PinnedUpdated Sept. 10, 2025, 4:29 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk, a close ally of President Trump and the founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist organization, was shot in the neck on Wednesday while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University.Cellphone videos posted online showed people running from the event after a gunshot rang out. One video appeared to show Mr. Kirk’s head jerking back as blood poured from his neck. He had been delivering remarks while sitting under a tent with the slogan “The American Comeback.”A university spokeswoman, Ellen Treanor, said that Mr. Kirk was struck about 20 minutes after he began speaking on campus. She said a suspect had fired at Mr. Kirk from the Losee Center, a building about 200 yards away.The university originally said the shooter had been taken into custody. But officials determined that person they had detained — who can be seen in videos posted online — was not the gunman, another spokesman, Scott Trotter, said later, relying on information from the university’s police chief, who was coordinating with other law enforcement agencies.Here are the details:Condition unknown: Ms. Treanor said Mr. Kirk’s security agents had taken him away after the shooting, and she did not have any information on his condition. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, confirmed that Mr. Kirk had been shot in the neck.Bipartisan condemnation: Democrats and Republicans quickly denounced the shooting on social media. “We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!” In a post, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California, called the violence “disgusting, vile and reprehensible.”Close ally: Mr. Kirk, 31, has emerged in recent years one of the most influential young right-wing figures in the country and established himself as a close ally of the president. Mr. Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012 and has since become a fixture on college campuses, where he hosts rallies like the one in Utah, often drawing large crowds. Read more ›White House influence: Even though he is not part of the administration, Mr. Kirk’s influence in the White House is significant. Since the November election, he has helped vet prospective appointees, testing their loyalty to Mr. Trump.Campus is closed: At least 1,000 people were attending the event at Utah Valley University when Kirk was shot, according to Mr. Trotter, a university spokesman. He said theSept. 10, 2025, 4:29 p.m. ETSpeaker Mike Johnson, entering the House chamber for a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk, called his shooting “detestable.”“Political violence has become all too common in American society, and this is not who we are,” Johnson said, adding: “We need every political figure, we need everyone who has a platform to say this loudly and clearly. We can settle disagreements and disputes in a civil manner, and political violence must be called out, and it has to stop.”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:19 p.m. ETA witness described a chaotic scene at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday when the right-wing activist Charley Kirk was shot.Credit...Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune, via REUTERS, via, via ReutersAndrew Piskadlo was standing in the middle of a campus amphitheater on Wednesday, waiting to debate Charlie Kirk about the Eighth Amendment, when a single shot rang out.“It was surprising, and no one really got down until the people in front of the stage did,” Mr. Piskadlo, 28, of Salt Lake City, said in a phone interview. “People got down in waves.”He had been in line at a campus event at Utah Valley University, waiting to speak to and debate Mr. Kirk, as students typically do in the so-called “Prove Me Wrong” debates that Mr. Kirk, a right-wing activist, hosts.Mr. Piskadlo, who estimated that he was about 80 feet away, recalled that Mr. Kirk had been responding to a question about transgender mass shooting suspects at some point before he was shot.When the shot rang out, he said he dropped first but did not run. He said he did not see Mr. Kirk get shot. He estimated that the shooting occurred just minutes after the program began, shortly after noon local time.Mr. Piskadlo, said he was active in Utah politics, said the setup of the amphitheater struck him as unsafe before the event. Despite a heavy security presence, he noticed “there were a lot of ledges, points where this could happen,” he said. “This seemed really preventable. I’m kind of angry at the organizers.”When the shot rang out, he said he saw people starting to get down and take cover.The crack of the shot “wasn’t nearly as pronounced,” he said, which may explain why not everyone in the crowd dropped immediately.“I’m just hoping Charlie is OK,” Mr. Piskadlo said.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:10 p.m. ETKamala Harris, the former vice president, said on social media she was “deeply disturbed” by the shooting of Kirk, adding, “I condemn this act, and we all must work together to ensure this does not lead to more violence.”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:05 p.m. ETThe conservative commentator Glenn Beck told Megyn Kelly on her live YouTube show that his daughter was at the event where Kirk was shot. She confirmed on Instagram that she was “about 10 feet away and saw everything.”Sept. 10, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk, right, speaking with Lara Trump during the Turning Point Action conference at Huntington Place in Detroit last year.Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York TimesTurning Point USA, founded by Charlie Kirk when he was 18, is a sprawling right-wing political organization with more than 850 campus chapters. The group sends conservative speakers to college campuses and hosts conferences that convene thousands of young people for right-wing discussions of political issues like economics, race and immigration.Turning Point claimed a significant role in getting young people to vote for President Trump, who made inroads particularly with Gen Z men in the 2024 election. