Charlie Kirk, pied piper of the American right

THE CROWD at the University of California Riverside was riled up. A few thousand people—locals and students at this public university outside Los Angeles—had gathered on a campus lawn to watch Charlie Kirk debate anyone who would challenge him. Many of them knew Mr Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative activist, from social-media videos documenting his debates with college students. These have titles like “45 Minutes of Charlie Kirk SHUTTING DOWN College Kids”.

To his supporters, Mr Kirk is more than a conservative activist: he is an evangelist of the right, St Paul SHREDDING the libtard Gentiles. He started Turning Point USA, the country’s most prominent conservative youth organisation, “to save the greatest culture and country ever to exist”, as he put it in a video from 2023. Although some on the right might see that goal as accomplished by Donald Trump’s re-election last year, he remains in organising mode. Many of Mr Trump’s most ardent supporters have recently become disillusioned by his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Mr Kirk has attempted, on his podcast, to lead this unruly flock back to their master. As Mr Trump loses popularity and the rift within his party grows, the coming months will test whether Mr Kirk has made a lasting mark on American politics.

As the crowd at UC Riverside chanted “USA”, Mr Kirk took the mic under a tent emblazoned with the challenge “Prove me wrong.” A freshman biology student wearing a bucket hat attempted to do just that. He said he wanted to debate abortion. When Mr Kirk, a devout, pro-life evangelical, asked the student to define life, he responded that life began at “consciousness and speech”. Mr Kirk interjected that babies usually don’t start speaking until they are a year old, “so if I murdered you at six months, that’s ok?” Backed into a corner, the flustered student doubled down. “Yes,” he said firmly. The crowd bayed. “The fact that he’s a biology student at this university shows the horrifying moral rot happening at higher education,” said Mr Kirk, as the student was ushered away. Shortly after, a video was posted to Mr Kirk’s YouTube channel: “UCR Bio Student Justifies Abortion Past Birth”.

As a boy, Mr Kirk styled himself someone who was unafraid to call out bad ideas, as he saw them. At his high school in the Chicago suburbs, he championed small government and the theories of Milton Friedman and pushed classmates to justify their fervour for Barack Obama, the lodestar of the Democratic Party at the time. It wasn’t just the ideas of the right that drew him. Being a conservative at his uniformly liberal school was an act of rebellion. “I had something in me that wanted to push back against the orthodoxy of the time,” he said in a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, another conservative media star.

Mr Kirk found his milieu with an older crowd. As the rare high-schooler brimming with zeal for free markets and small government, he began talking at local Tea Party gatherings. In 2012, at the urging of a mentor he met at one such event, he dropped out of college, which he’d attended for just a few weeks, in order to focus on activism. Mr Kirk began travelling to Midwestern colleges to win over students for conservatism. Sitting at a card table next to a poster that read “I think government should be smaller”, he debated any student who approached. He adored the “verbal combat”, as he has described it, and he realised that, despite being a drop-out, he could hold his own against college kids.

When Mr Kirk wasn’t touring colleges, he was going to cocktail parties in Palm Beach in search of funding for the nascent Turning Point USA. He was a gangly 18-year-old who didn’t know how to knot a necktie, yet he quickly figured out how to part Republican donors from their money. He told them that he was going to challenge the dominion of liberalism on America’s campuses. As college students began embracing illiberal ideas like “deplatforming” conservative speakers, donors found Mr Kirk’s sales pitch ever more appealing.

Even the preternaturally confident Mr Kirk could not have foreseen how successful he would be. He has also deployed his talents as an organiser and fundraiser in service of the Republican Party, raising $100m to convince low-propensity voters in battleground states to vote for Mr Trump during last year’s election.

The evidence suggests it worked. TP USA now has chapters at 850 colleges. A survey conducted by TikTok found that, among users under 30 who voted for Mr Trump in 2024, Mr Kirk is the most trusted individual on the platform. Mr Kirk’s videos may have helped Mr Trump regain the presidency. After all, Kamala Harris won young voters by 12 points less than Joe Biden did in 2020, a bigger swing than for any other age group. Mr Trump reportedly attributes this reversal to Mr Kirk.

Thirteen years since Mr Kirk first set up his card table at a college, he is still inviting students to prove him wrong. But he is now a grown man, a seasoned debater and close ally of the president. And since 2018 he travels with a camera crew, the better to capture the idiocies of his opponents—who are still not old enough, in many cases, to order a beer. In the early days of Turning Point USA, Mr Kirk attempted to win the hearts and minds of the people standing in front of him. Now, he turns them into content to win hearts and minds online.

At UC Riverside, a woman steps up to the mic. Montserrat Marroquin, a 22-year-old senior, began by politely informing Mr Kirk that she was “open to learning”. Civil at first, their discussion grew heated when they began to debate sexual consent. Mr Kirk asked whether a man should seek a woman’s permission to kiss her. Ms Marroquin thought he should. Mr Kirk was appalled. “You’ve exhibited why young men are moving right so dramatically, because they don’t want to be called rapists at every turn,” he said. The crowd roared.

As a crestfallen Ms Marroquin walked away, one of Mr Kirk’s staff rushed up to her, to assure her of Mr Kirk’s good intentions. Mr Kirk is clearly sensitive to the criticism that, in debating students, he is no longer tangling with peers. He has said that he “tries to be more tender” with students intent on good-faith conversations. But he had no time to consider whether he had lived up to that ambition in Ms Marroquin’s case. The cameras were rolling and there were liberals to CRUSH. ■