The life and death of Charlie Kirk
You could love him. Or love to hate him. But you couldn't ignore him.
Air Force Two touched down in Phoenix yesterday carrying the casket of 31-year-old conservative organizer and influencer Charlie Kirk.
The homecoming of Kirk — whose assassination in Utah on Wednesday was both shocking and tragically easy to imagine in today’s violent political climate — marks not only the return of one of Arizona’s most prominent political figures, but the arrival of a political era defined by hatred.
Kirk founded the influential MAGA youth organization Turning Point USA, which has become one of the defining movements of modern conservative populism. He largely made his name right here in Arizona, organizing on liberal college campuses and hosting rage-baiting debates about race, gender, sexuality, religion and identity.
The deeply Christian activist could objectively be called kind and charismatic, or cruel and condescending — a thought leader of the new right, or a dorm room philosopher spouting anti-gay, anti-trans hatred masquerading as free speech.
But whatever you think of his beliefs, his influence on the Republican Party — and on Arizona — is undeniable.
Kirk was ubiquitous. You were as likely to spot him at the Scottsdale Unified School District meeting as at the White House. And everywhere he went, he was adored by the MAGA right and reviled by the progressive left.
He was among the most polarizing figures in American politics. And the violent death of one of the fiercest allies of Donald Trump sparked equal parts crass glee and bloodthirsty vengeance, depending on your particular corner of the internet.
While police and the FBI continue the search for his killer, calls of retribution are already breaking out, including from the president, who pledged from the Oval Office just hours after Kirk’s shooting to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he said.
In the wake of Kirk’s untimely demise, the nation is filled with more fear, anger and resentment. And a lot of questions: Who killed him? Why? What comes next for the movement he founded? And what does his murder portend for the future of American politics?
Those questions are too big for us to answer.
But we’ll help you contextualize and make sense of this moment as best we can.
Putting down roots in the desert
While Kirk started Turning Point in Illinois, the organization found its footing in his adopted home of Arizona.
The political influence network that Kirk first founded more than a decade ago officially moved its headquarters to a Phoenix business park in 2019. And Turning Point strategically mobilized student groups, nabbed precinct committeemen seats and raised millions for far-right campaigns across Arizona.
Turning Point’s footprint in Arizona has included extravagant campaign rallies, extensive political messaging, loads of employees and an army of young volunteers to fight on the frontlines of the culture wars.
And while the organization’s influence is undeniable, its tangible results have been mixed.
The state Legislature is loaded with Turning Point-approved candidates who have won seats in Republican-leaning districts, but the organization’s candidates for higher office in Arizona have mostly flamed out in the increasingly purple state.
In 2020, Trump lost the presidential race in Arizona, despite the massive investment from Turning Point’s ground troops, which included paying Arizona teenagers to push pro-Trump messaging on social media. (Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman’s marketing firm ran the program.)
Besides lending its grassroots ground troops, its campaign arm spent around $500,000 boosting Republican campaigns for major Arizona state positions in 2022. But the Turning Point touch didn’t work: Turning Point-backed Kari Lake lost her bid for governor, Blake Masters lost his bid for U.S. Senate, and almost every other statewide Republican candidate also failed.
The group learned from its mistakes and redefined its campaign strategy last year by “directly using outside organizations to lead canvassing efforts to turn out voters,” NPR wrote. In Arizona, TPAction deployed thousands of troops to chase over 315,000 ballots in 2024. But its highest-profile endorsee, Lake, lost her U.S. Senate race, and many in GOP circles cited Turning Point’s narrow focus on only the MAGA base as a prime factor.
This year, Hoffman’s new firm, 1TEN, received nearly $440,000 from the Turning Point PAC to support U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs’ gubernatorial campaign.
Before his death, Kirk was laying the groundwork for the 2026 election push in his home swing state, and his organization was expanding its reach to focus on everything from ousting Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne from office to sweeping utility-regulation boards like the Corporation Commission and Salt River Project.
What Kirk stood for
For those of you who haven’t been following Kirk’s career, the New York Times has a handy roundup of some of the big issues he focused on. Here are the highlights:
He opposed gay and transgender rights and the separation of church and state, and wanted students to report professors who embraced what conservatives view as “gender ideology.”
He endorsed the Great Replacement Theory on immigration, which says immigrants are displacing white Americans.
