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Charlie Kirk Was Killed. Now What?
CNN One Thing
Sep 14, 2025
The apparent assassination of Charlie Kirk has both sides of the aisle calling on Americans to ‘lower the temperature’ of political rhetoric. But we’ve been here before – is there actually any chance that happens? We hear why Kirk was so effective in motivating young conservatives and look at what could happen next.
Guest: Alex Stone & Lilliana Mason, SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins Professor of Political Science
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Host: David Rind
Showrunner: Felicia Patinkin
Editorial Support: Donie O’Sullivan & Sean Clark
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:00
This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and this is America.
Lilliana Mason
00:00:04
I think we have a political problem, and we have violence problem, and sometimes those overlap.
David Rind
00:00:09
Stick with us. You interviewed Charlie Kirk once, right? That is correct. What was that experience like? Oh, it was phenomenal.
Alex Stone
00:00:18
Charlie, how are you doing today, sir?
Charlie Kirk
00:00:19
'Great, man, great to see you, and you're very-.
Alex Stone
00:00:21
'The first thing that he said to me was- Love your tweets, I don't know if they're tweets, your posts- Alex, I love your tweets man. And that kind of made my day in my whole week.
David Rind
00:00:34
'Alex Stone is a 21-year-old student from Kansas City, Missouri. He's also a conservative podcast host who has thousands of followers on X and Instagram. And he was a big fan of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and the group he founded, Turning Point USA.
Charlie Kirk
00:00:50
Welcome to AmericaFest everybody!
Alex Stone
00:00:55
The first time I saw Charlie Kirk was probably in 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona at America Fest.
Crowd
00:01:05
Thank you Charlie!
Alex Stone
00:01:05
It was my first ever Turning Point event, and it was phenomenal. It was amazing. I was like, Oh my goodness.
Charlie Kirk
00:01:10
All these students that we have at Turning Point. You all look at this.
Alex Stone
00:01:13
This is a movement of young people that is rising up to be the next generation of conservative politics.
Charlie Kirk
00:01:20
The kids are all right.
David Rind
00:01:22
Alex was just 17 at the time, he couldn't even vote, but he says the energy of that room inspired him to take his interest in politics to the next level.
Alex Stone
00:01:31
Without Charlie Kirk, I don't know if I'd be doing what I'm doing today. Part of my story is because of Turning Point. They gave me an opportunity to go to their events and do my show. And I think that's the same story for many others who have been involved in Turning Point, I know so many people, so many young people where their start in politics was Turning Point USA and now they're working in the Trump administration.
Kasie Hunt
00:02:02
We are hearing from President Trump. He is on his true social platform saying that Charlie Kirk has passed away.
David Rind
00:02:14
'In the days since Kirk was gunned down in front of a crowd of thousands at a Utah college, he is being remembered as someone who inspired so many young conservatives like Alex to take up like-minded causes and vote.
President Donald Trump
00:02:26
I won the young people by 37 percent. No Republicans ever won. And I won by 37. And Charlie Kirk will tell you TikTok helped. But Charlie Kirk helped also.
David Rind
00:02:41
'Kirk was also known for these prove-me-wrong debate sessions on college campuses, where anyone could come up and go back and forth on hot button issues.
Student
00:02:49
It is an embryo, which is not a baby.
Charlie Kirk
00:02:51
Well, okay, so it's a fertilized embryo.
Student
00:02:54
Correct, which isn't a baby.
Charlie Kirk
00:02:55
So at what point does it become a baby?
Student
00:02:57
When it is born.
David Rind
00:03:00
'And he said something once that sounds rather ominous today. When people stop talking, that's when you get violence. But his words and actions were sometimes controversial. For example, he disputed Trump's 2020 election loss and Turning Point is behind a group that publishes names of college professors they claim discriminate against conservatives. There's no doubt it is tragic and horrible and it should never have happened. But he did say plenty of outrageous things that I think many people found hateful, whether they say it was anti-trans, anti-feminist. He once ran on a rant against Martin Luther King Jr. Of all people. So I guess I'm wondering, when people hear some of that stuff, they might say unity and coming together was not exactly the full message. Yes, there was a dialog, but there was also a wedge.
Alex Stone
00:03:54
I think there's absolutely going to be a wedge anywhere in politics, and even if you disagreed with him or not, like college students, you know, who disagreed with him went up there to talk to him because he was willing to talk and now he's gone. And whether you disagree with him, or not that is tragic. That is that is sad. It's heartbreaking. It's heart breaking for the conservative movement and furthermore for our country. Because if you can't have free speech, if you can't stand for what you believe in and talk about what you believe in, like the First Amendment promises us, what else are people willing to do?
David Rind
00:04:29
Well, yeah, I wanted to ask how you feel about this uptick of political violence in the country, because just in the last few years, a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota were assassinated in their home. There was a shooting at the CDC headquarters, an arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor's mansion, a health care CEO gunned down in broad daylight, a plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, not one, but two assassination attempts against President Trump. And that's just, you know, that's an incomplete list. So what do you make of all that?
