As a conservative student at left-leaning Boston University, Philip Wohltorf says he wasn’t always a big fan of Charlie Kirk. But he admired Mr. Kirk’s willingness to travel to college campuses and speak to his critics, as he was doing last Wednesday when he was fatally shot at Utah Valley University. “He was the guy who would sit down and just debate everyone,” he says.
Mr. Kirk’s boldness inspired other young conservatives to speak up, even when they faced social opprobrium, says Mr. Wohltorf, a junior and vice president of his College Republicans chapter. Now he feels “an obligation” to build on Mr. Kirk’s legacy by fostering open political debate on campus.
“He started the movement, and you can’t get rid of this movement by taking out one guy,” he says.
Why We Wrote This
History shows the loss of a charismatic leader can propel a political movement into something even more powerful – or mark the beginning of its decline. For now, Charlie Kirk’s allies are vowing to continue what he started.
Where that movement goes next is an open question. Mr. Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 as a student organization and built it into a conservative force multiplier, propelled by his online celebrity that made him a national political figure. His violent death, captured live and flashed across social media, sparked a tidal wave of angst and anger inside the White House and throughout President Donald Trump’s broader MAGA movement, of which Mr. Kirk was an unofficial leader – seen by some even as a potential heir to Mr. Trump. That raises the stakes for what could be a contested battle to define Mr. Kirk’s legacy and shape the political movement he built.
Turning Point says it has around 900 college and 1,200 high school chapters, with a presence on 3,500 schools in total, where it organizes events, promotes conservative politics, and registers and mobilizes voters. It also has a separate political advocacy group, a church-based initiative, and a media division; several prominent MAGA figures started out as Turning Point influencers. A prodigious fundraiser and a talented public speaker, Mr. Kirk appealed to Republican donors who saw youth recruitment and training as an effective way to counter Democrats’ sway over a bloc of voters that has long leaned left.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Kirk told Utah’s Deseret News that he wanted Turning Point to be “an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as The New York Times, Harvard, and tech companies.”
Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx 2025/AP
On Sunday, Andrew Kolvet, the executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” Mr. Kirk’s popular podcast, posted on X that Turning Point had received 32,000 inquiries in the space of 48 hours about starting new campus chapters.
“Charlie’s vision to have a Club America chapter (our high school brand) in every high school in America (around 23,000) will come true much much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined,” Mr. Kolvet wrote, later adding: “This is the Turning Point.”
Political assassinations can alter the course of history. President John F. Kennedy’s killing enabled his successor Lyndon B. Johnson to push civil rights legislation through Congress. But the death of the head of a movement can also diminish its standing, says Kevin Boyle, a historian at Northwestern University. Losing a charismatic leader can be devastating; the faith-based group led by Martin Luther King Jr. never regained its influence after his death, even as Dr. King became, over time, a national icon, he notes.
“When you have a dynamic figure heading an organization or a movement, it’s often really hard for a movement to survive without him,” Professor Boyle says.
Echoes of the 1960s
Last week’s murder is the latest in a series of killings and attempted killings over the past decade of politicians, judges, business leaders, and government officials, targeting both Democrats and Republicans. Many observers have drawn parallels between these attacks and those carried out in the 1960s and ’70s amid heightened divisions along political and racial lines. In the space of five years, President Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. King, and Malcolm X were shot dead; George Wallace, the populist governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate, survived an assassination attempt in 1972. That period also saw a wave of bombings and arson attacks, mostly by left-wing radicals.
Violence and trauma can propel social movements toward radicalism and acts of vengeance, warns Professor Boyle, author of “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.” “One of the great fears of our time, because we’re living in an era of intense polarization, is that some traumatic act of violence feeds a cycle of retribution,” he says.
MRSERIKAKIRK/Instagram/ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters/File
Mr. Kirk was married and had two young children. In an emotional address filmed in front of Mr. Kirk’s vacant desk, his widow, Erika Kirk, said last Friday that her husband wanted to be remembered “for his courage and his [Christian] faith.” She said he laid down his life for the nation and was standing “at his Savior’s side wearing the glorious crown of a martyr.”
She then addressed the “evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination,” saying: “If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you just have unleashed. … You have no idea of the fire that you have ignited.” There is no indication that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, who faced formal charges in Utah on Tuesday, acted in conjunction with anyone else.
Evangelical Christians were among those attracted by Mr. Kirk’s impassioned rhetoric in defense of traditional family structures and in opposition to issues like abortion, gun control, and diversity initiatives. His widow’s reference to martyrdom has been echoed by other supporters who have compared his death to the killing of figures such as Dr. King. (Mr. Kirk criticized Dr. King as a “bad guy” and considered the Civil Rights Act to be a mistake.)
