Charlie Kirk’s murder sparks calls for revenge

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She was warm, funny, every student's favourite teacher.

No one ever suspects a woman could do such a thing, especially one with kids.

The parents trusted her too.

I felt that the school was a safe place.

If anything was to happen, there would be somebody there.

But it was all a smokescreen.

She was brainwashing us from the start.

The favourite: a five-part investigation from background briefing.

Search background briefing on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast was produced on the lands of the Owabakal and Gadigal people.

Just a warning, this episode discusses the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

We don't go into graphic detail, but we do play audio from the scene.

Okay.

We're going to start at 11.49 a.m.

US Mountain Time on September the 10th, 2025, on 800 West Street, Orem, Utah.

A figure in black, who police allege is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, awkwardly walks towards Utah Valley University.

Speculation is the reason he's walking awkwardly is he has a rifle stuffed down one of his pant legs.

He's captured by a CCTV camera above someone's garage.

He makes his way through the university and onto the roof of one of the buildings.

At 12.04 p.m., Main Street Media Utah reporter Adam Bartholomew starts his live stream of the Charlie Kirk event in the university's quad.

Yeah, I'm streaming right now.

That's the camera?

That's the camera, yeah.

Thousands of people were gathering to watch Charlie Kirk's prove-me-wrong debate.

What's up, you guys?

You guys excited to see Charlie Kirk?

No, no.

What are you doing here?

Adam Bartholomew interviews some of the people present about why they're there.

My sign says, Free Palestine, love one another.

What's that referencing, the love one another?

The love one another is referencing the Bible.

It's referencing Jesus' teachings.

Everyone seems very nice and courteous.

I feel like there's been so much hate even here.

All of these people out there, I might disagree with most of them, but I still love them for who they are.

At 12.09, Charlie Kirk takes the stage, throwing MAGA hats into the crowd.

Then he starts taking questions and debating members of the audience.

At 12.23, Charlie is asked about his previous comment that transgender people should have their right to own a gun revoked.

Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

Too many.

Holy shit!

Holy shit!

There's been a shooting, we heard shots.

We heard shots.

Charlie Kirk is hit in the neck by a rifle shot at a range of 130 meters.

Seconds later, CCTV captures the black-clad figure running across a rooftop, dropping to the ground and running into the woods.

This all happened within 33 minutes.

But 49 minutes later, Fox News was already speculating about the motive of the shooter.

I don't think it was a coincidence that the shot rang out when you get a question about transgender mass shootings.

Over the next two hours, Fox News pundits and Republican politicians pile on.

I'm going to say this.

Democrats own what happened today.

I am devastated.

To be clear, there was no information available at all about the motivation of the shooter at this stage.

Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.

They murdered him because he was effective.

So they killed him.

The left killed him.

They were understandably shocked and horrified and saddened and frightened by the death of their friend.

And both sides were jumping to conclusions about the shooter's motives.

But on Fox News, thoughts quickly turned to vengeance.

We're going to avenge Charlie's death in the way Charlie would want it to be avenged.

You got riots in LA.

They are at war with us.

The conservative commentators and politicians quickly started to galvanize around one single idea.

These people.

They killed him.

They are coming to get us.

So is any of that true?

And can anything be done to stop America's endless cycle of escalation in political violence?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

On a freezing cold night in Indiana in 1968, Robert F.

Kennedy Sr.

climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck with a loudspeaker.

To protect him from the wind, he was wearing a coat that had once belonged to his big brother, President John F.

Kennedy.

I have some very sad news for all of you.

In front of him was a crowd of mostly black voters, eager to hear what the young presidential candidate had to say.

But Bobby Kennedy knew something the crowd did not.

And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Delphi.

Bobby Kennedy was an ally of Martin Luther King Jr.

in the campaign for civil rights.

His campaign staff and the local mayor in Indianapolis encouraged Kennedy to cancel this event.

Political violence was endemic across America at the time, and they feared that the wrong words could lead to a riot.

