How Charlie Kirk Shaped Conservative Politics

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This is Andrew, an audiobook narrator in Los Angeles, California.

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Seems like people from radio would be interested in that position.

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover cover politics.

I'm Elena Moore.

I also cover politics.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And today on the show, we're talking about conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot yesterday during an event at Utah Valley University.

His death has become a political flashpoint in the last 24 hours, and we want to talk about what that means.

Elena, let's start with you.

I want you to talk a little bit about who Charlie Kirk was.

We should say he was only 31 when he was assassinated.

This guy has been in the public eye, in the national political scene, for more than a dozen years.

He started Turning Point USA when he was just 18.

That was 2012, in the midst of former President Obama's second campaign.

He decided to start a group that was kind of meant to counter some of those progressive, college-focused liberal groups and provide a space, almost a counterculture type space for someone who wasn't a progressive young person.

And that exploded.

I mean, in the more than a decade since it's turned into multiple nonprofits connected to Turning Point USA.

He had an advocacy wing that worked on campaigns, and we saw him morph into a really close ally of President Trump and the Trump family.

Yeah, I mean, this is somebody who would go around campuses.

This was a big piece of what he did, trying to argue with.

with people literally to say, prove me wrong, right?

He would have people step up to microphones.

He would answer whatever they would throw back at him.

But he was very combative, you know, and a lot of the things that he said were controversial and became really a lightning rod for a lot of liberals.

He was ubiquitous on TikTok and Instagram, more than 8 million followers on each of those platforms for him and his podcast.

He was really effective at what he did with young men in particular and getting a lot of young men to become Trump voters.

But a lot of his thoughts, again, on women, DEI, transgender people, they were things that made a lot of liberals upset with what he was doing on these college campuses.

I think his entire MO was: free speech should mean free speech.

And so that's what this prove me wrong campaign was.

And that's what he was doing when he was fatally shot.

Free speech was center, and obviously we can talk more about what that meant for him and what that looked like in his views.

But that was kind of key here: of fostering a space where, for lack of a better phrase, like you wouldn't get canceled for sharing your more far-right, conservative, firebrand opinions.

He felt like say the outrageous thing and be allowed to do that and challenge the politically correct environment on campuses.

And a lot of times the things that he said were absolutely politically incorrect.

Yeah.

From my understanding, this was like the beginning of what was going to be a college tour.

And he was sort of in the middle of a conversation about gun policy.

Can you fill in more about like how this happened?

Yeah.

So obviously there are a lot of really disturbing videos that capture this moment online.

It appears that the question that Kirk was being asked and debating was about gun violence and shooters.

There's obviously been a lot of rhetoric on the right.

They argue that there's a large number of school shooters that are transgender.

That's something that's disputed and it's a very small number of people, but that's the conversation they were having.

They were talking about numbers of how many people who identify as trans participate in gun violence and how common that is.

And he was in the middle of talking about this horrible thing being shot at school.

And then he was shot.

And like Domenico said, he's never shied away from topics.

And so the conversation itself isn't surprising, but the timing is certainly horrible.

There's a difference, though, obviously, between having disagreements, being able to have those verbal sparring matches, and not have that turn into something violent.

And I think that's where a lot of people in this country are very concerned about the political moment that we're in, because this violence is not relegated to one party or the other.

There have been targets from people who are in both parties just over the last year, year and a half that you can add up more than half a dozen of those, from fire bombings of a governor's mansion in Pennsylvania to Tesla EV stations, electric charging stations being set on fire, to the state senator in Minnesota.

There's a lot of this that goes around.

The problem is how do people respond to it?

And

I think social media is one of those things that has made things worse in many ways because it has really moved people to their corners and there isn't a lot of coming together.

You know, I think conservatives for a long time had been trying to figure out a way to effectively communicate with young people on conservative issues.

Why was Kirk so effective at it?

On top of just having a big social media platform, I think his central message was a fairly simple one and one that aligned with what Trump was pitching to young people, which is,

you know, we see you.

We see the struggles that you feel financially.

We see the othering that some some have argued they've felt in social settings for feeling more conservative.

And more than anything, I heard him say, you know, both when I've interviewed him and publicly, you know, speaking at the Republican National Convention, the Republican Party, he would argue, wants you to have a better life than your parents.

And that is a simple message that I think we're hearing from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

But I actually talked to Charlie Kirk on the phone the morning after President Trump won re-election in November.

And I asked him, like, what is Trump's draw with young people?

They don't look at it as economic or social.

There's one above.

They just want to live in the same country as their parents.

I don't know if that's a social issue or an economic issue.

That's just,

they want a nice life and they feel it slipping away.

They feel as if insanity is creeping into their institutions.

I think that that's a message that people are going to keep emulating.

Yeah, I mean, it really speaks to the populism that's been so popular, frankly, in the age of Trump on both the left and right.

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to take a quick break.

More in a moment.

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And we're back, back and we've been talking about conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed yesterday.

The response to Kirk's death has been markedly partisan, even though as of taping this, we don't know the motive for the shooting.

Domenico, I do want you to talk about some of the responses and reactions we've been getting to this from the media and social media.

