Charlie Kirk, who died Wednesday at 33 after being shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem, founded the right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA in 2012, when he was only 18. He and the group eventually rose to be powerful influencers. Here is a breakdown of who Kirk was.
Turning Point USA origins
Kirk grew up as the son of an architect in the Chicago suburbs, which is where he started Turning Point USA, now based in Arizona. He attended a community college in the suburbs but dropped out, and he applied to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point but was not accepted, according to the BBC.
“Kirk often referred tongue-in-cheek to his lack of a college degree when engaging in debates with students and academics on esoteric topics such as post-modernism,” the BBC notes.
He founded Turning Point USA with backing from Tea Party activist William Montgomery. The organization, focused on reaching high school and college students, “was not an immediate success,” the Associated Press reports. “But Kirk’s zeal for confronting liberals in academia eventually won over an influential set of conservative financiers.”
From fiscal issues to culture wars
Turning Point initially emphasized fiscal issues, such as low taxes and limited government. Its website still mentions these topics, but in recent years it has taken on culture-war issues, opposing LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights.
“Kirk’s evangelical Christian religion and family — he married a former Miss Arizona, with whom he had two children — were front and centre in his politics, and he was seen as both the future of conservative activism and a highly polarising figure,” the BBC article notes.
Kirk and his group rose in prominence in the era of Donald Trump. Turning Point supported Trump in the 2016 presidential race, and Kirk was an aide to Donald Trump Jr. during the general election campaign. Kirk became “a regular presence on cable TV,” the AP notes, and Trump and Trump Jr. often appeared at its events. Kirk was the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention and the opening speaker at the 2020 convention.
He campaigned for Trump again in 2024. Appearing with Trump in Georgia last fall, he said Democrats “stand for everything God hates,” and said the race between Trump and Kamala Harris was “a spiritual battle.” He added, “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”
Kirk hosted The Charlie Kirk Show as both a podcast and a nationally syndicated radio show. He wrote several books and newspaper columns advocating for conservative causes.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA grew. “With a presence on over 3,000 high school and college campuses nationwide, over 650,000 lifetime student members, and 450 full- and part-time staff all across the country, Turning Point USA is the largest and fastest-growing conservative youth activist organization in the country,” according to its website.
Anti-LGBTQ+ activism
Among his anti-LGBTQ+ and particularly anti-transgender comments, in 2022 on his show, he blamed trans people for inflation. “They’re the same in this aspect – when you believe that men can become women, why wouldn’t you also believe that you could print wealth? If you believe that someone can change their gender, why wouldn’t you also believe that money is wealth?” he said. “Now there are very simple laws of economics. Just like there’s laws of nature. There’s laws of physics, laws of thermodynamics, laws of biology.”
In 2024, he said the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, should have had gay sex instead, suggesting that might lessen the charges against them. He mentioned the incident in which a gay Democratic Senate staffer was involved in a sexual act with another man in a U.S. Senate hearing room. The staffer lost his job, and an investigation was launched. Kirk also said the January 6 protesters were largely peaceful, which is not true.
This year, Kirk guested on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, and Newsom drew fire for agreeing with Kirk that trans girls and women shouldn’t compete in female sports. Newsom, a Democrat, is usually an LGBTQ+ ally. But he has stood up to Trump’s demands that California institute a trans athlete ban.
In 2023, Kirk tweeted that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were “anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Christian,” and a “Marxist Trojan Horse with a sweet sounding name.” This was in response to the news that Chick-fil-A, owned by conservative Christians and known for giving to anti-LGBTQ+ causes through its foundation, had hired a DEI officer.
Just before he was shot Wednesday, he had taken a question from an audience member, who asked, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk responded, “Too many.” In truth, the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men.
And at an event in 2023, he said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” This was fact-checked by Snopes.com.
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Who was Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist killed Wednesday?