Welcome to the First Things podcast. On this episode, we'll discuss the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I'm joined by editor Rusty Reno. I'm senior editor Julia Yost. Thanks for joining us.

On Wednesday, September 10th, Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA,

certainly one of the most influential conservative figures in the country,

was shot and killed while addressing students at Utah Valley University. As we record this,

the assassin is unidentified and at large. This comes, of course, about a year after two attempts

were made on the life of Donald Trump.

Rusty, what is going on?

You wrote last night for First Things.com in a piece titled A Turning Point for America,

that these events are taking you back to April 1968.

Why is that?

Well, that was the month where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And my thoughts went back last summer when Trump was nearly killed. Assassinations are symptoms, typically, of social turmoil.

And the social turmoil of the 60s was the overturning of a longstanding

social consensus about the relation of black and white and the role of black Americans in society.

And that overturning of that consensus was a very bitter pill for many white Americans to swallow,

especially in the South. And it led to an atmosphere of, you know, anger and rancor and resentment

and so on. And in those kinds of atmospheres, you know, unhinged people or disturbed people or people prone to extremism will do, we'll do extreme things, including violent things.

And James Earl Ray was certainly a very disturbed man.

And we don't know who the perpetrator of this assassination is, but it would not be at all

surprising if that individual were in some way kind of involved in extreme activities or, you

know, could be diagnosed as suffering from mental health problems and so on and so forth.

So it's really the atmosphere

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