A conservative activist was shot dead at a Utah university last year, and the establishment press would rather you focus on whether a TV host felt "uncomfortable." That's the only conclusion to draw from coverage of Pat McAfee's comments about his College GameDay visit to the University of Utah, where he dared to reference the assassination of Charlie Kirk — and watched the media scramble to bury the killing beneath headlines about his hurt feelings.
McAfee said on his Monday show that the University of Utah's official Instagram account posted a video of students mocking him — calling him "corny" and "creepy" — right before he went on air to promote the school. He said it made him feel "very, very uncomfortable," and then he said the quiet part out loud: "Has anything like really scary happened at like a college gathering in the state of Utah recently?" He was referring to the September 2025 fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City.
The Staten Island Advance framed its entire story around McAfee being "uncomfortable" and his gripes about the Instagram post. The Salt Lake Tribune did the same, burying the Kirk reference mid-story under a headline about McAfee "blasting" the university. Only Fox News used the word "killing" in its lede and noted that Kirk's family has alleged in a legal filing that UVU knew of a rooftop security risk before the assassination. Fox also reported that 30 percent of college students say violence is an acceptable way to stop speakers on campus.
That survey number is the story. Kirk wasn't killed in a vacuum. He was killed in an environment where a third of college students have been told that silencing conservative speech by force is acceptable. When a university's official social media account amplifies hostility toward a public figure days before he walks in front of thousands of its students, it is not a "lighthearted" bit — which is how the University of Utah characterized its now-deleted post in a subsequent apology.
"We sincerely apologize for creating any perception that Pat was unsafe or unwelcome on our campus. Nothing could be further from the truth," the university said, according to Fox News. But the perception wasn't created by a perception. It was created by a pattern. A conservative was assassinated at a university 40 miles away, and the institutional response is to post videos stoking derision of a visiting broadcaster.
McAfee said he hopes to never return to Utah. "I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there," he said, per the Tribune. He's not a conservative activist. He's a former NFL punter with a daytime talk show. And even he could see that something is broken.
The question is why the press can't. Kirk is dead. A university amplified contempt for a public figure on its official channels in the same state. And the story the institutions want you to read is about whether Pat McAfee had a bad morning.
