MAGA Pundit Charlie Kirk Shot During Speaking Event at a University

Charlie Kirk, conservative activist and founder of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was reportedly shot Wednesday at an event in Utah.

Witnesses at Utah Valley University in Orem reported seeing Kirk get shot in the neck during a Q&A with students. Kirk was scheduled to appear at a “Prove Me Wrong Table” at the university as part of his American Comeback Tour.

Kirk has built a career off of traveling to college campuses to engage students in debates about different controversial political topics, including advocating against gun control.

Kirk is reportedly in critical condition, according to America First Post, a conservative news outlet.

Despite a previous report that police had arrested a suspect, “the suspect is not in custody,” UVU spokesperson Scott Trotter said in a statement. “Police are still investigating. Campus is closed for the rest of the day.”

A livestream of the event captured the incident from a distance, showing a large crowd of people outside on campus, running and screaming.

President Donald Trump quickly issued a statement praying for Kirk’s swift recovery. “A great guy top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM,” the president wrote on Truth Social. Turning Point USA previously mobilized behind Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.

JD Vance also issued a statement about the reported shooting. “Say a prayer for Charlie Kirk, a genuinely good guy and a young father,” he wrote on X.

And, weirdly enough, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted that he was “praying for” Kirk.

FBI Director Kash Patel published a statement that he was “closely monitoring reports” of the incident. “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,” Patel wrote on X.

Democratic activist David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting and target of Kirk’s ire, also commented on the “horrifying news” that Kirk had been the victim of gun violence.

“Gun violence and political violence have to fucking stop,” Hogg wrote on X. “Charlie, his family, and all the students who had to witness the shooting are in my thoughts. We have disagreements, but we all agree something has to change.”

Earlier this year, Kirk mocked Hogg, saying that he was indistinguishable from a “survivor from a concentration camp.”

In 2023, Kirk said it was “worth” the cost of “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

This story has been updated.

On Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan, as he is wont to do, threatened a local elected Democrat on Fox News.

This time, Homan targeted Boston’s Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, who has earned national prominence—and the ire of Homan and the White House—for spiritedly defending her city from incursions by the Trump administration.

Asked about Wu’s staggering primary victory as she seeks reelection in November, Homan said, “I don’t care who the mayor is.… They’re not going to stop us. They can stay on the side and watch us do their job. However, they better not step over the line. They better not impede our efforts. Or there’s going to be consequences.

“We’re coming,” Homan continued. “We’re going to be there tomorrow. We’re going to be there the next day. We’re going to be there next month. We’re going to be there next year. You’re not stopping [us] from what we’re doing.”

Last week, Trump’s Justice Department sued Boston and Wu over the Boston Trust Act, which limits local authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies. The DOJ argues that the law illegally obstructs the federal government—though Boston University law professor Sarah Sherman-Stokes told the Associated Press it is well within the city’s “constitutional right to limit their involvement in enforcing immigration law.”

Wu, for her part, condemned the lawsuit as an “unconstitutional attack” by a presidential administration “intent on attacking our community to advance their own authoritarian agenda.”

“This is our city,” the mayor said, “and we will vigorously defend our laws and the constitutional rights of cities, which have been repeatedly upheld in courts across the country. We will not yield.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s new memoir sheds light on her abbreviated presidential campaign, skewering Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the race as “recklessness” in the process. 

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote, in an excerpt from 107 Days, her first-person account of her sprint to Election Day, published in The Atlantic on Wednesday. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

Harris comes off as more bitter and negative toward the Biden administration than ever before here, and with good reason. Biden maintained his candidacy for 2024 despite accruing years’ worth of mental slip-ups and gaffes, culminating in an absolutely disastrous debate performance that made it clear he was in no state–mental or physical—to run for a second presidential term. 

Even after that, it took nearly a month for him to officially step down. Harris wrote, rather transparently, that she stopped short of advising the president to step down because she felt it would make her look bad, and too self-serving.  

