Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

As news alerts and graphic videos spread across social media on Wednesday afternoon, Yale students reckoned with the killing of the 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot while speaking at a university in Utah.

Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was known for inspiring young conservatives. For students, the shooting, which Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called a “political assassination,” prompted grief, fear and reflection on political violence in a divided country.

“The news has affected me very greatly on an emotional and spiritual level,” William Barbee ’26 wrote to the News. “As a leader within the conservative movement at Yale, I have felt a certain palpability to this event — it hits close to home. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of fear after hearing the news, that an event like this could have happened anywhere.”

Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University on Wednesday for the first stop of his “The American Comeback Tour.” After a gunman opened fire from a building 200 yards away, striking Kirk in the neck, he was taken to a hospital and later pronounced dead. The shooter had not been found or identified by Wednesday night and the motive is still unknown.

For some at Yale, Kirk’s killing felt both personal and deeply unsettling.

Diego Victoria ’27, a conservative who said he sees himself as on the “same side” as Kirk, told the News that he first learned about the shooting from a friend’s text, then watched a video of the assassination circulating on social media.

“It was just absolutely horrific,” Victoria said. “It’s horrific that he’d be killed over speaking, over exercising his free speech.”

Victoria said he fears that conservatives are increasingly targeted for their beliefs. He noted that there are people on the “very far left who would rather see conservatives dead than let us speak.” 

The gunman’s political views were unknown on Wednesday.

Manu Anpalagan ’26, president of Yale College Republicans and an admirer of Kirk’s civil debates, said the news of the assassination reached him in the middle of class — a friend’s all-caps text, then breaking-news banners, then the video itself.

“It’s one thing to hear about it, another completely different feeling to actually see it happen,” he said. “Political violence of any type against anyone, regardless of their beliefs, is just entirely wrong.”

The Yale College Republicans had been in touch with Kirk’s team about planning a campus visit later this semester, Anpalagan said.

Anpalagan said the reactions he has seen from classmates have ranged from “panic and fear” among fellow political student organizers to “smiling, laughing.”

Anpalagan and Christian Thomas ’26, the president of the Yale College Democrats, coauthored a News opinion piece condemning the assassination and all political violence.

“We have already overheard peers cracking jokes about Kirk’s death,” they wrote. “We want to be clear: no matter what you or we might think of Charlie Kirk’s politics, in no world should he have been assassinated for expressing his views.”

In April, Kirk cited the Yale Youth Poll — which tracks political attitudes among young Americans — to argue that college-age voters were swinging right. 

“The most dramatic generational political swing in history is unfolding before our eyes,” he wrote on X, pointing out that 18-to-21-year-olds leaned Republican in the poll even as their slightly older peers leaned Democratic.

President Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-mast until Sunday evening in honor of Kirk.

Jonas Loesel contributed reporting.