Charlie Kirk

Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co‑founded the conservative student organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and served as its executive director until his assassination in 2025. A key ally of Donald Trump, he became one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, publishing several books and hosting The Charlie Kirk Show.

Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, Kirk became politically active in high school. He briefly attended college before dropping out to focus on building TPUSA with political donor Bill Montgomery. The project later expanded into affiliate groups such as Turning Point Action and Turning Point Faith. Kirk's activism centered on mobilizing conservative students and promoting Republican causes nationwide.

Kirk advocated for a range of conservative positions, including opposition to abortion, gun control, DEI programs, and LGBTQ rights. Over time, he aligned with the Christian right and advocated for Christian nationalism. His more controversial positions included criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as promotion of COVID-19 misinformation, false allegations of electoral fraud in 2020, and the white genocide conspiracy theory.

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was fatally shot by a rooftop sniper while speaking at a TPUSA debate event at Utah Valley University. His assassination drew international attention and condemnation of political violence, while also sparking partisan dispute. On September 21, almost 100,000 people attended his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

Charles James Kirk was born on October 14, 1993, in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois, to Robert Willard Kirk and Kathryn Smith Kirk (née Smith), and raised in the nearby city of Prospect Heights. His father is an architect who was involved in the construction of Trump Tower. His mother is a former trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who subsequently worked as a mental health counselor. He had one younger sister, Mary, who went on to become an art curator in Chicago.

Kirk described his parents as moderate Republicans. They were active in conservative circles, and his father was a major donor to the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign. Raised in the Presbyterian Church, Kirk was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. He experienced a political awakening in middle school, during which he read books by economist Milton Friedman and became more attracted to the principles of the Republican Party.

In 2010, during his junior year at Wheeling High School, Kirk volunteered for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk (no relation). Also during his junior year, he began listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show, a prominent conservative talk radio broadcast. In his senior year, he initiated a boycott of cookies at the school's cafeteria to reverse a price increase. He also wrote an essay for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in high-school textbooks; it led to his first media appearance on Fox Business at age 17.

In 2012, Kirk applied to West Point but was rejected. Although he was accepted that same year to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he enrolled instead at Harper College, a community college in Palatine, Illinois. Withdrawing after one semester, he left Harper to concentrate on his work with Turning Point USA, the political group he co-founded with conservative businessman and mentor Bill Montgomery. In 2015, Kirk enrolled part-time at King's College in New York City, taking online classes. Kirk did not receive a college degree during his lifetime, a fact he noted in debates with academics and students.

In May 2012, Kirk gave a speech at Benedictine University's "Youth Government Day", where he met Bill Montgomery, who was then a Tea Party-backed legislative candidate. Montgomery later said that the event's speakers had bored the audience of a few hundred high-school kids, but the students began paying rapt attention when Kirk started speaking. Montgomery encouraged Kirk to pursue political activism full time. A month after they first met, Montgomery and Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA, aiming to create an organization that would rival liberal groups such as MoveOn. Kirk described it as a student organization advocating for free markets and limited government. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Kirk met Foster Friess, a former investment manager and prominent Republican donor, and persuaded him to finance the organization.

Kirk remained the executive director, chief fundraiser, and the public face of Turning Point USA until his death in 2025. He became known for visiting college campuses to host informal debates with ideological opponents, typically students, and attempting to persuade them to consider conservative candidates. He often sat behind a table bearing his slogan, "Prove me Wrong". According to the Associated Press, video clips of Kirk's campus appearances spread online, helping him "secure a steady stream of donations that transformed Turning Point into one of the country's largest political organizations". Turning Point eventually began holding massive rallies in which top conservative leaders addressed tens of thousands of young voters. In 2025, TPUSA said it had chapters at more than 2,000 college and high school campuses, and that it had received 32,000 inquiries about starting new chapters in the days after Kirk's death.

TPUSA's activities include publication of the Professor Watchlist and the School Board Watchlist. Critics of these watchlists say they threaten academic freedom and have led to the targeted harassment of academics. In 2019, the Professor Watchlist was briefly suspended by its web host. In 2020, ProPublica investigated TPUSA's finances and found that the organization made "misleading financial claims" and that its audits were not done by an independent auditor. ProPublica also reported that Kirk's salary from TPUSA had increased from $27,000 to nearly $300,000 and that he had bought an $855,000 condo in Longboat Key, Florida. In 2020, Turning Point USA had $39.2 million in revenue. Kirk earned a salary of more than $325,000 from TPUSA and related organizations.