He was a fierce advocate for free speech, but also created a Professor Watchlist where students would identify leftist professors for harassment and cancellation.
He supported gun rights and, in a statement that was quoted often on social media by his critics, he said gun deaths were worth the cost “so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Instead of cutting back on guns, the way to reduce gun violence was for everyone to have a gun.
He dismissed climate change, calling it “complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash.”
He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake” that had become an “anti-white weapon.” He called Martin Luther King, Jr. an “awful” person.
And he opposed affirmative action, calling Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a “diversity hire.”
Education’s outside agitator
While Turning Point has chapters at more than 850 colleges and universities across the nation, perhaps no school is more closely associated with Turning Point than Arizona State University.
In many ways, ASU became the home base for Kirk’s free speech crusade. His fixation on the university in his home state led to a decade-long clash between Kirk-enthusiasts, students, administrators and even the Legislature as Kirk hosted campus debates, organized visits from well-known conservatives and put ASU professors on a “Watchlist.”
One of the highest-profile flare-ups came in 2023, when Kirk was part of a "Health, Wealth & Happiness" seminar with conservative radio talk show host and writer Dennis Prager and “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki.
ASU faculty signed a petition and joined students in protest, and a donor was so mad about the protest that he pulled his money from the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett Honors College and gave it to Grand Canyon University instead.
Although the event went on as planned, the state Legislature also took notice. A joint state legislative committee ordered the university to investigate whether conservative free speech was being stifled on campus.
Kirk went on the offensive, adding every professor involved in the petition to Turning Point’s “Professor Watchlist” — an online database of educators Kirk deemed to have “radical behavior” that the organization still maintains.
After professors started receiving threats, ASU President Michael Crow sent Kirk a letter asking him to remove them from the watchlist. In October 2023, an LGBTQ+ professor on the watchlist was pushed to the ground by members of Turning Point USA. The attackers admitted to the charges as part of diversion agreements.
Kirk wasn’t deterred from visiting ASU. His most recent visit to campus was in September 2024. Kirk was joined by Lake at a "Greeks for Trump" voter registration drive.
Besides dominating the college conservative space, Turning Point has around 20 chapters in high schools and community groups across Arizona.
And Turning Point’s anti-educator activism isn’t limited to college campuses.
The organization also created a “School Board Watchlist,” where parents can identify “radical” districts that promote “anti-American, radical, hateful, immoral, and racist teachings in their districts.”
As we noted in 2021, its messaging hasn’t exactly been subtle.
The website for its School Board Watchlist features the words “The Battle To Save America’s Classrooms” scrawled over clips of people fighting with police, shouting down school board members and getting arrested at school board meetings.
From hated to venerated
Kirk was the kind of guy you either loved — or you loved to hate.
And he seemed to revel in it.
Like any skilled political practitioner, he knew that if his enemies weren’t attacking him, it meant he didn’t matter. And there was rarely a time when Kirk didn’t matter.
When “South Park” ran an episode lampooning Kirk earlier this year, for example, Kirk loved it. He changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of Cartman and told Fox News it proved he made a cultural impact. (South Park pulled the episode from the air after his death.)
“We as conservatives need to be able to take a joke,” Kirk said of the episode. ”We're all broken people. Stop taking yourself so seriously. That's probably one of the problems that we've had in our politics is that people can't take a joke.”
But in death, he’s ascended to a strange new status — venerated as an agent of free speech by some of the lefty elitists he raged against.
Since the shooting, pundits who used to deride Kirk’s politics are now lavishing him with praise for talking to people who disagreed with him. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, for example, said Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
“He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.”
A martyr in the era of political violence
Kirk wasn’t just murdered — he was assassinated in a calculated act of terror.
And the body politic is still grappling with what that means.
The shooting, The New Yorker wrote, “had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic.” You could even see it in the shooting itself. As soon as the shot rang out, the people closest to the stage threw themselves on the ground, quickly followed by those behind them, “in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading.”
He’s the most prominent victim of political assassination in the U.S. in recent memory, but far from the only one. The shootings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, an attack on the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt on Trump, and now the Kirk shooting all prove we’re entering a “new era of political violence,” akin to the 1960s, which saw assassinations of the highest-profile politicians in the country, as the Washington Post wrote.
Kirk himself warned about the spread of “assassination culture,” as the Washington Post editorial board noted.