What have you seen so far?

Yeah, it's been interesting because,

you know, some Democratic leaders, former presidents Obama and Biden, you know, said that they were really calling for calm, saying that this was

a moment when people have to come together and think about the family that Charlie Kirk has left behind here and that violence is never acceptable.

I thought it was a very powerful statement from Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah.

where this happened, by the way.

And Cox really also called for people to come together.

And he also mentioned some of the violence against

Democrats in the country, whether it was Minnesota or elsewhere.

And he was really trying to push back against those who might feel good that Charlie Kirk is no longer here and saying, you know, kind of try to be more human than that.

Put your pens down, step away from the computer.

And I thought it was a really powerful statement.

Yeah, President Trump made comments on a video last night in response to Kirk's death.

Actually, here is some of what he said.

It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today,

and it must stop right right now.

Domenico, what do you make of this response?

Well, you know, experts will say that it's not helpful when it comes to trying to tamp down political violence.

Now, I do understand that this is personal for President Trump.

You know, he's someone who considered Charlie Kirk to be like a son.

He was very close to his son, Donald Trump Jr., who said he considered him to be like a little brother.

And of course, Trump was targeted himself in a political assassination attempt.

And you know,

I do think, though, we have to put in context the fact that we don't know the motivations of this shooter at this point.

And the person who attacked President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania was someone who was not necessarily politically motivated, but wanted to have a large-scale event and was also scouting out where President Biden was going to be.

But, you know, sometimes the conclusions get far out beyond the facts because it fits people's people's narratives very conveniently.

But what Trump was saying there, just talking about radical left-wing rhetoric, is obviously very different than what we heard from Spencer Cox.

And I think that's more what people would say would help tamp down this kind of political violence and take the temperature down.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

And I mean, we should emphasize here, like, Kirk was a controversial figure.

He definitely had a lot of people who disagreed with him.

But I think that what's really kind of shaken a lot of young conservatives is like, this was a man who his entire message was free speech, free speech.

You should be able to say what you want.

And he was killed.

And we don't know why he was killed, but I cannot imagine how that sits with

a lot of students who were kind of feeling empowered by him being so kind of open about his views like that.

Yeah.

And, you know, when you watch or listen to a lot of conservative media, which I did yesterday, you had some people like Jesse Waters on Fox saying that this is war, that they've waged war, and how are we going to respond?

You know, it's the kind of thing that is,

it kind of makes for good TV, right?

Because outrage makes for good TV, but it's not necessarily something that helps in these situations.

Yeah.

I do wonder, though, where the movement that Charlie Kirk sort of shepherded into a big win for Trump last year, where it goes from here.

First of all, can we get a sense of the scale of how effective that operation was?

Yeah.

Well, like, you know, like we've said, this man was a huge like media personality, but he was an organizer and in many ways a recruiter.

I mean, Turning Point USA, like we said, started in 2012.

Its website now says it has over 800 college chapters.

Last year, the group and its nonprofits linked to the organization reported roughly an annual revenue of $100 million.

This is a massive organization that he started.

It's also brought in a lot of conservative firebrands to the mainstream.

I mean, I think about, you know, Florida Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna, who's one of the youngest members of Congress.

She worked for Turning Point.

She was supported by Kirk, and I actually spoke with her this morning, and she's obviously devastated.

She credits a lot of her career to him.

I think there are a lot of people like that who felt awakened and inspired because there was this big organization they could kind of be a part of and rise up in.

And not to mention, you know, Turning Point Action, the advocacy wing of Turning Point USA, played a role alongside the Trump campaign in the 2024 election.

They were tasked with helping mobilize voters in key swing states like Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin.

All states Trump won.

We don't know the extent that Turning Point directly contributed, but we do know that young voters especially you know, shifted right.

And I think in some way, shape or form, part of that conversation includes Charlie Kirk.

You know, Kirk was quite effective.

I mean, there aren't a lot of people who are willing to do what he did in saying, hey, ask me anything and then argue his point.

He had an agenda clearly, and he was willing to do it in a way that was, you know, provocative, but he didn't mind that, right?

And he was willing to have that debate, have that argument, try to convince people of his views.

There's a real question on who can really step in to do that because not a lot of people really want to be able to, or are able, frankly, to do that at all.

Yeah.

And, you know, I will say, I don't think it's going to be one person.

And, like we've said, this man was a controversial figure.

He said a lot of things a lot of people didn't like.

But for the folks who did agree with him, I think there will be a mobilization because of it.

Even in the last, you know, less than 24 hours while we're taping this pod, there have been, you know, conservative influencers, content creators, organizers who have developed followings over the last few years who have come out and reflected on how Kirk influenced them.

And so, you know, there's a lot of questions about about how the Republican Party can sustain and potentially even build on their youth coalition after the 2024 election.

It remains to be seen how this affects that.

Does it rally people?

Does it, you know, bring people together?

We'll have to see, but I'll definitely be watching it.

All right.

Well, let's leave it there for today.

I'm Ashley Lopez.

I cover politics.

I'm Elena Moore.

I also cover politics.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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