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. referred to Mr. Kirk as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.”Turning Point USA also hosts a number of popular podcasts, including “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which has a focus on right-wing politics, and “Culture Apothecary,” which is led by Alex Clark and focuses on conservative views about wellness, lifestyle and the Make America Healthy Again movement.This month, Mr. Kirk, now 31, kicked off the American Comeback Tour, in which he was set to visit campuses across the country — including Colorado State, the University of Minnesota and Montana State — to talk about conservative politics.In June, Turning Point USA organized the largest gathering of young conservative women in the country, where speakers, including Mr. Kirk and his wife, Erika, urged the 3,000 young women to put marriage before careers.This December, the group is set to hold AmericaFest, which draws high-profile right-wing speakers like Greg Gutfeld, Glenn Beck and Jack Posobiec.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ETThe police have determined that a person who was taken into custody after the shooting was not actually the shooter, according to Scott Trotter, a university spokesman. The university had earlier said a suspect was in custody.Sept. 10, 2025, 4:01 p.m. ETRex SakamotoVideo posted on social media shows the moment Charlie Kirk was shot and the seconds leading to the incident. Kirk was being asked questions about mass shootings in America.“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?” a person asks. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk responds right before he is shot.Videotranscriptbars0:00/0:07-0:00transcriptDo you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years? Counting or not counting gang violence —Sept. 10, 2025, 3:53 p.m. ETYoung people who attended recent Turning Point events expressed alarm about Wednesday’s shooting of Charlie Kirk in Utah. “It’s absolutely sickening,” said Ella Guidry, 22, who has gone to several Turning Point conferences, including a summit for young conservative women in June.Credit...Tess Crowley/The Deseret News, via Associated PressSept. 10, 2025, 3:50 p.m. ETKirk’s event at Utah Valley University was the first appearance of a 15-stop itinerary on what was called the American Comeback Tour. In recent years, Kirk, 31, has made college campus stops a centerpiece of his messaging, encouraging students and the general public to ask him questions directly in debate-style format confrontations. Videos of those question-and-answer sessions have become popular on YouTube, with some amassing millions of views.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:41 p.m. ETUtah Valley University said on social media that it has closed its campus and canceled classes until further notice. The university urged those on campus to “secure in place until police officers can escort you safely off campus.”Sept. 10, 2025, 3:41 p.m. ETCharlie Kirk was scheduled to debate a progressive influencer, Hasan Piker, at Dartmouth College on Sept. 25. On his Twitch live stream, Piker reacted to the news with horror, urging some of his followers to stop making jokes about the shooting, and he expressed fear that he could be similarly targeted.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:31 p.m. ETIn a social media post, Vice President JD Vance called on Americans to “say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father.” Vance regularly texts with Kirk.In a second post, Vance included a photograph that showed him with Kirk and Donald Trump Jr.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:24 p.m. ETGabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who nearly died in a 2011 assassination attempt, said she was “horrified” to hear that Kirk had been shot. “Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence,” she said on social media.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ETFrom the magazineCharlie Kirk at his podcast studio.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times(The New York Times Magazine published a profile of Charlie Kirk in February 2025.)About an hour before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, Charlie Kirk was sitting in the Capitol Rotunda when he glanced down at his iPhone. What the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality saw caused him to swallow laughter. A reporter for The Daily Beast had posted on X: “‘Charlie Kirk has better seats than every member of Congress. Tells you how little Trump thinks of Congress,’ one GOP lawmaker tells me.” Twenty minutes later, Kirk saw that a Republican senator from Indiana, Jim Banks, had posted a rebuttal of sorts: “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.”Kirk found himself wondering how everyone would have reacted had he taken the much-closer seat he was originally offered. Instead, because the event had been moved inside, he and his wife were seated a couple of dozen rows from the stage. Kirk lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., but brought his wife and two young children with him to stay at the sleek Salamander hotel in Washington for 10 days in January as the Trump administration took power, just as he had uprooted his family three days after the election and installed them for a two-month stay in a condo in Palm Beach, Fla., near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.Like so many others in the MAGA ecosystem, Kirk is acutely attuned to wherever the Trump-related action is. The difference is that Kirk always seems to find his way to the center of the action whenever he shows up to it. During Trump’s first presidency, Kirk told me, he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times. And within days of Trump’s victory in November, Kirk had become