With his right-wing group Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk engaged controversial topics. Some students were inspired. Others found his views appalling.
Charlie Kirk did not have to attend college – or even believe it was worthwhile – to attract fervent followings on campuses throughout the United States. Widely considered liberal bastions, campuses were Kirk’s primary workspace, and he arrived with a message of conservatism.
He found young people navigating a maelstrom of political and cultural forces that sometimes caused extreme turbulence on university grounds. His clear, if occasionally caustic, answers to the country’s most vexing problems cut through, particularly for young men coming of age at a time of social isolation, when lives are increasingly lived online.
“It’s kind of scary to say what you believe in, especially in this cancel culture,” said Porter LaFeber, 22, a medical student at Utah Valley University who was at an event Thursday where Kirk was killed. “Charlie Kirk seemed like he just went totally above that. He kind of gave a voice to the people that were maybe a little bit scared.
“He gave me the confidence to be able to believe what I believe,” LaFeber added.
The topic of trans rights was particularly fraught, LaFeber said. As a Christian, he did not always feel he could say what he actually thought about the issue.
Kirk would arrive at colleges ready for rhetorical combat, willing to engage on the thorniest topics, from abortion rights to race. He railed against trans rights. He espoused traditional family values, like prioritising marriage for men and women and having children. He argued that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. Some students found his views profound and inspiring; others were appalled.
His campus visits regularly provoked impassioned protests from students who disagreed with Kirk’s stances, like his criticism of transgender rights and endorsement of the so-called great replacement theory, which claims immigrants will displace white Americans.
Demonstrators at Florida State University gathered behind barricades in February, chanting, “You spread hate; you spread lies,” as Kirk debated students under a pop-up tent. In April, protesters gathered during his appearance at Purdue University, holding cardboard signs and waving LGBTQ+ Pride flags. Kirk’s fans seemed to relish the pushback and posed for photos in front of the demonstrators.
Kirk had identified something that many students said they struggled with.
“He exposed the rigidity of progressive culture,” said Erik Balsbaugh, a left-leaning political organiser who works with young people in online spaces, including gaming. “That made a lot of young men feel powerful and feel that they were better than the people who were enforcing these cultural norms. It was dangerous. It was subversive.”
That connected with the feeling for many young men that left-leaning culture had become oppressive, humourless and, simply put, against them.
“He was a master in understanding where young men felt left behind,” Balsbaugh said.
Kirk started Turning Point USA when he was just 18 and built the organisation from a small shoestring operation to a messaging powerhouse with podcasts, speaking tours and college events that often included debates. He was a skilled speaker and entirely native in the world of online communication, and worked relentlessly to engage students across the country.
LaFeber was in high school when he first encountered Kirk, through listening to another right-wing podcaster, Ben Shapiro. Over the years, he came to love Kirk’s audacity – his boldness in saying what he thinks.
LaFeber said he often feared expressing his thoughts around left-leaning young people, because the smallest wrong move could get him cancelled, he believed. When he worked as a teller at Chase Bank, for example, several colleagues discussed politics but never asked him his view because, he surmised, they assumed he agreed with them. He didn’t, so he kept quiet.
LaFeber was excited to go to Kirk’s event. Standing among the crowd of about 3000, he saw the moment Kirk was shot. LaFeber then dropped to the ground and eventually fled. He spent the rest of the day in shock.
“I left campus, got on my motorcycle and went home. And I was sitting there by myself saying, ‘Oh, my God, did this really just happen?’” he said. “I am sad, but to be honest, I am also pissed off. Why did it have to come to this?”
Kirk was 31, closer in age to college students than to most national politicians, reaching vast audiences of young men at a pivotal age when they are trying to understand who they are and why they believe what they believe.
“He just kind of understood that the youth, the young conservatives, are kind of like an animal of their own,” said Gabe Saint, 23, president of the University of Wyoming chapter of Turning Point USA. “Like, we have issues that we care about that maybe some of the older conservative generations don’t care about.”
Political establishments on both sides of the aisle had left young people wanting more, he said. Kirk delivered that.
“He just kind of understood that we were struggling,” Saint said.
Young men interviewed after Kirk’s death who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said that a primary reason they related to Kirk was his defence of his Christian faith. They felt that mainstream, liberal culture looked down on religion, and they liked that Kirk defended it.
“Growing up as an active Christian, a lot of his values resonated with me,” said Colton Anderson, 21, a student at Brigham Young University, who was about 35 metres away from the stage when Kirk was shot. Anderson had been looking forward to the event for weeks and cleared his schedule to attend. He said he sometimes put Kirk’s videos on while doing homework because they were relaxing and sometimes funny.
Many said they didn’t like all of what Kirk said and understood that he could be provocative. But they said that he helped them feel less lonely in a broader culture that they felt often put them down.
Gabriel Bower, a friend of Anderson’s, said the shooting had made him feel “kind of sick”. He said he connected with Kirk as a Christian and perhaps as meaningful was the feeling he got from seeing how many other young people liked him, too.
“It was a relief to see that other people do have the same values and ideas as me,” Bower said. “That gives me more reassurance that I’m not alone, that I’m not a crazy, radical person that people might think. That being religious is not lonely.”
He said that on Instagram, only about five of his more than 100 friends had not posted about Kirk’s death.
“It’s my whole feed right now,” he said.
After the shooting, LaFeber was still trying to process what had happened, so he gathered with friends over takeout to talk about it. He said he was worried about how people might react.
“Are they going to kill every political leader we have?” he said, recalling the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year. “When is it going to end?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sabrina Tavernise and Alyce McFadden
Photographs by: M. Scott Brauer and Veasey Conway
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