Guest Editorial by Darla M. Youngs

To Governor Cox, With Love

Just hours after conservative and spiritual activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down in front of thousands of students who had gathered at Utah Valley University for the start of his “American Comeback Tour,” Utah Governor Spencer Cox spoke at a press conference about the shooting. I was deeply moved.

Kirk was 31 years old at the time of his death, with a wife of less than five years and two small children. From all accounts, his wife and children were in attendance at the UVU event when he was shot in the neck and killed.

When the news of the shooting was released, I was driving to Chittenango to visit my mom, who is in rehab after suffering a stroke some weeks ago. Ironically, I was listening to a recording of Kirk debating college students from Washington State University when he was shot. I was devastated when I learned later that he had died.

I first became aware of Charlie Kirk following the infamous debate on June 27, 2024 between then-President Joe Biden and now-President Donald Trump, which was disgraceful, and difficult—if not almost impossible—to sit through. In the editorial the following week, titled “Damn, Nation,” this paper wrote:

“The Democratic Party has failed us. The Republican Party has failed us. The sitting president, by all appearances last Thursday, ‘has left the building.’ The former president is a convicted felon. These two grumpy old men actually wasted time on national television arguing about who was the better golfer. What is a voter to do? As Mr. Bennett said to Elizabeth in ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ when considering the undesirable marriage proposal from Mr. Collins, ‘an unhappy alternative is before you.’”

I am slightly embarrassed to say that only after that debate did I really begin to pay close attention to national politics. I made it a point from then on to listen to news reports and commentaries from both sides of the aisle, trying to reconcile the often disparate accounts of various events. It was then that I discovered Charlie Kirk and his debates with college students, during which he outlined both his political and religious views and invited young voters to “prove me wrong.”

I do not share all of Kirk’s beliefs. In fact, I firmly believe—and this paper has commented on this as well—that anyone who advocates entirely on one side of the aisle or the other is not truly thinking for themselves. In this paper’s editorial of May 22, 2025, “Is the Media Doing Our Thinking for Us?” this paper wrote:

“Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum—left, right or center—if you are getting all your news from one source, without doing some actual follow-up on your own, you might not be thinking for yourself. Don’t get us wrong. We’re all susceptible to being convinced, persuaded, influenced, ‘educated.’ But, from time to time, it behooves us to take a step back and consider whether we might be being misled, or misinformed.”

But I digress. For my part, listening to Kirk sparked in me an interest to learn more about our Constitution and our founding fathers. To listen to, consider, and educate myself on both sides of an argument and then to draw my own conclusions. To examine my relationship with God. To determine what “the good, the true and the beautiful,” Kirk’s mantra, means to me. And whether I agreed with him or not, I admired Kirk’s willingness to hold public, civil discourse with prominent figures whose beliefs did not necessarily align with his own—among them political commentator Bill Maher in April and California Governor Gavin Newsom in May—and to continue his public debates on college campuses across the nation despite numerous threats against his life.

On September 10, at the press conference that introduced me to Gov. Cox, details surrounding the shooting were unclear. What became clear very quickly, though, was that the governor is a man who bears listening to. In a statement that I still can’t get out of my mind, he said:

“This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation. I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination.

“We are celebrating 250 years of the founding of this great nation—that founding document, the Declaration of Independence, this great experiment on which we embarked together 250 years ago; that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights—the first one of those is life. And today, a life was taken.

“Charlie Kirk was, first and foremost, a husband and a dad to two young children. He was also very much politically involved, and that’s why he was here on campus. Charlie believed in the power of free speech and debate to shape ideas and to persuade people. Historically, our university campuses in this nation and here in the state of Utah have been the place where truth and ideas are formulated and debated. And that’s what he does—he comes on college campuses and he debates. That is foundational to the formation of our country, to our most basic constitutional rights. And when someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or their ideals, then that very constitutional foundation is threatened.

“Now, we have a person of interest in custody; the investigation is ongoing. But I want to make it crystal clear right now to whoever did this: We will find you, we will try you, and we will hold you accountable to the furthest extent of the law. And I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah.

“If anyone in the sound of my voice celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.

“I don’t care what his politics are. I care that he was an American. We desperately need our country. We desperately need leaders in our country. But more than the leaders, we just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be—to ask ourselves: ‘Is this…is this it? Is this what 250 years has wrought on us?’ I pray that that’s not the case. I pray that those who hated what Charlie Kirk stood for will put down their social media and their pens and pray for his family, and that all of us—all of us—will try to find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.”

According to an article published on September 11 by Jonathan Draeger for RealClear Polling, titled “Polls Show Rising Number of Americans Justify Political Violence,” in April of this year the Network Contagion Research Institute, along with Rutgers University, found that 55 percent of self-identified left-of-center respondents said that it was at least somewhat justified to murder President Trump.

“Forty-eight percent said the same of Elon Musk, and 40 percent of respondents, including 59.6 percent of left-of-center respondents, said it was at least somewhat acceptable to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest,” Draeger wrote.

A drastic increase from just five years earlier when, in a 2020 poll, 36 percent among Republican respondents and 33 percent among Democratic respondents said using violence to advance political goals was at least “a little” justified.

But in a poll conducted by YouGov taken after Kirk was murdered, it was reported that 11 percent said violence can sometimes be justified to achieve political goals, while 72 percent said violence is never justified. Evidently another 5 percent said they would prefer not to say whether they think violence is sometimes justifiable to achieve political goals.

So, yeah. I love Governor Cox for admonishing us to find our “better angels” on September 10. Too many people, both Democrats and Republicans, have been victimized in the name of politics. Kirk’s death is not the first, but I hope it will be the last.

Violence and destruction of property has not been limited to any one side of the political aisle, as discussed in this paper’s April 17 editorial, titled “There’s No Excuse for Violence.” In the aftermath of Kirk’s tragic death, I have hope that we, as citizens, can find a way to stop demonizing and dehumanizing each other—to clean up the angry, toxic, political rhetoric on both sides to which we are all being exposed daily.

If the recent poll is any indication, I think we may be moving in the right direction. I do think we can find our better angels. Don’t prove me wrong, please. Rest in peace, Charlie.

Darla M. Youngs is the general manager and senior editor of Iron String Press. She describes herself as a liberal conservative.