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Arizonans mourn Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters on September 10, 2025 in Phoenix. (Photo by Rebecca Noble\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
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The Arizona state flag flies at half-staff outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters to honor Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, in Phoenix.(Photo by Sydney Lovan\/Cronkite News)<\/p>\n
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Shane Besore, a Charlie Kirk supporter, is emotional during an interview outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix on Sept. 10, 2025. Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed at an event in Utah. (Photo by Sydney Lovan\/Cronkite News)<\/p>\n
PHOENIX \u2014 Shane Besore drove up at 2 p.m. Wednesday to the Turning Point USA headquarters with his head down and parked in a gravel lot. <\/p>\n
A handful of others had already arrived at the headquarters of the organization Charlie Kirk cofounded to mourn and pay their respects to the right-wing media personality who was shot and killed at an event in Utah hours earlier.<\/p>\n
Besore walked in a solemn silence, shoulders slumped, holding a red \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hat. At the entrance, he placed the hat on a metal post, as a makeshift memorial grew.<\/p>\n
He walked back, eyes filled with tears, leaving behind the hat he filled with notes and Bible verses dedicated to Kirk\u2019s family and the Turning Point staff. <\/p>\n
Kirk was shot in the neck while speaking at a student event at Utah Valley University. He was rushed to a hospital and later died.<\/p>\n
Besore wasn\u2019t alone. Other grief-ridden followers brought flowers to the headquarters. One man hung a hat he purchased from Kirk in Arizona. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was watching on every single platform possible and just wrote a bunch of Bible verses in there to encourage the TP USA staff,\u201d Besore said, his eyes welling with tears. \u201cErica, his wife, especially, I have all the notes written in the top of the hat and in the bottom of the hat, and thank you to Charlie,\u201d <\/p>\n
Not only were people in grief, they were in shock.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just live in a very strange society right now,\u201d said Andrea Serrano, another Arizona resident at the group\u2019s offices.<\/p>\n
Serrano said she admired Kirk for his courage and his outspoken nature, promoting the conservative voice. She visited Turning Point headquarters mostly because of her son, a college student who\u2019d been inspired by Kirk, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what\u2019s going to happen now is there\u2019s going to be a lot of young men and young women who have these views that Charlie had that are probably going to start speaking up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Micah Barnett wasn\u2019t a follower of Kirk, but he wasn\u2019t happy about the killing, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a citizen, I may not believe everything that has to do with the conservative point that he portrays, but I\u2019m just concerned as a citizen of what our country is coming to nowadays,\u201d Barnett said. \u201cI see all the violent actions, whether it\u2019s against Donald Trump or the Minnesota politicians and now Charlie Kirk.\u201d <\/p>\n
Barnett, who is 20, said he wished political discussions were more open and less polarizing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very concerning to grow up in a country that\u2019s becoming more and more divided amongst itself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Kirk assassination wasn\u2019t the first in recent months. <\/p>\n
In June, Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot and killed. In December 2024, Luigi Mangione shot and killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump narrowly survived an attack in July 2024 when a bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
Acts of political violence have been perpetrated \u2013 and felt \u2013 on both sides of the aisle.<\/p>\n
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol hoping to overturn his defeat to President Joe Biden. The same day, pipe bombs were found at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee offices in Washington.<\/p>\n
In response to Kirk\u2019s death, Trump ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff through Sunday. The flags outside Turning Point headquarters were lowered shortly after the news of his death was announced, moments after Besore hung his MAGA hat. <\/p>\n
The ASU Turning Point USA chapter canceled a meeting scheduled for Wednesday night. <\/p>\n
The chapter has a controversial history with the university. In 2023, two members attacked a queer ASU professor. ASU President Michael Crow also asked Kirk to remove ASU professors from Turning Point\u2019s \u201cprofessor watchlist\u201d in 2023, saying the list \u201cresulted in antisemiitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks\u201d on ASU professors.<\/p>\n
Kirk still made campus appearances after the controversies. He visited the university a year ago, stumping with Kari Lake during her failed bid for the U.S. Senate. <\/p>\n
In recent months, Turning Point called for Arizona GOP chairwoman Gina Swoboda to step down after she urged more oversight of state-provided school vouchers.<\/p>\n
Regardless, Swoboda said she was unnerved by the killing. <\/p>\n
\u201cWords cannot describe the shock and horror I felt today when I learned of the senseless and tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University,\u201d she said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Besore credited Kirk\u2019s activism for prompting him to vote for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Conservatism, he said, lost its best spokesman when Kirk died. <\/p>\n
\u201cI pray for Erica,\u201d he said. \u201cI pray for his two kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one,\u201d he added, \u201cshould have to do anything like that to try to prove their point.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Arizonans mourn Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk outside of the Turning Point USA headquarters on September 10,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":217213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,7249,5643,1587,19719,69,46805,7042,7250,1589,3674,7252,118607,44307,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-217212","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-andy-biggs","10":"tag-arizona","11":"tag-az","12":"tag-charlie-kirk","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-katie-hobbs","15":"tag-maga","16":"tag-mark-kelly","17":"tag-phoenix","18":"tag-political-violence","19":"tag-ruben-gallego","20":"tag-turning-point","21":"tag-turning-point-usa","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115183638688857452","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}