Student reads poem on Kirk anniversary at UTSA Turning Point event

By The Conservative Desk (/journals/conservative-desk)

The student stepped to the microphone at the University of Texas at San Antonio holding a phone and a pink Starbucks drink. She gave her name as Pamper Baby. It was a Turning Point USA Pick Up the Mic event, the open-dialogue format meant to keep Charlie Kirk’s campus work alive after his murder. Christian Collins, president and founder of the Texas Youth Summit, was taking questions under the tent.

She did not have a question. “So I took a Plan B, and I’m an immigrant, this, like feeling kind of guilty. So I wanted to read a poem that I actually wrote,” she said. Collins asked whether she had a question. “No, I just wanted to share,” she answered. “I felt like, you know, freedom of speech. I wanted to share a poem I wrote for everybody.”

Then came the verse, a parody of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” “It was the night before the Kirkiversary, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The flags were hung proudly. The memes all on deck, as we solemnly remembered a shot to the neck. The podcast fell silent. The hot takes grew wary. For tomorrow, dear friends, is the great Kirkiversary.”

She kept going. She invited the room to an event she called Squirt for Kirk, set for October 10th. “We’re hosting that also on October 10th. I’ll see y’all there to BYOE. You know, vaccines included, s***’s free. See y’all there. That’s all.” Collins asked whether she was happy with herself. “Baby, I’m thrilled,” she said. She told him he was brave to be out there with no protection, no neck brace. He answered, “I’ll pray for you.”

Collins posted the video on X on October 27, 2026. “At @UTSA for Pick Up the Mic, a student read a poem celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk with such glee, then told me I was brave to be out here without my neck covered. I told her I’d pray for her. This is the climate. We pick up the mic anyway.” The student’s full identity has not been confirmed by the cited reports.

Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in the neck on September 10, 2025, while speaking outdoors at Utah Valley University. Two days later, authorities charged Tyler Robinson, 22. Reports state Robinson was motivated by viewing Kirk’s conservative views as “hateful” and was in a relationship with a male roommate described as transitioning. Kirk had built Turning Point USA into a national campus network. He was a husband and father. The bullet that killed him struck the same place the student at UTSA chose to joke about.

The free-speech claim the student herself advanced is real and deserves a plain answer. She said she wanted to share a poem under the banner of freedom of speech. The Constitution protects even ugly political speech, including speech that mocks the dead. Collins let her finish, asked one question, and said he would pray. That is how ordered liberty works on a public campus: the speaker keeps the microphone open, the audience hears the words, and the audience decides what those words reveal.

What the words revealed is not a policy disagreement. They celebrated a political assassination as an anniversary party, complete with memes and a mock invitation. They treated a shot to the neck as punchline material while the man standing was told he was brave for appearing without a brace. Actor Dean Cain watched the clip and said, “She’s sick in the head.” Meghan McCain condemned the student. Other commenters defended the exercise as free speech or attacked McCain. The record carries both reactions. It does not carry any statement from the University of Texas at San Antonio administration, any named Democrat officeholder, or any confirmation of the student’s legal name.

The conservative case rests on the facts the video already supplies. A political murder occurred on a campus. The suspect was charged. a student used an official Turning Point open-mic slot to turn the killing into light verse and to imply that the next speaker might need physical protection for his neck. That sequence is not abstract culture-war rhetoric. It is a concrete record of how some students now treat political violence: as content, as a holiday, as a dare. Public safety and the rule of law require that citizens treat assassination as a crime to be prosecuted, not a punchline to be workshopped. Limited government and free enterprise both depend on the ordinary expectation that people can speak, organize, and disagree without being shot or being told the shooting was festive.

Collins’s response was the opposite of the poem’s tone. He did not escalate. He asked whether she was pleased with what she had done, received the answer “Baby, I’m thrilled,” and said he would pray. The Texas Youth Summit founder kept the event moving. The Pick Up the Mic format itself is an attempt to continue Kirk’s method: show up, take the hostile question, answer it, and leave the room with the argument rather than the threat. The student used that format to advertise glee at a murder and to note the absence of a neck brace on the man listening to her.

Kirk’s killing already forced a national argument about whether years of labeling mainstream conservative speech as hate lowers the barrier to violence. The UTSA clip does not settle that argument by itself. It does show, in real time, a student who felt comfortable enough to recite the “Kirkiversary” lines, promote a mock event. The ordinary American watching the video does not need a seminar to understand the difference between protected speech and a healthy civic culture. One is a legal floor. The other is the habit of treating political opponents as human beings whose murder is not entertainment.

Collins posted the exchange and kept the invitation open. The next decision belongs to the campus that hosted the microphone, the students who will decide whether to fill the next seats, and the prosecutors still responsible for the case that began when a young man put a bullet through Charlie Kirk’s neck.