But Kennedy refused and on the back of that flatbed truck delivered a speech that he'd scrawled down on his way to the event.

Martin Luther King

dedicated his life

to love and to justice between fellow human beings.

He died

in the cause of that effort.

He acknowledged that he understood that this news could lead to more violence.

For those of you who are black,

considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible,

you can be filled with bitterness

and with hatred

and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country

and greater polarization.

Black people amongst blacks and white amongst whites,

filled with hatred.

toward one another.

Kennedy expressed a level of empathy that few politicians can manage.

For those of you who are

black

and are tempted to fill with be filled with hatred and mistrust

of the injustice of such an act

against all white people,

I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.

I had a member of my family killed,

but he was killed by a white man.

He quoted an ancient Greek poet.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus.

He once wrote,

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart

until in our own despair against our will

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

There was no violence in Indianapolis that night.

We have to make an effort in the United States.

We have to make an effort to understand,

to get beyond or go beyond these rather difficult times.

Keep all that in mind when we jump forward to the evening of the 13th of July, 2024.

Okay, everybody, I did not anticipate to be streaming or going live right now, but oh my goodness, we have never lived through a moment like this.

Charlie Kirk was going live on the internet just after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But Kirk wasn't planning to call for calm, nor was he quoting ancient Greek poetry.

The Democrat Party is a disgusting stain on this country.

And they have talked about calling Trump a dictator, calling Trump Hitler, hoping that he dies, hoping that he gets assassinated.

They have been hoping for this the entire time.

For Kirk, the Democratic Party was to blame for the shooting.

They tried to silence him, they tried to jail him, and now they've tried to kill him.

This is what they've wanted.

They have been wanting to create the preconditions for the assassination and the death of Donald Trump for quite some time.

There's that language again.

They are trying to get us.

And Charlie Kirk is saying it before he knew who the shooter was.

It was an enormously tense moment.

Kirk was right in saying that left-wing people had been calling Trump a dictator and Hitler and hoping for his death.

Of course, the entire Democratic Party wasn't calling for it, but it only takes one person with one gun to do something like this.

So, what about the actual motive of the shooter?

We published an episode about the assassination attempt in Butler a few days after it happened.

The thesis of that episode was that a history of government secrecy has primed Americans to reach for conspiracy theories when something shocking and inexplicable happens.

Since the publication of that episode, a lot of new information has come out about that shooting.

So let's run through what we now know about what happened that day.

Hello, my name is Thomas Crooks.

It has always been my passion to create and build things of my own.

Thomas Crooks was a nerdy and awkward guy who lived a fairly isolated life.

His parents said he had few friends, no girlfriends, and mostly kept to himself.

Today, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and my academic goals.

my passion for building things, my love of cooking with my family, and lastly, what I hope to achieve in this course.

His family was politically diverse.

His dad was a gun-loving Trump supporter and his mother was a Democrat.

Thomas once donated $15 to a left-wing organization in 2021, but then registered as a Republican when he turned 18 later that year.

But by and large, Thomas's own political activity didn't really align with partisan politics.

His opinions seemed to be pretty varied.

Here's what the FBI found when they dug into what they believed was his internet history.

In 2023, though, Thomas had written an essay in favour of ranked choice voting, like we have in Australia, saying it would promote kindness and cooperation instead of division and anger.

He, like his father, was an avid gun enthusiast.

His dad said that he thought Thomas's mental health had declined after he graduated from his engineering science degree with high honours in May 2024.

In fact, unbeknownst to his dad, Thomas had spent months secretly buying up chemicals to create homemade explosives and searching up information on both Republican and Democratic Party events.

On July 3rd, the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania was announced.

On July 6th, the shooter registered to attend the rally and performed a search for, quote, how far was Oswald from Kennedy.

It was 81 meters, by the way, though Kennedy was in a moving car.

On July 7th, the shooter traveled from his home to the Butler Farm Showgrounds and remained there for approximately 20 minutes.