The former vice president also described feeling forced to constantly prove her loyalty to the Biden administration, particularly after she essentially called him a segregationist onstage at the Democratic primary debate in 2019. She also felt pigeonholed by the busywork and events she was tasked with, and abandoned in the face of her enemies when she took center stage as the candidate. 

“In Selma, Alabama … I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.… I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the cease-fire agreement then on the table,” Harris wrote. “It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.” 

She continued, writing, “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”

A constant theme in these pages is how Harris’s unwavering loyalty to Biden was constantly unrecognized and unrewarded, making her decision to stay so loyal (up until now, really) all the more questionable.  

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé,” Harris wrote. “Two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …  getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”  

On one hand, Harris has a right to feel slighted, and set up for failure. It sounds like senior members of the Biden administration had issues acknowledging her strengths and working with her, at the very minimum. 

On the other hand, it feels quite futile to hear Harris, who had multiple opportunities to differentiate herself from her predecessor, parrot the same talking points about Biden’s health that progressives were criticized for, well after the fact. Even if hindsight is 20/20, it might not do Harris any good in 2028. 

Her new memoir, 107 Days, comes out September 23. 

A special election in Virginia has put the House one step closer to releasing the Epstein files.

James Walkinshaw’s win in Virginia’s 11th congressional district on Tuesday night has given Democrats another vote in the lower chamber, shrinking a razor-thin Republican majority that has so far obstructed attempts to bring transparency to records related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Virginian’s blowout victory will push the party breakdown to 219 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the House, a margin so tight that House Republicans will only be able to lose two votes on any legislation they hope to pass through the chamber. But three other vacancies—in Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee—threaten to further erode a conservative grip on the House.

Two of those special elections are almost certain to be Democratic victories. They include the races to fill seats left by Texas Democratic Representative Sylvester Turner, who passed away March 5, and Texas Democratic Representative Raul Grijalva, who died just days later, on March 13. Walkinshaw, who will replace Gerry Connolly, was the first Democrat to win a special election since Donald Trump returned to office in January.

So far, House Speaker Mike Johnson has blocked bipartisan attempts to make the Epstein files public. But if supporters of the movement can muster 218 votes in the House, they can circumvent Johnson altogether, sending the motion to the Senate.

Some notable House Republicans have already joined hands with dozens of their Democratic counterparts in a bipartisan effort to make the Epstein case files publicly available.

Introduced by Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who has a habit of actually standing up to Trump, the bill aims to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices” relating to Epstein and his longtime girlfriend and sex-trafficking associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The text of the bill specifies the release of flight logs, travel records, the names of individuals and government officials connected to Epstein’s “criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings,” the names of corporations or organizations tied to Epstein’s trafficking networks, potential immunity deals or sealed settlements, as well as “internal DOJ communications.”

Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Elijah Crane, Tim Burchett, Nancy Mace, and many others have already signed their support for the bill.

Falling short of condemnation, President Donald Trump is acting completely clueless about the more than a dozen Russian drones that entered Polish airspace.

Writing on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump didn’t attempt to conceal his confusion. 

“What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” he wrote.

But Trump is going to need to come up with a better response to Russia’s latest incursion than, “Huh?” Poland has invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, meaning that the alliance—including the United States—must consult about the latest security threat.  

For the first time in NATO’s history, alliance fighter jets engaged enemy targets in allied airspace, as forces scrambled to shoot down the foreign drones, according to The New York Times. The drones were part of a larger-scale attack across the border in Ukraine.

Trump refused to answer a question about what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called a “large-scale provocation” Tuesday night, after a disastrous foray to a restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. 

The president has previously used social media to create the impression that he is criticizing world leaders that he privately cozies up to, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Trump’s latest statement falls short of public condemnation, portraying ignorance—and for once, it’s seemingly on purpose!

Russia’s latest move has reignited long-held concerns that Trump’s toothless approach to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has emboldened Moscow to expand its efforts to other neighboring states.