Perhaps more than anyone else, Charlie Kirk, the prominent Donald Trump ally and political organizer who was shot and killed Wednesday, brought hard-right politics to a generation of younger Americans, expanding the reach of Trump’s politics largely through raucous, theatrical in-person debates designed to go viral online.
It was at one such speaking event, at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where a shooter took Kirk’s life on Wednesday, as he went back and forth with an attendee about mass shooting statistics. Kirk is survived by his wife and two small children, a 3-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy.
Kirk, 31 when he was killed, was profoundly influential in right-wing politics in the United States, developing close friendships with several members of the Trump family, including the president himself, and bringing aggressive social conservatism to the masses, particularly young people. He was “deeply involved in vetting top positions for the administration since the election and was in constant communication with top advisers and the president himself,” ABC News reported after his death Wednesday; among other things, he successfully campaigned for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican Party last year.
Kirk’s well-funded group Turning Point USA, which he co-founded and is oriented toward students, has over 800 college campus chapters, according to its own figures. Its “professor watch list” was arguably a precursor to the Trump administration’s own efforts to target academia. And its sister political advocacy group, Turning Point Action, helped fuel Trump’s 2024 political operation.
Over the years and countless live events — all clipped and disseminated through a sophisticated media network — Kirk pushed a far-right view of the United States, earning millions of social media followers across several platforms and establishing a path for the Republican Party to bring Trumpism into the future.
Kirk used the confrontational live events to hold court and challenged attendees, mostly college students, to debate him on various political and culture war issues. In the process, he popularized an explosive style of political performance that is now commonplace.
Key to the performance was portraying his political opponents as caricatures. The Democratic Party platform, Kirk wrote in a bulleted list last year, was “Mass migration, Dirty cities, Men in women’s sports, Baby killing, High taxes, Inflationary spending, Anti-police, Anti-male, Anti-woman, Anti-whites, Anti-American, Pro-foreigner, Pro-gangbanger, [and] Pro-Hamas.”
Responding to a commenter, Kirk added: “Pro-child grooming, yes.”
“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates,” he said a few days before the presidential election. “The Democrat Party is espousing the death of the unborn, the mutilation of our teenage kids, open borders, the destruction of our sovereignty, the elimination of our currency status.”
That style was perfectly in tune with the current president, who frequently amplified Kirk’s posts online.
“I want to express my tremendous gratitude to Charlie Kirk,” Trump said at Turning Point’s “AmericaFest” in 2024, shortly after he won a second term in the White House. “He’s really an amazing guy. Amazing guy. And his whole staff for their relentless efforts to achieve this very historic victory. It’s such a great honor. It’s not my victory. It’s your victory. It’s a great honor.”
Turning Point Action’s central role in the 2024 Trump campaign’s ground game — it targeted “low-propensity, disengaged Republican voters” in several states — had fueled skepticism, as Trump noted in the same speech.
“The Democrats and the media said that Turning Point could never run a ground game, [that] they weren’t experienced,” Trump said. “They didn’t know Charlie, right? But when the ballots came in, the other side really didn’t know what the hell hit them.”
“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, announcing Kirk’s passing. “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
When Kirk started TPUSA in 2012, as an 18-year-old, the group’s stated purpose was to educate students “about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets and capitalism,” in part through “non-partisan debate, dialogue, and discussion.”
But over time, Kirk advocated for a nativist, fundamentalist Christian view of society. Despite Kirk’s obvious enthusiasm for open debate — he once described his public debates as partially entertainment, given the “ideas that are kind of colliding” — he was also insistent that the United States was a Christian nation, and one that ought to prioritize native-born citizens.
“I am both a Christian and a nationalist, but most importantly, I’m a Christian,” Kirk responded to a 2023 Rolling Stone report exploring TPUSA’s Christian nationalist shift, before positioning himself against “secular totalitarianism” and political opponents who he claimed sought to imprison Christians.
“We native born Americans are being replaced by foreigners,” Kirk said shortly after the 2024 presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in a case study on TPUSA in May. Kirk went on to say Trump would “liberate” the country from “the enemy occupation of the foreigner hordes.” (Kirk in turn dismissed the SPLC as “garbage” and “irrelevant.”)
“One of the reasons we’re living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they’re incompatible,” he said last year. “You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.”
“America was founded as a Christian nation. Prove me wrong,” Kirk captioned a video clip in which he commented.
“It’s not Islamophobia to notice that Muslims want to import values into the West that seek to destabilize our civilization,” he wrote in June, after referring to the mayoral race in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim democratic socialist, had recently won the Democratic Party’s nomination. “It’s cultural suicide to stay silent.”
The day prior, Kirk had characterized Mamdani as “a similar form of that pernicious force” of “radical Islam” as was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those attacks occurred when the mayoral candidate was nine years old.
A few days ago, Kirk described how “wokeism, or Marxism, combining with Islamism,” would soon be engaged in spiritual battle against “the American way of life,” which he defined as “Christendom.” He labeled a video of the remarks, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” Hasan Piker, the left-wing internet streamer who’d been set to debate Kirk at Dartmouth College on Sept. 25, noted those comments on his stream Wednesday.
In particular, Kirk embraced the far-right talking point known as the “great replacement” theory, which posits that political elites — often specifically Jews, though not necessarily in Kirk’s telling — are “importing” non-white immigrants in order to displace white Americans. The theory has inspired several mass shooters.
