Charlie Kirk, the right-wing political influencer and activist who co-founded Turning Point USA to foster a culture of conservatism on school campuses around the nation, was shot dead while speaking to students at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday. He was 31 years old.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” President Donald Trump wrote Wednesday afternoon on Truth Social. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
One of Kirk’s spokespeople confirmed his death to The New York Times.
Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University at an event on Turning Point USA’s American Comeback Tour when he was shot in the neck while sitting on a table under a small pavilion declaring “Prove Me Wrong.” He was rushed to the hospital, where he was held in critical condition before he died.
Kirk, born and raised in the affluent suburbs of Chicago, embraced political life from a young age, volunteering as a teenager for the successful 2010 Senate campaign of Mark Kirk (no relation). In 2012, as a senior in high school, he wrote a column for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News alleging that students were being indoctrinated by textbooks with a liberal slant. The piece propelled him to an appearance on Fox Business Network and a speaking engagement on a nearby college campus, where he met Bill Montgomery, a retired businessman who encouraged him to pursue activism full-time instead of attending college. Kirk did briefly attend Harper College but soon dropped out, and in 2012 co-founded the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA with Montgomery, who became his mentor. (Montgomery died at 80 in 2020 due to complications from Covid-19.)
From the age of 18, Kirk served as the executive director and public face of Turning Point. The nonprofit says it is “committed to identifying, educating, training, and organizing students to promote freedom,” and promotes “the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” As he grew the operation into a massive media machine, Kirk made frequent appearances on Fox News as a voice of young conservatives, addressing subjects such as free speech at Ivy League universities, drawing tens of millions in donations from powerful Republican donors in the process. Today, according to its website, TPUSA has “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.”
Kirk made thousands of media appearances in his activist career and wrote for many right-leaning press outlets, as well as less partisan publications such as The Hill and Newsweek. He was the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention and the opening speaker at the 2020 RNC. In 2018, he was selected for the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of rising young entrepreneurs. Of his four books, The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future was a number one New York Times bestseller. Although Turning Point, as a 501(c)3 organization, cannot technically involve itself in partisan political activity, Kirk served as a key surrogate for Trump — with whom he became close allies — through his public appearances and on his popular podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, as well as through his YouTube channel, which has nearly 4 million subscribers and has accumulated more than a billion views altogether.
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Kirk is survived by his wife, Erika, and their two young children.
From Rolling Stone US
