In middle school cafeterias, high school hallways and across college campuses, Charlie Kirk’s death spread phone to phone. Students passed around videos, glanced at photos and saw close-ups, reviewing every angle of the moment he was shot.
“I can’t escape it,” 20-year-old Chandler Crump says of the posts surrounding Kirk’s murder. “Every platform I’m opening right now is having discourse about it, groups that have absolutely nothing to do with politics are mentioning it because of Charlie’s influence.”
While images of his violent death were a graphic intrusion, Kirk himself was not a new presence in their feeds.
Their parents might not have known who Kirk was, but they did.
Maybe they got sucked in when they saw him debating Kamala Harris supporters on TikTok. Maybe something he said about marriage sparked a reaction in them. Maybe his loud-and-proud brand of politics, no matter how controversial, gave them confidence.
Charlie Kirk, for many in the under 25 crowd, was a symbol. A hallmark of youth political organizing in the internet age. A person they revered or despised. Now, he’s gone, fatally shot on a Utah college campus on Sept. 10.
For many Republicans, he was a culture warrior who could make inroads with young voters. For many Democrats, he was the epitome of Trump’s brand of combative conservatism. Across the political spectrum, young people are left reckoning with what his death means for their generation and grappling with how they feel about it.
“Charlie Kirk changed my life,” Chandler Crump, left, wrote in an X post about Charlie Kirk’s passing. “I was 14 at the time but Charlie told me it didn’t matter how young I was, I could fight alongside him in this movement.”
Charlie Kirk’s rise to fame, activism in the internet age
Kirk was 18 when he founded Turning Point USA to introduce conservative ideals across college campuses, where he saw a liberal bias. The organization gained national prominence within the Republican Party and has since grown to be the largest conservative student movement with more than 800 college chapters.
Kirk surged in popularity through the organization’s college campus tours, where he drew large crowds of supporters and vehement dissenters looking to debate him.
More: From cookie crusade to conservative politics, Charlie Kirk inspired and enraged millions
Crump was one of the people who grew up in Kirk’s movement. He first met the political commentator at Turning Point USA’s Young Black Leadership Summit in October 2018. He was 14 at the time and says Kirk inspired him to start an X handle and build an online platform. Over the years, they stayed in touch, and Crump continued going to Turning Point summits, eventually rising in the ranks enough to become a speaker at the events.
“He told me, it doesn’t matter if I’m Black or White, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m young or old, I can speak up and make my voice heard about what I believe,” Crump says. For Crump, Kirk was an inspiration. Other young people didn’t see him that way − but they did see him.
Kirk’s rise coincided with the internet age, as many young people looked toward social media as their primary news source. Nearly half of teens say they’re online constantly, according to 2024 data from the Pew Research Center, and 72% of teens say they sometimes or frequently check their notifications as soon as they wake up. As such, young people living in their phones may feel an outsize connection to figures like Kirk.
For Gen Zers scrolling through their socials, Kirk was hard to miss. Clips of his debates with college students, who lined up in crowds to argue with him, would amass tens of millions of views. He also had millions of followers across his X, Instagram, and TikTok handles, as well as on his YouTube channel and podcast.
“One of the things about Charlie Kirk being killed is that we’ve seen him before, whether we like him or not, he’s been part of our reality,” says Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins. “His murder maybe hits us harder in a way, just because it can’t be abstract, it’s more real.”
That same viral nature of the internet made avoiding his death inescapable as graphic videos of the shooting circulated, appearing in people’s feeds with little or no warning.
As an adamant supporter of gun reform, 23-year-old Jacob Dolin worries the lightning speed social media dissemination of videos of the shooting will further desensitize Americans to gun violence. He was also disappointed to see less attention on the shooting at a Colorado high school.
Binder says that violent videos and images can take a toll on one’s mental health. For a generation that grew up with active school shooter drills and to-the-minute news alerts about mass shootings, desensitization to violence is likely more pronounced.
The Charlie Kirk video spread fast: How did we get so desensitized to violence?
For young men in the conservative movement, Kirk was a role model
Kirk’s most successful inroads, perhaps, were made with young male voters, some of whom shifted right in the 2024 election. Young men are graduating from college at lower rates than women and struggling with loneliness and social isolation, and Kirk’s “pre-feminist, machismo” brand of masculinity resonated for many, according to Ronald Levant, a professor emeritus of psychology at The University of Akron and co-author of “The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist.”
“It has to do very much with the fact that young men are not doing well in America today,” Levant says. “Figures like Charlie Kirk offer them something to blame: ‘it’s this feminist movement,’ ‘it’s the liberals,’ ‘it’s the Democratic Party,’ and so on.”
To some young Republicans, Kirk, a devout evangelical Christian who often appeared smiling with his two young children and wife, was the picture of success.
Young Republicans like Chandler Crump viewed Charlie Kirk as a role model. Crump says he “will never be the same without him.”
More: What to know about Charlie Kirk’s wife and family
“For myself and for many other Gen Z men, we want to be like Charlie,” Crump says. “I definitely subscribe more to the notion and the thought that my primary goal is having children, getting married.”
Gen Z is navigating a partisan divide between men and women larger than any other age range. A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll asking Gen Z about their priorities found men who voted for Trump ranked having children as the most important aspect of their definition of success, while women who voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least important factor of their success.
Kirk capitalized on the widening gap to position himself as a conservative cultural authority on traditional values and religion. He vocalized that women should prioritize having children over their careers, advocated for bringing back college as a place to get a “Mrs. Degree.”
Is this a reckoning moment for Gen Z?
Young people USA TODAY spoke with viewed Kirk’s death as a reckoning moment, though they disagreed on what that moment will mean. Some say it cemented in their minds the need for gun reform, while others viewed it as confirmation of growing political extremism in America.
Online, young people on both ends of the political spectrum were quick to react. Some posts criticized comments Kirk made about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ people during his career. But many left-leaning Democratic youth activists, including those who had challenged Kirk to debates, expressed their condolences.
Left-leaning livestreamer Dean Withers, 21, who built a platform on debating conservatives, was moved to tears on his stream as he found out about Kirk’s death.
“If you want to end gun violence, it is something that you can never celebrate,” Withers says. “It should come as no shock when I tell you that I think Charlie Kirk was a bad person… But does that mean I think he deserves to lose his life? No.”
Reuben Berkowitz, 20, says he “detests” Kirk’s brand of “toxic” and “harmful” masculinity, but thinks it’s important to understand what he tapped into.
“It can’t be ignored that he had a large base of young men my age, who really loved what he stood for,” Berkowitz says. “In order to reckon with the crisis of modern masculinity, I think it does have to be addressed.”
Across the spectrum, young people agreed that if he’d lived, Kirk would have gone on to impact the political system.
“He was able to blend social media and his beliefs to attract young individuals into the support for traditional conservative values,” Dolin says. “I definitely saw him as someone who was going to shape how our generation viewed politics.”
Rachel Hale’s role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach her at rhale@usatoday.com and @rachelleighhale on X.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Charlie Kirk was an icon for some young men. Now what?