Days before he was shot and killed in Utah, Kirk traveled to East Asia to share his views with like-minded and conservative groups.
In an interview with CNN at an event hosted by the right-wing Sanseito party in Tokyo, Kirk said he sees similarities between the political movements in Japan and the United States.
“I’m really excited to see that there’s a growing political movement here in Japan that’s fighting for the same things we believe in,” he said.
Kirk said he’s learned through his recent travels that Japan is facing mass immigration issues “similar to the dynamics” seen in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
When asked how he would respond to critics who call his ideas xenophobic, Kirk said:
“I laugh, but I mean, everything is rooted in love: love of country, love of people, and even my biggest critics would agree that if you put 30 million foreigners in Japan, Japan would no longer be Japan. That’s not xenophobia, that’s common sense.”
Time is running out for the investigation
More than 12 hours after Kirk was fatally shot at Utah Valley University, his killer remains at large.
“Time just means he can get further away,” Kenneth Gray, a distinguished professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven, told CNN, noting the potential complications facing authorities in their search for a suspect in the conservative activist’s death.
Gray also said that the initial announcement of the arrest of two suspects who were later released “sends the wrong message to the public.”
Investigators will try to determine if anyone saw the suspect enter the building from which the victim is believed to have been shot or if anyone at the event captured the suspect on video.
The FBI, which is working with local and state law enforcement in Utah, is asking anyone with “information, photos and video” about the killing to share the files via an online form, the agency said in a statement to X.
Eyewitness speaks out about reduced security
Skyler Baird, one of the thousands of people who attended the event, described the moment Kirk was shot.
“I was only about 15 feet away from him and I heard a noise and I thought, ‘That was a gunshot,’” he told KUTV. “I knew almost immediately that he wasn’t going to make it.”
“He was well protected from someone running around with a knife or someone trying to hit him personally, but the security in the general area was like a normal day at the university.”
Calling the incident a tragedy, Baird said Kirk was at the university to “talk to both sides.”
Kirk’s controversial comments
Kirk has made controversial statements on a number of issues in the past.
Charlie Kirk has made a number of statements in the past about race relations in the United States. Kirk called civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. “terrible” and a “bad guy” while condemning the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, color, sex, and national origin, as well as segregation.
“I’m sorry. If I see a black pilot, I’m going to think, ‘I hope he’s competent.'”
“I have a very, very radical view of it, but I can defend it and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he said. Al Jazeera reported.
In 2024, Kirk said in a podcast: “I’m sorry. If I see a black pilot, I’m going to think, ‘I hope he’s qualified.’”
Kirk has strongly opposed the establishment of June 19 as a federal holiday. He said the move to honor the date that ended slavery was motivated by “anti-American” sentiments that promoted “a neo-segregationist view” that he claimed sought to replace Independence Day.
Kirk was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – the right to bear arms – despite the regular mass shootings with guns in the country.
In 2023, he said, “It’s worth having, unfortunately, some gun deaths every year so we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That’s a sensible compromise. It makes sense.”
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the right-wing activist posted about the “China virus” — a phrase later adopted by President Trump during his first term.
In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Kirk also allegedly compared the demands for pandemic vaccination to apartheid.
Kirk once discussed how former U.S. President Bill Clinton used “empathy and sympathy” as a political strategy. “Actually, I can’t stand the word empathy. I think empathy is a new-age coined term that is doing a lot of damage.”
What is known about the murder?
Only one person is believed to have been involved in the killing, according to Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who called Kirk’s killing a “political assassination.”
President Donald Trump called Kirk’s death a “dark moment for America” and blamed the rhetoric of the “radical left” for fueling political violence.