Alex Stone
00:04:58
I think it's tragic. Every single one of those is tragic. It shouldn't happen in the United States of America and it needs to end and it need to end now. I believe that we have a serious mental health issue in the U.S.A. And we need to get to the bottom of it and we need get to bottom of this fast.
David Rind
00:05:18
So, I turned to someone who has spent her whole career trying to get to the bottom of it. Liliana Mason is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the SNF Agora Institute. She specializes in political violence and its impact on democracy. I'll be back with her right after this.
David Rind
00:05:42
So Professor Mason, I'm trying to think of where to start. And when you see political attack after political attack, not to mention mass shooting after mass shooting, I kind of run out of questions. So as someone who studies this stuff, where is your head at?
Lilliana Mason
00:05:57
So I think I'm of sort of two minds on this. One is that we're still not in, you know, 1960s level political violence. There have been attacks on political figures. Some of them have been motivated by politics and some of them, have not. A lot of people would argue that the guy that tried to shoot Trump during the campaign was actually more like a school shooter. He was looking for attention and fame more than he was trying to specifically target Donald Trump. And that matters because when political violence occurs, the most dangerous element of it is the temptation for retaliation.
David Rind
00:06:33
Right. I've heard some people say that political violence is contagious. Does it actually work that way?
Lilliana Mason
00:06:39
It can, I mean, the hope is to make sure that it isn't because once a cycle of violence starts, it's very difficult to stop it, right? Even the person who started it can't stop a cycle retaliation. And so the idea is to prevent that from starting at all. One thing that I've studied is, we ask people in surveys whether they think the violence is acceptable for achieving political goals. And normally we have a pretty low number of people that say that it is 10 to 20%. Of Americans say that, you know, that violence could be an acceptable method of achieving political goals. But if we then say, well, what if the other side starts at first, though? Then that number goes up to like 50, 60 percent.
David Rind
00:07:18
So people just view it as more acceptable if it's done to them.
Lilliana Mason
00:07:24
If they didn't start it, right? Nobody wants to be the one to start it. But a lot of people are willing to say, if they start it then I'm ready to have a fight.
David Rind
00:07:33
I mean, we've seen social media be a part of this too. TikTok has said it's actually gonna take down some of the more graphic images and videos of this particular tech that we've see. And we've seeing how social media can help amplify some of that stuff and spread misinformation. Does that contribute to a rise in politically motivated violence at all?
Lilliana Mason
00:07:56
I mean, I don't know if the graphic nature of violent videos contributes so much. I think that much more is the kind of way that we talk about politics online, and the kind rhetoric that we use to talk about politics, the rhetoric that our leaders use. There was a time not that long ago when it was considered improper for elected officials to use demeaning and degrading language about their political opponents. And now that's the stuff that we're consuming all the time now.
David Rind
00:08:26
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that because hours after kirk was shot president trump came out with this video tribute
President Donald Trump
00:08:31
Our prayers are with his wife, Erica, the two young, beloved children, and his entire family who he loved more than anything in the world.
David Rind
00:08:42
And he also singled out rhetoric responsible for what he called radical left political violence.
President Donald Trump
00:08:49
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
David Rind
00:09:11
Obviously we could spend a whole podcast listing out the times Trump or his allies have used inflammatory or insulting language against Democrats, casting them as enemies, and so on. But you're saying rhetoric does have a direct correlation with this violence?
Lilliana Mason
00:09:27
Rhetoric doesn't necessarily immediately cause violence, but it creates an atmosphere where the norms against violence are weakened. And ideally, in a functioning democracy, you have strong norms against the use of violence for political goals, for achieving political goals. When our leaders don't enforce that and don't force those norms, don't remind us about those norms then those norms can be weakened. But I've done experiments where we sort of ask people to just read one quote from either. Donald Trump or Joe Biden that says violence is never an acceptable method of doing politics in a democracy and After people read that they back off of violence, right? It means that it's relatively easy for leaders to take people sort of off the ledge and move them back away from it
David Rind
00:10:09
In an instance where, say, President Trump pardons rioters from the January 6th attack on the Capitol, does that send a message that you can get away with this kind of stuff?
Lilliana Mason
00:10:21
Yeah, I mean, I think that particular pardon sent a message that you can get away with this if you're doing it on behalf of Trump. People do learn from that, that this president in particular, if you are doing something violent to defend him, then he's going to be OK with it. But again, it's still very rare for people to actually engage in violence, right? Usually it's somebody who is already sort of unstable and volatile. And then the political messages just sort of direct them in a political direction.
David Rind
00:10:56
Obviously, this particular attack was especially shocking in the way that it was captured on video, very gruesome. Is the shock of it matching up with what we're actually seeing in terms of the data around violent incidents?
Lilliana Mason
00:11:11
No, I mean, that's the thing. It's that these events are just so intense and dramatic that it makes it feel like there's more of them than there are.
