Howard Stern on Charlie Kirk: ‘I Disagreed With Him on Everything, But They Murdered the Argument’

This is Howard Stern, and I’ve got to be honest, I’m completely messed up over this Charlie Kirk thing. And not for the reasons you might think. Let’s get it out of the way right now: I couldn’t stand the guy’s politics. We disagreed on just about every single issue, from top to bottom. If you’re a regular listener to my show, you know that. But he’s dead. He was murdered at 31 years old, assassinated by a coward on a rooftop while he was on a stage, talking. And that’s a whole different thing. That’s a line that, once crossed, you can’t un-cross. And it’s got me thinking about what the hell is happening to all of us.

You know, the thought that keeps running through my head, the thing that’s really haunting me, is that I was probably going to have him on the show eventually. It was inevitable. And we would have screamed at each other. He would have called me a liberal lunatic, and I would have called him a right-wing nutjob. It would have been a hell of a fight. It would have been great radio. You would have listened, whether you loved it or hated it. But at the end of it, after all the yelling, we both would have gone home. That’s the whole damn point of this country. That’s the whole point of free speech.

But we can’t have that conversation now. That chance is gone forever. A 22-year-old kid with a mail-order rifle and a head full of poison decided he was judge, jury, and executioner. He didn’t just murder a man; he murdered the argument. He ended the conversation with a bullet. And that, to me, is the saddest part of this whole damn thing. It’s the ultimate form of censorship, and it’s a loss for every single one of us, whether you were a fan of Charlie Kirk or you couldn’t stand him.

I’ve been watching the details of this come out, and it just gets more pathetic and more heartbreaking. The killer wasn’t some mastermind; he was just a kid. A kid whose own father saw his picture on the news and had to make the most horrifying phone call of his life. Can you imagine? Having to turn in your own son for being an assassin? This whole tragedy has obliterated two families. The Kirk family, obviously, a young wife and two babies who have to face a future without their father. But also the killer’s family, who have to live with this shame and horror for the rest of their lives. It’s a national disgrace.

And for what? Because we’ve allowed our political discourse to become a non-stop, 24/7 rage machine. We have politicians and media figures on both sides who get rich and powerful by telling us that the other side isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. They’re not our opponents; they’re our enemies. They’re not human. And when you drill that into people’s heads day after day, year after year, eventually, some sick, lonely kid in his basement starts to believe it. He starts to think that he’s not a murderer; he’s a soldier. He’s a hero, taking out the enemy.

That’s the sickness. And this kid, Tyler Robinson, is just the symptom. He climbed a roof and lay in wait for hours, a coward’s plot from start to finish. Down below, Charlie Kirk was in the open, vulnerable, armed with nothing but a microphone. That’s the image that should haunt all of us. The man talking, and the man aiming the rifle.

But forget all of that for a minute. Forget the politics, forget the First Amendment, forget the state of the country. Let’s just talk about the human part of this. Charlie Kirk was 31. He had a wife and two kids, a one-year-old and a three-year-old. And that’s where this whole thing just guts me. As a father, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that kind of loss. Those kids have been robbed. They’ve been robbed of a lifetime of memories, of a father’s guidance, of his love. And for what? So some lunatic could feel powerful for a few seconds? It’s a level of tragedy that makes all the political arguments seem so small and so stupid.

So yeah, I disagreed with Charlie Kirk. But I’ll tell you what I disagree with more: murder. Assassination. The idea that we’re so far gone in this country that we can’t even let the other side speak anymore without someone trying to kill them. This isn’t about left versus right. It’s about sanity versus madness. We all have a choice to make. We can keep feeding the rage machine, or we can turn it off. We can keep seeing our neighbors as monsters, or we can remember that they’re human beings. If we don’t wake up and make that choice right now, this tragedy won’t be the last.