We assessed this show's advanced planning and reconnaissance on his part.

During his visit, he looked specifically at a site within close range of where Trump would be speaking, the AGR International Building next to the showgrounds.

He visited the site again on the morning of Trump's event after purchasing a ladder.

Shortly thereafter, at approximately 3.51 p.m., the shooter flew a drone approximately 200 yards from the farm show grounds for about 11 minutes.

Over the following two hours, Thomas wandered around the site, repeatedly catching the eye of law enforcement, who notified each other of his presence and took pictures of him.

Approximately 25 minutes prior to the shooting, the U.S.

Secret Service command post was notified of a suspicious person.

Officers lost sight of the subject from approximately 6.02 p.m.

to 6.08 p.m., but continued to communicate with each other in an attempt to locate him.

In that six-minute window, Trump took to the stage and Thomas Crookes climbed up onto the roof of the AGR building, taking a position about 135 meters from the former president's lectern.

The The Secret Service team was stationed inside the building that he was on top of, and so they were unable to see him.

And at approximately 6.08 p.m., the subject was observed on the roof by local law enforcement.

At 6.09, a local police officer turns on his body camera and begins trying to see onto the roof.

Yeah, someone's on top of the roof.

Look.

Here he is right there.

Right there, you see him?

He's laying down.

You see him?

Yeah, he's laying down.

At approximately 6.11 p.m., a local police officer was lifted to the roof by another officer, saw the shooter, and radioed that he was armed with, quote, a long gun.

In fact, Thomas saw that officer climbing onto the roof and turned around to point his gun at him.

The officer dropped to the ground, injuring his ankle.

He hobbled around the side of the building to try and get a clear look at Thomas.

Within approximately the next 30 seconds, the shots were fired.

Eight bullets flew right over the officer's head, hitting Donald Trump in the ear and killing former firefighter Corey Comprator in the crowd.

16 seconds after the first round was fired, a Secret Service sniper fired one shot, killing Thomas instantly.

Hi, Mike.

Hi, yes.

My name's Matthew Crooks.

I was calling in regards to my son, Thomas.

He left the house here at about a quarter to two this afternoon, and we've gotten no contact from him, and he's not home yet.

That's totally not like him.

Unfortunately, this story is only notable because Thomas Crooks tried to kill a presidential candidate rather than a group of schoolchildren.

Thomas Crooks didn't leave a manifesto or a trail of social media posts, and there's still no evidence that he was radicalized by any organized political group.

But young, isolated, disaffected men with access to guns doing something terrible is a horrifyingly common occurrence in America.

Thomas Crookes was able to fire eight shots at Donald Trump out of a mixture of luck and incompetence by the Secret Service.

So there really isn't all that much of a mystery here.

And yet here's what Charlie Kirk said just a few minutes after the shooting.

They have been calling it for some time.

of they want Donald Trump dead, they want all this dead.

Look, we all get death threats.

I get death threats every single day.

One of these people made good on one of those death threats.

Tried to today.

For Charlie Kirk, this assassination attempt was the result of Democratic Party rhetoric.

For fellow podcaster Dan Bongino, there was a conspiracy effort.

You're telling me I'm supposed to accept just at face value that, yeah, the guy was just a lone gunman, 20-year-old kid with no digital footprint whatsoever, none.

By the way, Dan Bongino is the deputy director of the FBI these days.

You've got this enormously important case where President Trump was shot in the head, a guy was murdered, two others were shot.

And nobody can explain where the body went, why it was cremated?

By that stage, quite a few of those questions had already been answered.

His body was cremated 10 days after the shooting, as per request of the family.

What exactly were you expecting to find on the shooter's body, though?

A die Republican's die tattoo on his chest, like Sideshow Bob?

Meanwhile, Bongino's now boss, Cash Patel, told Charlie Kirk that you can't trust anything the FBI tells you anyway.

Cash, can we trust the FBI to investigate President Trump getting shot?

No, absolutely not.

