminals, now under indictment by the International Court of Justice for his horrific ongoing massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians. But when he has visited Congress, the trained barking seals of that political body have provided him endless standing ovations. Obviously the money and media deployed by the Israel Lobby explain most of this behavior, but the powerful role of blackmail has almost certainly supplemented those factors.
The notion that many of our own elected officials are being ruthlessly blackmailed by a foreign power must surely outrage most patriotic Americans, and the increasing circulation of these ideas may eventually have important consequences. Just a few days after Carlson’s remarkable speech, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the fiercest MAGA partisans in Congress, surprisingly joined with Democrats Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two of her most leftwing colleagues, in voting to cut U.S. funding for Israel. This resolution only attracted a handful of supporters, but small cracks in a dam sometimes presage much larger breaks.
- American Pravda: Jeffrey Epstein, the Franklin Scandal, Pedophilia, and Political Blackmail
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 28, 2025 • 12,300 Words
I’d always regarded Kirk as an absolutely committed supporter of Israel and the Zionist project, much like almost all other American conservatives. Therefore, I had been shocked by Kirk’s willingness to provide Carlson with such a high-profile platform to make a speech taking such a contrary position.
Indeed, a few days ago Carlson revealed that Kirk had strongly encouraged those very controversial remarks.
Tucker Carlson shares the unforgettable backstage moment when Charlie Kirk looked him in the eye and told him to “go all the way” with his raw feelings about Iran and Epstein.
Charlie knew Tucker’s words would upset his donors, but he gave him the green light to speak freely at… pic.twitter.com/SwDAHU3i7O
— Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) September 17, 2025
Although I can’t quite remember the details, during the weeks that followed I’d gotten a strong impression that Kirk was becoming much more publicly critical of Israel, perhaps even starting to follow the political trajectory of his longtime friend Candace Owens, who had originally come from a very similar ideological background.
Therefore, when the media suddenly announced that Kirk had been killed in such a highly professional assassination with the sniper cleanly escaping, my thoughts turned in suspicious directions.
Early the next morning, the police announced that they had recovered the rifle used from a nearby wooded area, apparently left behind by the assassin as he fled the scene. The shells had been marked with various leftist slogans, including support for trans-rights, suggesting the apparent motive for killing the young conservative leader. But none of this assuaged my much darker suspicions.
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Over the decades, Israel and its Mossad intelligence service had committed an enormous number of political assassinations all around the world, eliminating their real or perceived enemies with unmatched skill and subtlety. In January 2020, I’d published a very long article on that topic that heavily drew upon Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman’s highly authoritative 2018 volume, whose contents I summarized in an early paragraph:
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.
But in the last few years, this campaign of Israeli political assassinations had gone into extreme overdrive, successfully striking down such huge numbers of targets that I published an additional article three months ago.
- Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 23, 2025 • 11,800 Words
Therefore, a few hours after hearing of Kirk’s death, I decided to very gingerly raise these possibilities with someone well situated in conservative circles who personally knew Kirk, and I was shocked by his response. Although I had never mentioned Israel by name, he unequivocally told me that everyone in Kirk’s circle, even including important Trump Administration officials, suspected that Israel had probably killed the young conservative leader.
While such beliefs might not necessarily be correct, I was astonished that they were apparently so widespread without even any hints reported anywhere in the mainstream or conservative media.
