The founder of Turning Point USA played a central role in organising young voters and giving shape to the pro-Trump agenda. He was fatally shot during a speaking event in Utah.
Charlie Kirk, a conservative wunderkind who through his radio show, books, political organising and speaking tours did much to shape the hard-right movement that has coalesced around President Donald Trump, becoming a close ally of his, died Wednesday (Thursday NZ time) in Orem, Utah, after he had been shot while speaking at a college campus event. He was 31.
Trump confirmed the death on his social media site, Truth Social.
Kirk had just taken the stage at the event, at Utah Valley University, when he was shot in the neck shortly after noon. He was taken to a hospital, where he was later declared dead.
Kirk was perhaps the leading voice among a cohort of young conservative activists who emerged during the Trump era. He had little connection to, or respect for, the Republican establishment, or for the ideas that traditionally undergirded the conservative movement.
Instead, he showed a genius for using social media and campus organising to build a following, which he then presented to donors and Trump-adjacent politicians to gain more resources and access.
By the end of 2024, he was considered something of a kingmaker. He had been an early champion of selecting Senator JD Vance of Ohio as Trump’s running mate. Several of his biggest donors received positions in the Trump administration, and he was central in rallying support behind embattled Cabinet nominees like Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexual assault after Trump chose him to be Secretary of Defence.
He likewise rallied his supporters against Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, who he said was not sufficiently supportive of Trump. She resigned in early 2024.
Kirk never sought a position within the administration. Instead, it became clear over the last year that his ambition was for something much larger: reshaping the Republican Party and, beyond that, American politics itself.
“We want to transform the culture,” he told The New York Times Magazine in February.
Kirk was 18 when he founded Turning Point USA in 2012, conceiving it as a conservative response to liberal organising platforms like MoveOn.org. He drew significant early support from Republican donors like Foster Friess and members of the Trump family like the president’s son Donald Jr., who were attracted by his fresh face and bold pitch for gaining ground among young voters.
He quickly became a fixture in the Trumpian media sphere. He tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people. Even some conservatives found his approach distasteful, but not Donald Trump: one sign of Kirk’s ascendance was how often Trump retweeted him.
By the start of the first Trump administration in 2017, Kirk was already in regular rotation on the conservative TV pundit circuit and an in-demand speaker among right-wing organisations. He proved to be a captivating speaker and an extremely capable debater, with a gift for bringing coherence to the President’s often logically fraught statements.
He was equally influential within the administration. He claimed to have visited the White House about 100 times during the first Trump term, including for meetings to discuss nominations and high-level personnel decisions.
Kirk was far from the only young face to emerge in the Trump movement. But whereas activists like Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos went too far too early in their embrace of baldly racist and homophobic ideas, Kirk had an innate polish and was able to tack quickly among far-right activists, establishment Republicans and sceptical young voters.
He focused his activism on what he characterised as rampant Marxism and gender ideology on college campuses. He encouraged students to report professors whom they suspected of embracing such ideas, and he did the same in appealing to parents and grade school students.
Turning Point grew rapidly, adding dozens of campus chapters a year and largely displacing older conservative youth organisations like Young Americans for Freedom. He not only brought high-profile right-wing speakers to colleges; he provided training, networking and organising, in the process creating a tight web of activists and future politicos.
He proved adept at packaging his public appearances with slick backdrops and high-value productions. He gave his speaking tours names: the “Exposing Critical Racism” (2021), “You’re Being Brainwashed” (2024).
Kirk rose even further into the conservative stratosphere during the early days of the pandemic, when he was quick to attack the World Health Organisation – which, in his typical fashion, he called the “Wuhan Health Organisation” – accusing it of hiding the source of Covid and claiming that it had emerged from a Chinese lab in the city of Wuhan. He later rallied opposition to school lockdowns and mask mandates.
He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies – he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100% effective” in treating the virus, which it is not – that Twitter temporarily banned him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.
After the 2020 election, Kirk led a “Stop the Steal” protest in Phoenix, embracing the false right-wing narrative that Trump had actually won the White House in his race against Joe Biden. He promised to send 80 “buses of patriots” to Washington on January 6, 2021 – the day the election results were to be certified by Congress – to support the Trump. Only about seven buses arrived.