The suggestion of martyrdom unnerves Matthew Boedy, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia who studies Christian rhetoric. Turning Point put Professor Boedy’s name on its “Professor Watchlist,” he says, after he wrote a newspaper editorial in 2016 opposing open-carry gun rights on campus. The site says its goal is to expose professors who are advancing “leftist propaganda” on campus; some of those on the list say they have received death threats.
Martyrdom, which traditionally referred to Christians persecuted for their faith, is a “dangerous” word to use in America’s charged political climate, says Professor Boedy. “It gives divine approval to seek retribution and seek vengeance.”
On Sunday, President Trump and other top Republican officials will attend Mr. Kirk’s funeral at State Farm Stadium (which can hold roughly 60,000 people) in Arizona, where Turning Point USA is based. Vice President JD Vance, a close friend of the activist and a political ally, flew to Utah on Air Force Two after the shooting last week to accompany his casket to Arizona.
This past Monday, Mr. Vance took the unusual step of hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show,” the flagship of Mr. Kirk’s media empire, where the vice president invited senior White House officials to pay tribute for two hours to Mr. Kirk’s life and work. Mr. Vance said he was “desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times/Reuters
Echoing claims made by Mr. Trump, the Vice President said that people on the left “are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.” Most surveys suggest a minority on both sides express such views, but a recent YouGov survey, taken in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s killing, found that 24% who identify as “very liberal” say it’s acceptable to “feel joy” at the death of a political opponent, compared with just 3% of those who call themselves “very conservative.” A poll taken in March 2024 found, however, that Republicans were more likely to say violence may be necessary to “get the country back on track.”
In recent days, Mr. Trump and other administration officials have spoken about waging a war on “radical leftists” whom they blame for Mr. Kirk’s killing. Speaking to Mr. Vance during the live radio show on Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed to dismantle what he called a “vast domestic terrorist movement” behind the assassination.
“Anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion, but focused anger, righteous anger directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history,” Mr. Miller said. “And we are going to channel all of the anger … to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.”
An edgier conservatism
Past conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater also succeeded in winning over many young people, says Daniel Ruggles, a political scientist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the youth conservative movement starting in the 1960s. But in previous eras conservative politics was also often dogged by a reputation for stodginess. On that front, Mr. Kirk’s brand proudly charted a new, edgier direction, propelled by his rhetorical skills. “I think Kirk was able to sort of translate a lot of the antiestablishment, Trump ideas to young people in a way that Trump himself maybe wasn’t as effective doing,” Mr. Ruggles says.
For a generation of young conservatives, particularly young men living in liberal communities, Mr. Kirk was a guiding star. “Seeing someone that was so public and so open with their views inspired me,” says Leo Ebner, a sophomore at Boston College. Mr. Ebner started a club at his high school after watching Mr. Kirk and other right-wing influencers. They “were just so open about their beliefs, and I never really saw that before,” he says.
Victoria Hoffmann/The Christian Science Monitor
Mr. Kirk passed up college to start Turning Point. To Mr. Ebner, this was part of his appeal. “He’s entirely self-taught,” he says. And when Mr. Kirk engaged in debates, “he always knew the answer. I think that was inspiring for a lot of people. Just seeing that people would ask him very difficult questions and he was able to simplify it.”
What distinguished Turning Point from other GOP-affiliated student groups was its provocative style and social-media savvy, says Jeffrey Kidder, a sociologist at Northern Illinois University. Conservatives had long played the contrarians on campus, tweaking liberal sensibilities. But Turning Point updated the playbook and plugged it into the digital-engagement economy.
“Kirk was able to brand certain conservative ideas as fun and exciting in a way that traditional Republican politics used to try to avoid,” says Professor Kidder.
To critics, Mr. Kirk’s brand put a gloss on a hard-right social agenda that drove Mr. Trump’s rise. Mr. Kirk became a defender and innovator of MAGA messaging, befriending Mr. Trump’s eldest son and becoming a trusted member of his inner circle. He amplified Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen and organized busloads of Trump supporters to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Called later to testify before a congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Kirk took the Fifth.
To see Mr. Kirk as merely a campus organizer is to miss the larger political movement he built, says Amy Binder, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored a 2022 book with Professor Kidder about student activism and Turning Point. In many ways, Mr. Kirk was an entrepreneur who understood digital media and built his own political brand to the point where he was a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2024.
“You don’t shift the electorate by just shifting college students,” says Professor Binder. “He was getting a lot of people excited off campuses as well.”
In 2024, Mr. Kirk took credit for getting young male voters in Arizona and other swing states to vote for Mr. Trump. It was the fruit of years of organizing, and it burnished his standing in MAGA, says Professor Binder. “His future looked really bright in MAGA. He could have carried that mantle,” she says.
Staff writer Caitlin Babcock contributed to this report.
