At just 18, he founded the association to bring conservative ideas to colleges. In recent years, he has successfully encouraged younger voters to vote for Trump.

Lights and shadows. And the shadows are thick. The political work of Charlie Kirk—killed Wednesday during an event at the University of Utah—with his association Turning Point USA is rooted in two different and complementary terrains. On the one hand, his real-life college life, where he entered to confront progressive students head-on. On the other, online spaces, as a right-wing influencer. A sort of younger (and perhaps slightly more pop-oriented) version of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro. A well-known and influential voice in right-wing online spaces who knew how to speak to young people the way right-wing youth wanted to hear. Aggressive language, social media self-assurance, the experience of someone who knows how to ride the social media wave well thanks to his young age. A wave that could have overwhelmed him, but which failed to drag him down into the depths of oblivion even when his association was accused of spreading fake news about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kirk throws Maga hats to the audience shortly before the ambush

Turning Point USA

Benedictine University, 2012. Eighteen-year-old Charlie Kirk hadn't even finished high school when he was discovered by Bill Montgomery, an entrepreneur and staunch conservative activist."You can't go to college," the man, more than fifty years his senior, told him when he heard eighteen-year-old Kirk's political speech to the young crowds attending the event."I don't know you," he added,"but you need to start an organization to spread your message among young people." And it was from this meeting that Turning Point USA was born, a nonprofit organization created by Kirk and Montgomery to spread conservative ideals in schools, colleges, and universities, historically fertile grounds for American progressive culture. Today, it has offices in approximately 850 colleges across the country.

Woke ideology and cultural Marxism were his sworn enemies, a synthesis of everything he saw as wrong with contemporary life. He took his battle to the field, namely colleges, in the form of debates titled"Prove me wrong." The arguments often focused on social issues such as immigration, abortion, and gender. And also the defense of the Second Amendment, the right to gun ownership by ordinary citizens."I fully recognize and admit that when you own a firearm, gun-related deaths occur," he said years ago during an event."Freedom has a cost." If you defend Second Amendment rights and claim that you can reduce gun-related deaths to zero, that's a lie."

He presented himself on his social media almost like a knight facing the enemy hordes."Charlie Kirk vs. the Wokies at the University of Tennessee" is the title of one of the countless videos of these live debates that he then posted on his YouTube channel. In the cover image, Kirk is on the left, with a serious look and a finger pointing at the four university students (three of the four are Black) plastered on the right side of the image, their faces contorted into ridiculous expressions. Kirk's style summed up in one image.

And while it may seem like mere influencer mannerisms to us, in real life this kind of content has played a fundamental role in convincing voters his age, who belong to the Millennial group, but now also to Generation Z, to leave their homes and vote for Donald Trump. The same Trump he was initially skeptical of, but who later welcomed him into his team, both formally—Kirk was Don Jr. 's personal assistant and was often welcomed into the White House during both his terms—and as a force to be deployed on social media.

Social media activity and troll factories

A right-wing influencer in every sense of the word, comparable to the famous podcaster Joe Rogan, who has made incendiary statements on his show a hallmark of style. And while Rogan has long been the most followed on Spotify and other listening platforms, Kirk's social media numbers reveal the hold he had on the web crowds. Net of his posthumous followers, his numbers on his platforms remain impressive: over 4 million subscribers on YouTube, over 5 million on X, nearly 9 million on Instagram, and more than 8 million on TikTok, where he posted his latest content just minutes before the attack, filmed from the very stage where he was speaking.

A huge audience, the one he had gathered on social media, and one that happily consumed his political commentary and vitriolic videos against progressives. In some cases, the horde of followers—both online and in person—served his association as a sounding board for the dissemination of highly politicized content. According to what the Washington Post revealed in 2020 (and which we reported on here), groups of enthusiasts (some of them minors) were recruited and paid by Turning Point USA to spread posts that today we would call"controversial": from those on the pandemic ("It's hard to know what to believe," read one such message, referring to the spread of the coronavirus) to those attempting to suggest (not even subtly) that the 2020 election, won by Democrat Joe Biden, was rigged. Thousands of identical messages, copied and pasted as if it were a typical  troll factory automated by bots, very similar to the one that hit the US during the US-coordinated media campaign. But, in this case, it originated from within the United States, from a Turning Point affiliate in Arizona. Yet another battle fought online to push issues so dear to Charlie Kirk. He himself has long pushed skepticism regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and unfounded doubts regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Controversial issues that for now remain orphaned—and no one knows for how long—by a right-wing influencer who spoke the language of young people perfectly.