Undaunted, Kirk was among the first to rally around Trump once he left office, travelling to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Florida, to strategise a comeback. Like the President, Kirk sensed that the country was not done with Trumpism, and that they could use the new Biden administration as a foil.
Kirk grabbed hold of the opportunity with both hands. He created a new group, Turning Point Faith, to amplify the role of Christian nationalism within the Trump movement. He doubled down in his critique of the left, which he said had taken over campuses, corporate America and government.
He continued to provoke: during a speech in Mankato, Minnesota, in 2021, he referred to George Floyd, the Black man whose murder by a Minnesota police officer sparked protests, as a “scumbag”; at other times, he referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King jnr as “a bad man”.
And he joined in Trump’s campaign against immigration, at times endorsing the so-called great replacement theory, the popular far-right idea that immigrants will soon displace white Americans – even adding an antisemitic twist to it.
“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” he said on The Charlie Kirk Show in 2023.
For a moment, it seemed as if such comments might signal the end of Kirk’s rise. Instead, he reached out to conservative Jewish donors and otherwise jittery Republicans, and at the 2024 Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, he was given a prime speaking slot.
There was no secret to his staying power: He delivered results. He spent tens of millions of dollars on voter mobilisation through Turning Point and other groups in the run-up to the presidential election. Trump won a surprising share of the youth vote, about 45% nationally, and drew even with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in several swing states.
After Trump’s victory, Kirk moved his family – his wife, Erika, and two young children – to a rented condo near Mar-a-Lago, so that he could participate in key discussions about the incoming administration.
And to make his status as an ultimate insider clear, Turning Point held a gala event in Washington on the eve of the inauguration, at which some 1500 people paid at least US$5000 ($8420) a ticket to brush shoulders with the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Kash Patel, who would become the FBI director.
Charles James Kirk was born October 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, Robert, an architect, and his mother, Kimberly, were active in conservative circles – his father was a major donor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
“I started listening to Rush when I was a junior in high school,” Kirk told The New York Times Magazine, referring to right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Listening, I was, like, ‘This guy is unbelievable!’”
In 2012, as a senior in high school, he wrote an opinion article for the conservative website Breitbart News criticising the prominence of liberal economists like Paul Krugman in his textbooks. The article led to an appearance on Fox News, which in turn drew the attention of Bill Montgomery, a restaurateur and early supporter of the right-wing Tea Party movement.
After Kirk explained his vision for bringing fresh conservative ideas to young voters, Montgomery urged him to skip college and start immediately. Kirk was accepted at Baylor University and briefly attended Harper College, in Palatine, Illinois, but soon took Montgomery’s advice and dropped out.
He founded Turning Point USA with support from Montgomery and Kirk’s father, who came up with the group’s name. He talked his way into the 2012 Republican National Convention, where he ran into Friess and gave him an impromptu pitch. Friess sent him a US$10,000 cheque a few days later.
Originally based outside Chicago, Kirk relocated to the Phoenix area, where he spent the next decade building the Turning Point empire; eventually, his headquarters encompassed five buildings, several named for prominent donors.
He was not initially a Trump supporter; during the 2016 Republican primary, he first supported two other candidates, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. But he was won over to the Trump campaign after a meeting with Donald Jr., who brought him on as his social media coordinator.
He married Erika Frantzve, a former Miss Arizona, in 2021. His survivors include his wife and their two children. Citing their desire for privacy, the Kirks did not reveal their children’s names.
Although he rarely touched on religion during his early years, Kirk increasingly embraced evangelical Christianity following the pandemic. He grew critical of gay rights and the separation of church and state, and began to cite Bible verses as support for his views.
To Kirk, Trump’s reelection demonstrated that his form of conservatism had moved from the fringes to the mainstream. He spoke frequently of an “American Renaissance”.
Others seemed to agree: this past spring, Kirk was the first guest to appear on a new podcast hosted by Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Governor of California.
And he continued to build his support among young voters with his “Prove Me Wrong” tour, which brought him to Utah Valley University on Wednesday. Several hundred ecstatic onlookers cheered as he took the stage. He sat down and began to speak. Then came the sound of a gunshot.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Clay Risen
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Anna Watts and Todd Anderson
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