Charlie Kirk, who rose from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster, culture warrior and ally of US President Donald Trump, was shot and killed on Wednesday during one of his trademark public appearances at a college in Utah. He was 31.

Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force – rallying the right on a college campus, this time Utah Valley University.

His shooting is one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, from the assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota to last summer’s shooting of Trump, that have roiled the nation.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on his social media site, Truth Social. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote.

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