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Journalism of Courage
Less than an hour after Charlie Kirk, 31, was shot dead on Wednesday, President Donald Trump posted a tribute calling the conservative influencer “Great” and “Legendary”, and his killing a “a dark moment for America”.
Trump ordered US flags countrywide to be flown at half-mast, an honour typically reserved for deceased government officials or soldiers, or during times of national tragedy.
Kirk had never held office; he was not even an official staffer in Trump’s campaign. His killing will be one of roughly 20,000 gun homicides that take place in the US this year.
What the President’s reaction speaks to is the unique position Kirk occupied in the Trump zeitgeist, as one of his closest advisers, and, as The New York Times put it in February, “the youth whisperer of the American Right”.
Born in 1993, Kirk catapulted into national fame in 2012, with an opinion article published in Breitbart News in which he railed against the influence economists like Paul Krugman enjoyed in college classrooms.
“Our public education system is supposedly one without bias… Instead, our classrooms are slowly becoming political lecture halls with teachers being pawns to further the doctrine of liberalism and ‘equality’,” he wrote.
The article earned Kirk an appearance on Fox Business and a meeting with conservative businessman Bill Montgomery, who urged him to drop out of college and helped found the non-profit Turning Point USA in 2012.
Kirk’s emergence as a young, social-media savvy conservative voice was timely amid a larger churn in the Republican party — one that would also propel the rise of Donald Trump.
“What began as a youth-oriented effort to rally college students against liberal orthodoxy morphed into something bigger,” an article in Time Magazine said. “Kirk made headlines with his “Professor Watchlist”, which targeted academics accused of suppressing conservative speech or promoting left-wing propaganda.”
In many ways, Kirk’s rise reflected the change in the tone of American conservatism in the 2010s, from the civility that underlined the politics of John McCain or even George Bush, to the aggressive real talk of Trump.
Today, Turning Point has evolved to being a well-funded, multipronged set-up, from a right-wing media giant to a grassroots political organisation with a presence in thousands of high school and college campuses, and a singular goal to get students to vote Republican.
Kirk’s opinions appealed to a wide spectrum of voters, from undecided youth to old Republicans to far right fanatics.
At the heart of his politics was the belief that American civilisation was “collapsing”, and that conservatives needed to combat “wokeness” with a moral framework of their own — a position that made him a popular in the pro-Trump Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
He appealed to conservative Christians by his criticism of gay and transgender rights and the separation of church and state. In 2021, he founded TPUSA Faith, which, according to its website, “exists to unite the church around primary doctrine and to eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit”.
Kirk endorsed the “Great Replacement Theory” which claims that White Americans will soon be in minority in the US, and will be subjugated by non-Whites. He railed against immigration, and called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlaws discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, and national origin, a “huge mistake”.
He was an ardent defender of gun rights, who argued that gun deaths were “worth” the cost of having the “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights”.
Through Turning Point, where he was a podcaster, social media savant, public speaker and field organiser, Kirk reached out to MAGA audiences with great effect. “We want to transform the culture,” he told The NYT in January.
Kirk was not always a Trump supporter. When, at age 23, he became the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, Kirk was yet to even meet the future President.
At the conference, however, he won over Trump Jr after saying that Trump’s children needed to “go out there and advocate”. “You’d have this Avengers squad of Trumps everywhere,” he had said, according to The NYT.
After Trump became President in 2016, Kirk emerged as one of his most steadfast supporters and defenders with a singular goal of making Trumpism appealing and accessible to the youth. “No one,” Trump posted in his tribute to Kirk, “understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”
Within days of Trump’s 2024 re-election, Kirk became one of his trusted lieutenants, rewarding prospective appointees with posts if they proved their loyalty to the President, and bullying dissidents into compliance.
Kirk was notably central to the rise of J D Vance, Trump’s deputy. He brought him on as a guest on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, in 2022, and endorsed his bid to the Senate that year. He is also credited with having supported his candidacy as Trump’s running mate.
“I saw JD as someone who would crush it with high-propensity suburban Republicans… They read The Journal. They hate the left. They don’t like Trump, but they like his policies. We’re talking about a couple hundred thousand voters that could determine the future of the election,” he told The NYT.
Indeed, Kirk played an active role in swinging the 2024 race in Trump’s favour through the “Chase The Vote” campaign in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin. Trump won in both states, and Trump Jr called Kirk “one of the true rock stars of this movement.”