The shooting super-charged the idea that the country was “basically a tinderbox,” the New York Times wrote, and we might have “entered an even more perilous phase” of an ongoing crisis of political violence.
And as a devout Christian, Kirk’s murder wasn’t just cast in political terms — it was wrapped in religious righteousness.
A former colleague of Kirk who now runs a podcast described news anchors as “demons” and Kirk as a martyr. The pastor at Kirk’s church in Phoenix said Kirk’s death will only strengthen his congregation’s resolve that “marriage is between a man and a woman” and “there are only two sexes.”
"What the enemy has tried to do today is silence the people of God, silence the men and women of God. Well, you just unleashed the dragon," Dream City Church Senior Pastor Luke Barnett told his congregation, per the Republic.
In Congress, they held a moment of silence, but Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert wanted a spoken prayer, which led to jeers from Democrats about Republicans ignoring a school shooting the same day Kirk was shot. GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida shouted “you all caused this” at Democrats, who then called for gun control.
Young people are likely to get hit hard by Kirk’s death. He built an empire on college campuses, and many students felt like they knew him personally. That affinity has led some of his friends and allies to call for war.
“What starts as a political difference becomes a blood feud the instant someone is hurt or killed…And when he was shot in the middle of a debate, the assassin didn’t just take aim at a precious human being, created in the image of God, he took aim at the American experiment itself,” New York Times columnist David French wrote.
In the wake of the shooting, several historically Black colleges received threats. One of them immediately shut down all non-essential activity.
And members of Congress cancelled outdoor events and started beefing up their security planning.
“This is a War”
Arizona’s politicians' thoughts and prayers came pouring out after news of the shooting broke, coupled with mass condemnations of political violence.
Others, however, declared war.
Republican state Rep. Rachel Keshel announced, “The Democrat party is dead,” and joined Libs of TikTok in outing the workplaces of people for offenses ranging from criticizing Kirk’s rhetoric to celebrating his death.
Her husband, the Trump-aligned election conspiracist Seth Keshel went a step further, writing on his Substack that “the leftist base of the United States is a terrorist front.”
"The left are not Americans. They are demon-possessed, hate-filled sycophants for a cause of evil, and I am done mincing words and playing nice."
Republican Rep. Nick Kupper called Sen. Ruben Gallego a “waste of human flesh” for declaring that “political violence has to stop by all sides.”
And Kari Lake told Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes to “repent” for prosecuting Turning Point executives, like Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer, in the fake electors case.
The line of succession
While his fans and family grieve, there’s one question on the minds of political operators across the country: Who can fill Kirk’s shoes?
Turning Point has many deputies across the state and nation, but none emerge as obvious heirs to the multimillion-dollar MAGA youth empire Kirk built.
But two names come up more often than others: Tyler Bowyer, the COO of Turning Point Action, the organization’s campaign arm, and Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, a longtime Turning Point ally and consultant.
Both were members of Arizona’s slate of fake electors.
But they’re not Charlie Kirk. Neither one has built more than a decade of trust and respect with Kirk’s audience and contacts.
And Turning Point is full of ambitious conservatives who might also fancy themselves the next Kirk.
Conservative activist, commentator, and provocateur Jack Posobiec, a former One America News Network anchor who helped guest-host Kirk’s show on Thursday, is another name that comes up a lot in conversations about who will lead the movement.
Other names include Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA who manages communications and public relations and has been involved in voter mobilization efforts and producing “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
Republican state Rep. Justin Olson, who is Turning Point’s longtime financial leader; former state Sen. Justine Wadsack, who now works at Turning Point, and missed a hearing in her own lawsuit last month because she was at a Turning Point event; and former state Rep. Austin Smith worked as senior director at Turning Point Action, but had to resign after he was accused of forging signatures to get on the 2024 Republican primary ballot. He was rehired in January.
Turning Point has plenty of staffers, influencers, and would-be heirs. What it doesn’t have is another Kirk.
Perhaps the question isn’t just who takes over Turning Point and fills Kirk’s shoes.
It’s whether anyone can.
Kirk was not deeply Christian. He was a Christian nationalist.
Hey Hank and Nichole, best reporting yet on Kirk and Arizona...haven't seen anything in depth from Yvonne yet. Keep up the great work, especially the Bolles push. Thank you.