In 2021, TPUSA announced it would launch an online academy as an alternative to schools "poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas". Turning Point Academy was intended to cater to families seeking an "America-first education". Arizona education firm StrongMind initially partnered with TPUSA with plans to open the academy by the fall of 2022 and assessed its "potential to generate over $40 million in gross revenue at full capacity (10,000 students)". The partnership ended after StrongMind received backlash from its own employees, and key subcontractor Freedom Learning Group, which prepared course content for the academy, also backed out. In 2022, Turning Point partnered with Dream City Christian School, a private school that has campuses in Glendale and Scottsdale, Arizona, and is affiliated with Dream City Church. In the 2022–2023 school year, the school received $900,000 in Arizona school voucher funds.

In May 2019, it was reported that Kirk was preparing to launch Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4) designed to elect more conservatives. In July 2019, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action had acquired Students for Trump along with "all associated media assets". He became chairman and launched a campaign to mobilize the youth vote for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign. The unsuccessful effort led TPUSA and the 2020 Trump campaign to blame each other for an overall decline in Trump's youth support. In December 2022, Kirk announced the Mount Vernon Project, an initiative by Turning Point Action to remove members from the Republican National Committee who were not "grassroot conservatives".

From October 2020 until his assassination, Kirk hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a daily three-hour radio talk show, on Salem Media Group's "The Answer" radio channel. It was among the most popular podcasts on Apple Podcasts. According to internal data from TPUSA, Kirk's podcast was downloaded between 500,000 and 750,000 times each day in 2024. Kirk's "Turning Point Live" was a three-hour streaming talk show aimed at Generation Z. TPUSA's monthly online average grew to 111,000 unique visitors in 2021. A February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Kirk's podcast contained the second-highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements among 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters.

In a 2022 episode of his podcast, Kirk called for a "patriot" to bail out of jail the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi's house and attacked and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. Also in 2022, journalist Bari Weiss released a report of internal Twitter documents dubbed "The Twitter Files", which alleged that Twitter was censoring conservative personalities on the social media platform. Weiss posted screenshots of Twitter tools that moderators could use to limit the reach of posts and accounts. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Kirk's Twitter account was flagged under "do not amplify", which meant algorithms would not highlight tweets coming from it.

In April 2024, Kirk created a TikTok account after previously expressing skepticism of the social media platform. His account gained popularity after he posted numerous videos of himself talking to college students on his campus tours, with some videos garnering as many as 50 million views. In February 2025, Kirk signed with the Trinity Broadcasting Network to host a weekday talk show, Charlie Kirk Today.

At TPUSA's college events, Kirk often propounded right-wing populist and nationalist views and invited students to "prove [him] wrong" (stylized in all caps) in front of an audience of vocal supporters. The New York Times reviewed more than four dozen debates at Kirk's twice-yearly university tours, and discussed them with four debate coaches and university professors. The analysis showed Kirk using the debate format to create viral confrontations and "deliver a consistent hard-line message while orchestrating highly shareable moments". The Times described him as having the advantage of having refined his debate performance against hundreds of people and used arguments likely to result in agitated and defensive responses by his less-experienced opponents.

Kirk was influential within the American conservative movement, particularly among young Christians. The New York Times said Kirk symbolized hope for the Christian right. From others, Kirk's political activism received criticism. His rhetoric was described as divisive, racist, xenophobic, and extreme by groups that studied hate speech, including the Southern Poverty Law Center. Kirk disagreed with critics who said he created a toxic online environment, arguing: "Disagreement is a healthy part of our systems." Kirk's positions have been described as far-right by a variety of outlets and academics, and others state that these positions are now in the mainstream of American conservatism.

Kirk was the William F. Buckley Jr. council member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a group "that has served for decades as a hub for a nationwide network of conservative activists and the donors who support them", according to the CNP's September 2020 membership directory leaked in February 2021. He was a spokesperson for CNP Action, the political arm of the CNP. In March 2025, Trump appointed Kirk to the U.S. Air Force Academy Board of Visitors. Kirk's last political rally took place in Kentucky, where he appeared alongside U.S. Senate candidate Nate Morris.

