I was eating lunch when I saw the news about Charlie Kirk. My sandwich sat untouched as I scrolled through my phone in disbelief. Another campus shooting. Another life cut short. But this one hit differently—maybe because I’d watched Kirk grow from that ambitious kid with a borrowed Chevy into someone who could fill college auditoriums with students hungry for a different perspective.
You have to understand something about Charlie. When he started Turning Point USA back in 2012, most eighteen-year-olds were worried about their freshman roommate assignments. Charlie was worried about the future of conservatism on college campuses. I remember meeting him at a conference in Phoenix around 2014—he had this infectious energy, talking a mile a minute about campus chapters and donor meetings, his wrinkled suit suggesting he’d been sleeping in airports again.
The thing is, Charlie wasn’t just another talking head. He understood something fundamental: if you want to shape the future, you start with the people who’ll be living in it. While establishment conservatives were writing op-eds for each other, Kirk was setting up folding tables on quad lawns, debating nineteen-year-olds about socialism, and somehow making fiscal policy interesting to kids raised on TikTok.
Did he make enemies? God, yes. The amount of vitriol directed at him—I watched him get shouted down at UCLA, saw the death threats posted online, witnessed security having to escort him through back exits. The Professor Watchlist he launched in 2016 became a lightning rod for criticism. Various campuses saw disputes over TPUSA chapter recognition. But here’s what his critics never understood: every attack just proved his point about the intolerance of the supposedly tolerant.
What scares me now isn’t just that we lost Charlie. It’s that we’re losing the ability to disagree without destroying each other. When I started in journalism forty years ago, you could grab drinks with your ideological opposite after a heated debate. Now? Now we’re here.
I keep thinking about how young he was—just 31. The shooting at Utah Valley University yesterday, September 10th, during what should have been just another campus tour stop. The details are still emerging, the investigation ongoing. But what we know for certain is that a voice that reached millions of young conservatives has been silenced. The President ordered flags to half-staff, a gesture that feels both appropriate and insufficient.
What haunts me most is the reaction I saw online after his death was announced. The celebrations. The memes. The jokes. These weren’t bots or anonymous accounts—they were people with their real names and photos, professors and students, journalists and activists. People who claim to stand for compassion and human dignity, dancing on a grave before the body was even cold. Charlie had parents. He had friends who are mourning. But somehow, political disagreement has become so toxic that we’ve forgotten the human being behind the ideology.
Charlie Kirk deserved better than this ending. America deserved better than losing someone who, love him or hate him, actually gave a damn about engaging the next generation.
— Sandra McCall
Sandra McCall is a contributor to The Wealthiest Investor, where she delivers sharp, unapologetic commentary on economic freedom, market accountability, and leadership performance. Her work challenges centralized overreach and defends the foundational principles of free enterprise with clarity, consequence, and zero tolerance for political interference.