Charlie Kirk death: The activist who mobilised young men behind Trump. Photo / Getty Images
A week before he was shot dead on a university campus in Utah, Charlie Kirk stood before a crowd in Seoul, celebrating what he called a global shift in youth politics.
“The phenomenon of young people, especially men, turning conservative is happening simultaneously across multiple continents,” he told a rapturous audience, who chanted “USA” as he boasted of having “brought Trump to victory”.
Kirk, a father of two, had every right to declare a shift in the passions and voting patterns of young men; in his home country, he had helped stoke that fire.
Donald Trump’s second stint in the Oval Office can be attributed to many factors – Joe Biden’s ailing health, Kamala Harris’ failure to charm undecided voters, four years of record-high inflation. But mostly, it comes down to young men.
More precisely, it was the way the Maga campaign reached out its tendrils, winding them around carefully chosen influencers with large but targeted online platforms, all with the aim of mobilising a voting group once considered niche, apathetic and untouchable.
As recently as 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, Pew Research Center polling showed Americans aged 18 to 29 leaned firmly Democratic, 63 to 31%. Just three years later, as Trump secured re-election, Republicans had taken the lead in that age group, 47 to 46%.
The gender divide behind that shift is crucial. A recent NBC poll showed that while young women remain strongly opposed to Trump (just 24% support him), young men are now almost evenly split, with 47% in favour. Across major issues, the share of young men approving of Trump’s policies is roughly twice that of young women.
The shifting allegiance of America’s youth is as stark as it is recent, and Kirk undoubtedly played a central role in turning that tide.
Raised in an affluent Chicago suburb, the son of a counsellor and an architect (his father’s firm designed Trump Tower in New York), Kirk never held office and never worked directly on a campaign, yet his influence was far-reaching.
When news of his death broke on Wednesday, some older voters may not have encountered Kirk, but their children will likely have seen his videos on social media platforms such as TikTok, whether they loved him or loathed him.
He seemed to pull off the rare trick of appealing to chronically online young men while avoiding alienating more traditional, wealthy Christian Republicans.
His views on the most heated topics of the day – from trans rights to immigration – were often polarising (he once called Martin Luther King Jr “a bad guy” and described the Civil Rights Act as “a mistake”).
Donald Trump Jr, for whom Kirk briefly worked as a social media coordinator, described him as “one of the true rock stars of this movement”.
Crucially, he achieved what previous campaigns had failed to do: he ignited a new brand of conservatism on college campuses.
Kirk’s determination to bring young people to the Right predates Trump and the Maga quest to win over disenfranchised young men. At 18, he founded a conservative youth organisation that now raises tens of millions of dollars in donations and has chapters at more than 850 colleges, where it registers voters and hosts Right-wing speakers.
Turning Point USA (TPUSA) is clear about its aim. Its website – resembling the kind usually associated with music festivals – invites visitors simply to “join the largest conservative movement”.
Click through to its online shop, and a pop-up offers a discount code. To claim it, you answer the question: “Which do you value most? Defending freedom. Maintaining traditions. Supporting veterans.” Answer and receive money off a T-shirt emblazoned with “Raised Right”, or a reusable glass straw printed with “raw unpasteurised truth”.
It’s a shade more subtle than a crimson Maga cap, but the principle is the same: come on, be on the Right side – the cool side – of all this, join our club.
Behind the merch is a political movement with real power. At one point, TPUSA established a Professor Watchlist, designed to expose “radical” academics. Its site quotes Kirk saying: “We play offence with a sense of urgency to win America’s culture war.” If his goal was to “win”, he achieved it.
TPUSA’s growth made Kirk “a harbinger and then an embodiment of Trump-era populism”, one New York Times op-ed noted: “A spokesman for a youthful Right that seemed both more rebellious and more relaxed (like a good college hangout) as progressivism became more institutionally dominant and uptight.”
By the time President Trump was first elected in 2017, Kirk was 23 and already a leading figure in the youth faction of the Maga movement. The President’s first term further cemented his status. He visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times during Trump 1.0, he told the New York Times in February.
After Trump’s re-election, Kirk was one of a small band of advisers tasked with assessing the loyalty of prospective appointees. His presence at the second inauguration ruffled some feathers in Congress, though Republican Senator from Indiana Jim Banks noted at the time that “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of Congress combined to get us to this point today”.
Titles from episodes of his podcast released in the days before his death perhaps offer the clearest insight into his ideology: “A Revival of Christian Men is Necessary”; “Lessons from Asia + What’s Wrong with Gen Z Women?”; “Ben Shapiro on George Floyd, Israel and Gen Z”; “You Do Not Want to Live in a Non-Christian Country”.
The pandemic appears to have been a hinge point for him (he called lockdowns “the stupidest thing ever”).
“Covid for me was a lot of thinking and reading time, while the whole civilisation was collapsing”, he told the New York Times in February. “I saw the wokies appealing to a moral order that they said was true and good. And I said, well, we think ours is.”
In 2021, he expanded TPUSA by creating a faith wing. Its mission was “empowering Christians to put their faith into action”, and the organisation encouraged pastors “to join in civic, social and cultural discussions”.
By the time Trump’s second campaign came around, Kirk had moved from popping up on university campuses to becoming an established media figure. He positioned himself as a “thought leader” and began making a lot of money as a podcaster, author and speaker. His book, The MAGA Doctrine, was a bestseller in 2020.
Social media has spawned a new breed of political operative, one who treads a line between citizen journalist and cult leader. Latterly, Kirk was one of them. Both a political rabble-rouser and a talking head, he had a voice that appealed to new and established conservatives. He recognised the value of traditional ways of connecting with voters, appearing at gatherings and rallies, while also courting new ones online.
For all the controversy he stoked, Kirk defended his work as an attempt to get people on both sides talking.
“When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence,” he said in a video posted on X showing him explaining his work on university campuses. “People like me are facing violence, assault,” he added.
Asked what his goal was, he replied: “There are more people that agree with me than some people would actually believe, and they come out of the woodwork when I do stuff like this.”
Last spring, he began recording videos on campuses for a series called “You’re Being Brainwashed”, in which he debated liberal students on questions such as “Do you think men can give birth?” Clips from the videos went viral, often gaining tens of millions of views.
Kirk’s TikTok, the New York Times reported, drew more followers than Fox News, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance and the Harris campaign. A national survey carried out by TikTok found that users under 30 who voted for Trump trusted Kirk’s voice above all others.
In May, he turned his attention to British students, attending debates at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, which he described as a “time warp”.
“Britain is the country trailing behind America,” he wrote in The Spectator the following month. “Make no mistake: Trump’s revolution is coming to the UK. But as I learned, just like in America, the students of elite universities may be the last to realise.”
He wrote of the “ideological transformation” he said had “swept” every campus he visited in America. “Five years ago, I’d typically meet a wall of hostility like the one I found at Cambridge. But in today’s America, college-age students have moved toward Trump more heavily than any other demographic.”
Having helped get Trump back to the White House in January, Kirk cemented his title as the youth whisperer.
Today, his bio on Spotify describes him as “America’s hardest working grassroots activist,” fighting on “the front lines of America’s culture war”.
Wednesday’s event was meant to be the first in a series of visits to colleges across the US, billed as the “American Comeback Tour”.
When a gunman opened fire at Utah Valley University, that tour came to a shocking end.
Yet the movement Kirk spearheaded will likely continue without him.
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