Charlie Kirk Argued for a New Kind of Conservatism

Charlie Kirk, who rose from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster, culture warrior, and ally of President Trump, was shot and killed Wednesday during one of his trademark public appearances at a college in Utah. He was 31. Kirk was married to podcaster Erika Frantzve. They have two young children.

• Kirk died doing what made him a potent political force—rallying the right on a college campus, this time Utah Valley University, the AP reports. His shooting is one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, including this summer's assassination of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota and last summer's shooting of Trump, that have roiled the nation.

• Kirk launched his organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, trying to win over young people and venturing onto liberal-leaning college campuses where many GOP activists were nervous to tread. A backer of Trump during the president's initial 2016 run, Kirk took Turning Point from one of a constellation of well-funded conservative groups to the heart of the right-of-center universe.
• Turning Point's political wing helped run get-out-the-vote efforts for Trump's 2024 campaign, trying to energize disaffected conservatives who rarely vote. Trump won Arizona, Turning Point's home state, by 5 percentage points after narrowly losing it in 2020. The group is known for its flamboyant events that often feature strobe lighting and pyrotechnics. It claims more than 250,000 student members.
• Kirk showed off an apocalyptic style in his popular podcast, radio show, and on the campaign trail. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he said Democrats "stand for everything God hates." Kirk called the choice of Trump vs. Kamala Harris "a spiritual battle."
• Kirk also remained a regular presence on college campuses. Last year, for the social media program "Surrounded," he faced off against 20 liberal college students to defend his viewpoints, including that abortion is murder and should be illegal. Kirk's evangelical Christian beliefs were intertwined with his political perspective, and he argued that there was no true separation of church and state.

• Turning Point was founded in suburban Chicago in 2012 by Kirk, then 18, and William Montgomery, a Tea Party activist, to proselytize on college campuses for low taxes and limited government. It was not an immediate success. But Kirk's zeal for confronting liberals in academia eventually won over an influential set of conservative financiers.
• Despite early misgivings, Turning Point enthusiastically backed Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal aide to Donald Trump Jr. during the general election campaign. Soon, Kirk was a regular presence on cable TV.
• Kirk's profile rose further during the coronavirus pandemic, when he strongly opposed school lockdowns and mask mandates, the New York Times reports. He was temporarily banned from Twitter in March 2020 for spreading misinformation.
• Kirk argued for a new conservatism that advocated for freedom of speech, challenging Big Tech and the media, and centering working-class Americans beyond the nation's capital. "We have to ask ourselves a question as a conservative movement: Are we going to revert back to the party of the status quo ruling class?" he said in his speech opening the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020. "Or are we going to learn from what I call the MAGA doctrine? The MAGA doctrine, which is a doctrine of American renewal, revival, one that America is the greatest country in the history of the world."