Five months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a campus rally in Utah, the conservative provocateur brought his “American Comeback Tour” through Oklahoma.
His April visit to Oklahoma State University drew out supporters and opponents to watch the 31-year-old speak and debate local college students about hot-button political issues.
Kirk was the founder and president of Turning Point USA and rose to prominence during the early years of the MAGA political movement. He spoke at the 2016, 2020 and 2024 Republican National Conventions.
Along with numerous media interviews and appearances, including on Fox News, The Washington Times, and The Washington Post, Kirk published his own book, “The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future.”
What happened when Charlie Kirk came to OSU?
During Kirk’s visit to Stillwater, hundreds of students gathered around a tent emblazoned with “PROVE ME WRONG,” a similar setup to the event at Utah Valley University where he was killed.
During the April 1 event, The O’Colly, OSU’s student-run newspaper, reported seeing a heckler with a megaphone competing against cheers as Kirk came into view.
“Two signs depicting Kirk as the devil stared down a ‘Jesus Loves You’ sign, juxtaposing the personalities that came to hear Kirk speak,” O’Colly reporter Bella Casey wrote.
Kirk’s own social media shared videos from the event, including one showing him throw Trump hats into the audience.
Oklahoma State Rep. Gabe Wooley, R-Broken Arrow, attended the OSU event in April.
He was one of several Oklahoma politicians who spoke out in remembrance of Kirk after the shooting.
Charlie Kirk visited Oklahoma several times
This wasn’t the first time that Kirk and Turning Point USA visited Oklahoma. He came to the Sooner State in 2021 and spoke to a crowd at the University of Oklahoma.
Kirk often spoke about gun violence, and began that event at OU talking about a shooting that happened a few days earlier in Boulder, Colorado.
“We were very slow to rush to judgement, as we should be in those instances, and not everyone was,” Kirk told the crowd, before launching a criticism of how “gun-grabbers” and others on the political left reacted to the tragedy.
In 2024, Kirk was one of several speakers at a Promise Keeper’s event in Tulsa. The New York Times covered the event and said Kirk’s speech mocked the concept of preferred pronouns and pandemic lockdowns, discussed transgender identities as a threat and pushed back on the concept of “toxic masculinity.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: See Charlie Kirk’s visits to OSU, Oklahoma and others before shooting