Conservative American activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday at a university event in Utah.

Kirk, 31, was a close ally of United States President Donald Trump and was widely credited for helping galvanise support for the Republican Party and Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement among American youth, including through regular engagements with university students.

Recommended Stories

list of 4 itemsend of list

He was the cofounder of the conservative youth organisation Turning Point USA. Here is a closer look at Kirk’s influence on young people and how it bolstered support for Trump and the MAGA movement:

Who was Charlie Kirk?

The conservative media personality grew up in Chicago and attended a community college there before dropping out to pursue political activism.

He became friends with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and the pair travelled together to Greenland in January. President Trump had made clear by then that he wanted to absorb the Danish territory into the US even though Denmark and Greenland had both pushed back.

Kirk was an early supporter of Vice President JD Vance while Trump was deciding on his running mate for the 2024 election.

A vocal critic of mainstream media, Kirk engaged in culture-war debates surrounding race, gender and immigration. He amplified and backed Trump’s unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen after Joe Biden won the vote.

Kirk has also been accused of holding racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic positions.

Kirk wrote a post on his X account on Tuesday in response to the fatal, unprovoked stabbing of a white woman by a Black man. He said: “The numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen 3X more often than white on black crime, despite blacks being only 13 percent of the population.”

Advertisement

On September 1, he wrote on his X account that “America does not need more visas for people from India. Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India.”

After the current war in Gaza broke out on October 7, 2023, after a Hamas-led attack on Israel, Kirk spoke at an event expressing solidarity with Israel. “The Muslims’ playbook is: surprise attack, use children and women as human shields, build international support that can then build consensus against Israel, and people will forget that Israel was attacked in the first place.”

In August, musician Taylor Swift got engaged to American football player Travis Kelce. During one of his events, Kirk said getting married might make Swift more conservative, urging her to have children. Kirk said: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

Kirk was a firm supporter of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, which grants Americans the right to bear arms. In an interview this year, he said that “it’s worth it” to have “some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”.

His death prompted condolence messages from Trump, his MAGA base, former US presidents, politicians from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, other public figures and world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Kirk’s shooter is still at large, and a manhunt for his killer continues.

What is Turning Point USA?

Kirk cofounded the nonprofit conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA in 2012 when he was 18 years old. He started it with Bill Montgomery, an American conservative activist who died aged 80 in 2020.

Turning Point has more than 850 chapters on US college campuses, where the organisation conducts discussions and conferences over issues such as immigration, abortion rights – Kirk was against them – and race.

The group also hosts several podcasts, including The Charlie Kirk Show, which reached more than 500,000 listeners each month.

When Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, he was on the first visit of his multicampus Turning Point tour.

In 2019, a British offshoot of the group called Turning Point UK was formed. There is also an Australian offshoot, called Turning Point Australia.

Did Kirk help MAGA?

While the extent of his influence is hard to measure definitively, the MAGA movement, Trump and independent experts all believe he played a crucial role in building support for the president and his political campaign.

Advertisement

“Charlie Kirk had a significant political and mobilising influence among the Trumpist youth,” Ico Maly, an associate professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, told Al Jazeera. Maly teaches courses about digital media and has written about far-right activism.

Maly explained that Kirk’s impact was the result of how he used digital culture in his ideological struggle.

“It was his embrace of digital culture that laid the foundation for his mobilisation power in support of the Trump agenda. His campus rallies were not merely offline performances. They reproduced a familiar digital format: ‘Ask me anything,’” Maly said.

Turning Point USA invested millions of dollars in a “chase the vote” initiative, building relationships with Republican voters in battleground states, registering these voters and assisting them with voting.

What the numbers show

Before the 2024 US presidential election, Kirk visited 25 college campuses on a tour called You’re Being Brainwashed to mobilise young voters. This tour was “hailed by some as the single most important reason for a surge in Trump’s support among the youngest voters”, Australia-based writer

While it is impossible to know how much Kirk’s efforts contributed, Trump benefitted from a clear bump in support among young voters in 2024.

He won 49 percent of the votes of men aged 18 to 49 nationally, up from 43 percent in 2020 and 46 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2024, Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, won 48 percent of the votes of young men. In 2020, Biden won 53 percent of the vote share for this group, and in 2016, Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton won 43 percent of this vote share.

In 2024, Trump won a 42 percent vote share of women aged 18 to 49. While Harris won 56 percent of the votes of this group, his vote share among young women was up from 38 percent in 2020 and 27 percent in 2016.

In the 2024 election, Trump won all seven key battleground states, including Arizona, where he defeated Harris by 187,000 votes. Last year, CNN reported an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter as saying Turning Point USA’s efforts helped bring 125,000 irregular voters in Arizona to the polls. According to CNN, Turning Point drove voters to polling places and helped them with mail-in ballots.

In May, Trump lauded Kirk’s contributions, saying they helped him win the vote of young people in 2024.

“And Charlie Kirk will tell you, TikTok helped, but Charlie Kirk helped also,” Trump said during an Oval Office ceremony.

How did Kirk manage to do this?

The very positions that turned him into a hate figure for some people helped him draw supporters to the MAGA movement too, experts said.

“His mobilisation power was fundamentally rooted in controversy. It is precisely this controversy that made him highly visible online, allowing him to exert significant ideological influence,” Maly said.

Advertisement

McCann added: “Kirk succeeded because he was charismatic, funny and tore apart wokeist ideology. Turning Point USA’s insurgent outreach to Gen Z perfectly complemented Trump’s populist pitch to the entire nation, which asserted that a coterie of insiders – the ‘enemy within’ – were betraying ordinary Americans.”

“People might disagree with Kirk’s populist politics, but it is hard to deny that the Brainwashed tour, magnified by its access to TikTok, addressed matters of substance” in the minds of many American voters, McCann said.