In 2021, Kirk alleged that Democratic immigration priorities were focused on “diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”
A couple weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, Kirk played a clip of protesters chanting “Free Palestine” and said that some Jews were realizing “that you can’t keep on importing people that don’t share your values.” He put that supposed realization in contrast with the Anti-Defamation League, which he said had “demanded we let the Jew haters in.”
“Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits,” Kirk added.
Last year, referring to the number of “illegals” who’d entered the United States during the Biden administration, Kirk wrote, “The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality.” (White supremacists have celebrated such language from prominent figures like Kirk and Tucker Carlson.)
A few months prior, after Elon Musk agreed with an X post from someone who said “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Kirk defended that sentiment.
“Now I don’t like generalizations,” Kirk said. “Not every Jewish person believes that. But it is true, the Anti-Defamation League was part and parcel with Black Lives Matter. It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans. They went all in on woke, and it wasn’t just [the Anti-Defamation League]. It was some of the top Jewish organizations in the country that have done that.”
“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband.”
Kirk’s view of a Christian United States included hyper-traditional gender roles.
Upon the news of pop star Taylor Swift’s recent engagement, Kirk said on his talk show, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” that he hoped Swift would become more conservative as a result: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge,” he said.
“If you’re going to find your life partner, that’s actually a really good reason to go to college,” he responded to one high school freshman who asked for his advice on college, saying she was interested in political journalism.
Kirk railed against birth control, saying it had manifested a Democratic Party that was based on a trade of “bitterness for stuff,” opposed same-sex marriage and the “homosexual agenda,” opposed abortion even in cases of rape, and accused Target of grooming children because of its Pride Month-themed collection.
In 2023, Kirk referred to transgender people as “so against the natural law,” “a throbbing middle finger to God” and “an abomination.” (Specifically, Kirk had referred to “the transgender thing happening in America right now.”)
In the wake of Trump’s second presidential win, Kirk’s efforts on this front made some headway in the Democratic Party, such as when California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosted Kirk on his podcast in March, agreeing with him that transgender women competing in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.” Kirk was the first guest on Newsom’s show.
Kirk leaned into Trumpian culture war fights, frequently devolving into racism.
While discussing affirmative action in 2023, Kirk referred to journalist Joy Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tx.), and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson – all Black women.
“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” Kirk said. “You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” Kirk said last year, calling the sentiment a “thought crime,” before hedging, “that’s not who I am, that’s not what I believe.”
Kirk was an early, prominent influencer to spread the false, racist rumor that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating household animals. “Residents of Springfield, OH are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets, another gift of the Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan,” Kirk wrote. “Liberals will soon be lecturing Americans on why they need to be sensitive to Haitian culture and accept this as the new normal. Those idiots deserve to be condemned and mocked mercilessly.” Elon Musk responded to one Kirk post about the lie, spreading it even further.
He called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful,” said the passage of the Civil Rights Act was “a huge mistake,” and called George Floyd, who was murdered by a police officer, “a scumbag.”
He was briefly banned from Twitter in 2020 after falsely claiming that the drug hydroxychloroquine, then hyped by Trump, was “100% effective” in treating the COVID-19 virus. He was a prominent figure behind misinformation and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“I think it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” he said in 2023, comparing them to automobile crash fatalities and advocating for armed guards at schools to combat school shootings.
Homeless people, Kirk said in April, either had drug issues, mental health issues, or were homeless “by choice.”
A fierce Trump ally, Kirk bragged shortly before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capital that Turning Point Action had helped send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” He later pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned by the House select committee investigating the attack.
“Weak people wanted hyper-sanitized action for the J6 hostages,” Kirk said after Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of every Jan. 6 defendant. “Trump wanted bold action to save people from lawfare tyranny. He delivered. This was all him.” (A few days after the attack, Kirk asserted “working people who voted for the president were repulsed by what they saw” on Jan. 6.)
More recently, Kirk had defended Trump after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a birthday scrapbook created for the occasion of the prolific sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday. The book included a creepy letter signed by Trump that featured the line “Enigmas never age” written over the sketched outline of a naked woman or girl, and concluded with the phrase “may every day be another wonderful secret.”
“Does the below from the WSJ look like this actual signature from the President?” Kirk wrote of Trump’s signature on the document. “I don’t think so at all. Fake.” (The signature on the card does in fact closely resemble Trump’s.)
But Kirk was not just an arch-conservative and Trump supporter. He was also a canny media operator.
Videos on Kirk’s YouTube channel regularly earned more than 1 million views, and carried titles like “Socialist Hippie Gets SLAPPED With Facts” and “Woke Student Learns Her Ideology is Racist.”
Those sorts of explosive arguments were especially fruitful on new platforms like TikTok, where young people are increasingly likely to encounter political news.
After the 2024 election, Kirk pointed to the power of social media clips, particularly on TikTok in recent months, to reach young people.
“On TikTok alone, it was 1 billion views in 90 days,” Kirk said shortly after Trump’s win, describing his own TikTok channel.
“It’s like, 60 to 80 million views a day. And that sounds like a number, but all of the sudden — here’s what’s amazing — it was the most effective way I’ve ever reached the working class in my career. The muscular class: Janitors, waiters, waitresses, Uber drivers, police officers, firefighters.”