David Rind
00:11:19
But there have been a lot, right?
Lilliana Mason
00:11:22
Yeah, I mean, we had the Minnesota legislators who were murdered for explicitly political reasons, as far as we can tell. That was the last sort of prominent violent event. And obviously, every time someone is killed, it's terrible. But I don't want to have a sense that there is this like epidemic of political violence occurring when for a lot of these things, first of all, that makes it feel more acceptable for other people to engage in political violence. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that. The fact that a political person is attacked doesn't necessarily mean that it was political violence.
David Rind
00:11:57
And I totally get there, there may be that kind of academic difference, but in the end, what it seems to me is that people are responding that something feels broken in the country with the way that this violence is playing out. Can you trace that to any one thing in particular?
Lilliana Mason
00:12:15
Yeah, I mean, our politics feels broken. This is what multiple decades of increasingly vicious and angry politics has brought us to, including language from people like Charlie Kirk, right? I mean it's, and I'm not saying that he has in any way brought this on himself, but the sort of the political rhetoric that we've been hearing in the last couple of decades has just been increasingly dehumanizing and vilifying of our political opponents in a way that. The norms used to be that when you talk about your political opponents, you treat them with decency and humanity and explain that you disagree, but you're still kind of all in this project together. And the focus on the battle makes us think more about our opponents or increasingly what feels like our enemies rather than the project of governing the United States.
David Rind
00:13:05
I don't expect you to have an answer to how to fix any of that. The hostility in our politics is, that's not a new problem, obviously. But I guess I'm wondering where this goes next. Obviously it doesn't seem to be going to a good place, but are there examples we can look to of how this could go?
Lilliana Mason
00:13:21
'I mean, I think it really does, it will depend a lot on leadership. And that's not just elected officials, but also, you know, leaders in the media, right? People who have prominent political voices in this country, the way that these types of anti-violence norms are enforced is by people reminding each other that this is not how we want to live.
David Rind
00:13:40
So that is valuable to hear people just say, this is not normal, we should not be doing this.
Lilliana Mason
00:13:46
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if violence is perpetrated on behalf of a political movement, for members of that specific movement to say, don't do this in my name. I don't like this, you know, I don't approve of this, and you're not helping me when you engage in this kind of behavior. That's the type of leadership that we ideally want to hear coming out of people who have influence. You know, that's something that if we don't want to live in a violent environment, we need to think about how we talk to each other and how we about each other.
David Rind
00:14:12
Yeah, because at the same time you have folks saying we need to be responsible, we need to calm things down, you have people like Jesse Waters on Fox talking about avenging Kirk's death, Laura Loomer calling it a professional hit without any evidence, that stuff.
Lilliana Mason
00:14:29
No, that's really playing with fire, I think, you know, trying to turn this into like this, this existential battle between the right and the left. It's a very easy thing to do if what you want is for people to pay attention to you, but it also can become something that sparks a cycle of violence that we will not be able to stop. If we have retaliatory violence and then a retaliation for that and then a retellation for, that that's the way that societies kind of fall apart.
David Rind
00:14:56
If I can try to sum up what you've said just broadly, when you look at all of these incidents, you would say that this country has a violence problem, but not necessarily a political violence problem.
Lilliana Mason
00:15:07
I think we have a political problem, and we have violence problem, and sometimes those overlap.
David Rind
00:15:14
Well, Professor Mason, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it.
Lilliana Mason
00:15:17
I'm happy to do it, thank you.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox
00:15:21
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We got him.
David Rind
00:15:25
'On Friday, after a 33-hour manhunt, Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced authorities had taken a suspect in Charlie Kirk's murder into custody. 22-Year-old Tyler Robinson was turned into authorities after a family friend contacted law enforcement with information that Robinson confessed to them or implied that he had committed the shooting. Cox said a family member told investigators that Robinson had turned more political in recent years.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox
00:15:51
In the conversation with another family member, Robinson mentioned Charlie Kirk was coming to UVU. They talked about why they didn't like him and the viewpoints that he had. The family member also stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate.
David Rind
00:16:06
'Officials also described finding a rifle in the woods near the university, along with three unfired casings that had inscriptions engraved on them. One said, hey fascists, catch. Others hinted at online trolling and memes. Another appeared to reference an Italian anti-fascist song.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox
00:16:23
I absolutely believe that this is a watershed in American history, yes.
David Rind
00:16:26
And amid a series of false threats and bomb scares across the country, Cox called for all Americans to get off the internet and lower the temperature.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox
00:16:35
This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off ramp? And again, it's a choice. It's a choose and every one of us gets to make that choice. Two more questions, two more questions.
David Rind
00:16:47
That's all for us today. As always, you can get the very latest on this story over at CNN.com, the CNN app, and we will be back on Wednesday. Make sure you follow the show so the new episode will pop into your feed right away. I'll talk to you then.