In an interview with Wired during the 2016 Republican National Convention, Kirk said that while he "was not the world's biggest Donald Trump fan", he would vote for him, and that Trump's candidacy made Turning Point's mission more difficult. Kirk flipped to supporting Trump at the convention and spent the remainder of the campaign assisting with travel and media arrangements for Donald Trump Jr. In October 2016, Kirk participated in a Fox News event along with Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Lara Trump that had a pro-Donald Trump tone.

Vice President JD Vance recalled that Kirk first reached out to him in 2017, before Vance entered politics, and that Kirk was one of the first people he called when he considered running for Senate. Kirk introduced him to his eventual campaign managers as well as to Donald Trump Jr. Other notable Republicans also credit Kirk with helping them establish careers in politics.

In July 2019, Kirk became chairman of Students for Trump, which had been acquired by Turning Point Action. The unsuccessful effort of his youth mobilization campaign led TPUSA and the Trump campaign to blame each other for an overall decline in Trump's youth support. In April 2020, Matthew Rosenberg and Katie Rogers wrote in The New York Times that Kirk exemplifies "walking the line between mainstream conservative opinion and outright disinformation" and that "with a powerful ally in the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Kirk both amplifies the president's message and helps shape it."

In May 2021, Kirk married Erika Kirk (née Frantzve), a businesswoman and podcaster who won the Miss Arizona USA pageant competition in 2012. The couple have a daughter, born in August 2022, and a son, born in May 2024.

Kirk's real estate portfolio consisted of three properties, including a $4.75 million estate in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a beachside condominium on the Florida Gulf Coast purchased for $855,000.

On September 10, 2025, while on stage at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, for a TPUSA event, "The American Comeback Tour", Kirk was fatally shot in the neck. The shooting took place at 12:23 p.m. MDT (18:23 UTC), around 20 minutes after the event began, in front of an audience of about 3,000 people. Kirk was taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital in critical condition, where he was pronounced dead later that afternoon.

Authorities arrested the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, in Washington, Utah, on September 12. Four days later, on September 16, he was charged with aggravated murder and other offenses.

On September 14, a public vigil was held for Kirk at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and was attended by Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers, including House speaker Mike Johnson, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A memorial service followed on September 21 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, which reached full capacity with a total turnout nearing 100,000 people. Prominent figures in attendance included President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy Jr., and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The list of speakers included political commentator Tucker Carlson, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Kirk's widow Erika, who publicly forgave Robinson during her remarks.

Following the shooting and before Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump called for prayers for him on Truth Social. Several prominent political figures from both parties, including all living former presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden), echoed the sentiment, as did a number of international heads of governments, among other officials. Internationally, several vigils were held in honor of Kirk outside of the local U.S. embassies. The vigil in Vienna was attended by the youth wing of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, as well as far-right activist Martin Sellner.

In 2018, Kirk was listed on that year's Forbes 30 Under 30 under Law & Policy. In May 2019, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humanities (D.Hum.) from Liberty University.

On September 10, 2025, following Kirk's assassination, President Trump ordered that the flag of the United States be flown at half-staff at the White House, on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the federal government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its territories and possessions, as a mark of respect for Kirk. The order remained in effect until sunset on September 14.

On September 11, President Trump announced that Kirk would posthumously be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He formally bestowed the award on October 14. His widow, Erika, accepted it on his behalf. On September 13, the mayor of the city of Netanya, Israel, announced that a traffic circle in the city would be renamed in honor of Kirk. At Kirk's memorial service on September 21, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn announced that he would be posthumously awarded an honorary degree. On November 12, the city council of Westminster, California, partially renamed a street in the city to Charlie Kirk Way.

On September 16, the commemorative AI-generated song "We Are Charlie Kirk" was released, becoming one of the first AI works to ever list on Billboard and Spotify's viral song charts. In March 2026, the Department of Education hung banners honoring Booker T. Washington, Catharine Beecher, and Kirk as American heroes.

In September 2026, on the one-year anniversary of Kirk's assassination, an eight foot bronze statue of Kirk was unveiled at the TPUSA headquarters in Phoenix. It was temporarily placed outside of the TPUSA facility, with plans to bring it inside at the end of the week for security purposes. The day after the statue was unveiled, it was vandalized with red paint smeared across the neck, face, and torso, as was a nearby Christian memorial poster. In response, Kirk's widow Erika stated that the damages would be repaired and that it would have no impact on his legacy, and the statue was promptly cleaned. Another statue of Kirk, called Freedom, was built and unveiled on the one-year anniversary as well and placed in Times Square.