Charlie Kirk, the conservative personality who was fatally shot Wednesday at a Utah university, gave his last television interview a day before on Dallas-based Fox News anchor Will Cain’s talk show.
Kirk, 31, rose to prominence as the founder of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that has courted young Republicans since 2012.
He was beloved among some Republicans, namely drawing praise from President Donald Trump. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Kirk’s death.
Kirk staged “Prove Me Wrong” forums on school campuses nationwide where he’d debate contentious social and political topics. The exchanges, particularly heated back-and-forths with his detractors, often went viral. His last event, at Utah Valley University, where he was shot Wednesday, was promoted in a similar vein.
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On Tuesday afternoon, Kirk appeared on The Will Cain Show, where he had been a guest before, to opine on media coverage surrounding the fatal stabbing of a Ukrainian woman on a Charlotte train in late August.
The suspect, an African American man, had past criminal convictions and a reported history of mental illness.
Kirk suggested the media did not care about the woman’s death.
“If a white attacker was minding his own business and a perfectly law-abiding Black individual is minding her own business and that white attacker took out a knife and was relentlessly hacking a law-abiding Black girl, you and I both know, Will, this would be national headlines,” Kirk said.
He did not specify which outlets he believed were ignoring the stabbing.
Kirk continued, saying the media avoided covering incidents that did not fit the narrative of Black people being subject to racially motivated attacks from white people.
Earlier in the week, CNN political commentator Van Jones accused Kirk of “race-mongering” after Kirk had said on his podcast that the Ukrainian was killed because she was white.
Jones refuted Kirk’s notion of a double standard on CNN, saying, “Where is the George Floyd Policing Act? It didn’t pass. Even when you had a white police officer murder a Black man on television.”
Cain reacted live to the news of Kirk’s death on The Will Cain Show Wednesday afternoon, referring to Kirk as a good friend.
On Thursday morning, Cain eulogized Kirk on Fox News.
“Mourning is the hardest and it’ll be the hardest for his family,” Cain said. “What makes this incredibly hard is what we all have to rationalize with … Where are we now as America? Where are we as a country?”
He continued: “We don’t know the answer to that yet.”