one of an intimate group of advisers vetting prospective White House appointees to determine whether they had shown unflagging loyalty to Trump. On more than one occasion, according to two sources with knowledge of the events, Kirk was in the room with the president-elect to discuss potential cabinet nominees.Kirk’s proximity to Trump is especially notable when you consider that he has never held office, worked in the White House or held a campaign staff position. He draws his value elsewhere. Kirk is the head of Turning Point USA, the nation’s pre-eminent conservative youth organization, which he started when he was 18. It has chapters at more than 850 colleges that register students to vote, bring conservative speakers to campus and organize a nationwide network of right-wing student-government leaders. Turning Point’s half-dozen or so annual events, featuring the biggest names on the right from Trump on down, are slick productions that draw enormous crowds.But perhaps most important is that Kirk’s dominant voice, via his podcast and his ubiquity on social media, has earned him credibility among conservatives as a die-hard Trump devotee. He has become a close friend of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Kirk traveled to Greenland on Jan. 7 — wearing a “Charlie”-embroidered flight jacket for the occasion — to publicize Trump’s proclaimed intent to acquire the Arctic territory. And Kirk was an early champion of JD Vance as Trump was deciding whether the senator would be his running mate.Kirk was among a select group at Trump’s private party two days before the inauguration at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The night before Trump was sworn in, Turning Point hosted a black-tie gala at which some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some V.I.P.s paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.” The following evening, an S.U.V. ferried Kirk from one inaugural ball to the next. Two days later, he was visiting the 47th president in the White House — and again the day after that.During the Trump years, Kirk’s two nonprofit entities, Turning Point USA and the political-action organization Turning Point Action, have grown from a total revenue of $4.3 million in 2016 to $92.4 million in 2023, a vast majority of it from donations. Through his podcast, his many speaking appearances and the books he has written, such as the 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine,” Kirk has become a millionaire.Trump, in turn, has come to view Kirk as one of his closest allies. Kirk visited Mar-a-Lago in early February 2021, during the ex-president’s nadir, and was photographed smiling alongside him. Four years later, at the president-elect’s golf-club party, Trump singled out Kirk for praise. “Charlie Kirk, what he’s done with the young people,” he said in a video I obtained. He went on to boast about his campaign’s sharp uptick among such voters. “Actually, other than Hispanic, that was probably our biggest swing. So, Charlie, I appreciate what you did.”Sept. 10, 2025, 3:20 p.m. ETA spokeswoman for Utah Valley University, Ellen Treanor, said that Kirk was struck by a suspect who had fired from the Losee Center, a building about 200 yards away.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:15 p.m. ETGov. Gavin Newsom of California called on Americans to reject political violence, describing the attack on Charlie Kirk as “disgusting, vile and reprehensible.” No officials have yet assigned a motive to the attack.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:15 p.m. ETAt least three videos posted on social media on Wednesday show the right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk being struck by apparent gunfire while giving a speech at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. In all of the videos, a pop can be heard before Kirk, who was seated on a chair under a small tent, recoils from being struck. In two graphic videos filmed from nearby, blood is seen coming from Kirk’s neck as he falls to his left.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:09 p.m. ETSenator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called the apparent shooting of Charlie Kirk a “sick and despicable attack” in a post on social media. Graham and several other Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama, said that they are praying for Kirk.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:08 p.m. ETPresident Trump just posted on social media in support of Charlie Kirk, a close ally and high-profile supporter of the president.“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot,” he wrote on Truth Social. “A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!”Sept. 10, 2025, 3:06 p.m. ETDeputy Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on social media that he is praying for “my friend Charlie Kirk,” adding that the Justice Department “is actively investigating this senseless act of violence.”Sept. 10, 2025, 3:06 p.m. ETGov. Spencer Cox of Utah said on social media that he is being briefed by law enforcement “following the violence directed at Charlie Kirk during his visit to Utah today.”“Those responsible will be held fully accountable,” Cox said.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:05 p.m. ETAttorney General Pam Bondi has dispatched agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the scene of the shooting.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:03 p.m. ETA spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in Utah said the office is aware of the reported shooting and agents are responding to the scene.Sept. 10, 2025, 3:02 p.m. ETF.B.I. Director Kash Patel said on social media that the bureau is “closely monitoring reports of the tragic shooting involving Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Our thoughts are with Charlie, his loved ones, and everyone affected. Agents will be on the scene quickly and the FBI stands in full support of the ongoing response and investigation.”