Why?

Well, conservative commentator Julie Kelly thinks they were involved.

There is no doubt in my mind that Thomas Crooks was in communications with probably an FBI informant, undercover agent, or an asset from another department, including DHS.

Everyone was getting on board Dan Bongino's conspiracy train.

And Julie Kelly was convinced that this was an FBI operation gone wrong.

It has all the hallmarks of another setup.

Another setup.

Any political violence must be either the result of left-wing rhetoric or a deep state conspiracy.

And that's because, according to Fox News's Greg Gutfeld, if they can do this, they are capable of anything.

It's really hard to radicalize Republicans.

We're not the radical type.

I'm not really sure what to say to that, apart from to suggest that it might be worth remembering January 6th, 2021.

You know, that day that Trump supporters were beating police officers and roaming the halls of the U.S.

Capitol, hunting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

In 2022, the Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray said that the greatest security threat the Bureau faces is racially motivated violent extremism.

Of the racially motivated violent extremism, the biggest bucket is those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.

The fastest rising threat, though, was anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism.

Sometimes there's overlap, but it's different.

And so that includes everything from militia violent extremism all the way to anarchist violent extremism.

And when you look at the political violence that's unfolded in the last few years, that checks out.

It was an anti-government militia that plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan in 2020.

It was a white supremacist who massacred black people in Buffalo in 2022.

It was a QA non-believer who nearly killed Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer later that same year.

In June this year, it was a Trump-supporting anti-abortionist who killed the Speaker of the Minnesota State House and her husband and and planned to attack dozens more Democratic Party figures.

And in August, it was an anti-vaxxer who killed a police officer as he fired a volley of bullets at the front of the Centers for Disease Control.

And yet, according to President Trump.

From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House House Majority Leader Steve Scalese and three others.

Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.

Trump blamed inflammatory rhetoric for the attacks against conservatives.

Violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year.

in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

There is no doubt that there is violence by left-wing people against right-wing people.

It clearly goes both ways, and it seems to be ramping up.

What we're seeing is a disastrous clash between America's First and Second Amendments.

People have the right to say mean things about whoever they want, which doesn't bode well when people are also free to own as many guns as they want.

The left says the problem is the guns, and the right says the problem is the violent speech.

Currently, the right is in charge and they believe they have a solution.

The last message that Charlie sent me was, I think it was just the day before we lost him,

which was that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.

And

I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out.

This is senior White House advisor Stephen Miller.

He's talking on Charlie Kirk's podcast with guest host Vice President J.D.

Vance following Charlie's death.

People ask me what emotions I'm feeling right now, and this is something people say.

I mean, you kind of know the answer.

There's incredible sadness, but there's incredible anger.

And

the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion.

But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history.

Trolley showed that.

Amen.

And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

The language has shifted.

Stephen Miller is no longer just blaming them.

Now he is setting out a plan to go after them.

By calling them terrorists, he can unleash the full force of the administration.

We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

Until recently, most people understood that political violence in America tends not to be organized.

Almost every attack is committed by someone disaffected and isolated from society.

There is no evidence of an organized left-wing militia trying to take down the Trump administration.

So what are these so-called terrorist networks that they plan to destroy?

I'm not sure that they quite know that themselves, but J.D.

Vance is going to pull out all the stops to find them.

I promise you that we will explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don't like what they say.

I want to end in the same place we started on the back of a flatbed truck in 1968 with Bobby Kennedy.

What we need in the United States is not not division.

What we need in the United States is not hatred.

What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness,

but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Thank you very much.

We are sadly still waiting for that prayer to come true.

true.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Beffin.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Adair Shepherd.

So things are moving very quickly in a way that they didn't in the 1960s when Bobby Kennedy was on that truck.

We're going to have a look at what that's doing to our ability to process big news events on Tuesday.

And next Thursday, I think it'll be Venezuela for real this time, but that is also what we said last week.

So, to be honest, who knows?

I'll catch you then.