Charlie Kirk, who helped build support for Trump among young people, dies after the shooting on campus

Charlie Kirk, who stood from a teenage conservative campus activist to a top podcaster and ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed on Wednesday during one of his characteristic public performances at a university in Utah. He was 31.

Kirk died and did what made him a powerful political strength – the right to a university campus, this time Utah Valley University. The event started a planned series of Kirk College -performances from Colorado to Virginia called “The American Comeback Tour”.

His murder was one of an escalating number of attacks on political figures, from the murder of a democratic state legislator and her husband in Minnesota to last summer’s shooting at Trump, who put the nation.

Trump announced Kirk’s death on his social media site, Truth Social.

Kirk personified the combative, populist conservatism that the Republican Party has taken over in the Trump era. An unabashed Christian conservative that often made provocative explanations about gender, race and politics, KIRK launched his organization, Turning Point USA, in 2012, aimed at younger people and ventured into liberal university campuses where many Gop activists were nervous to walk.

In the middle of the right of the center universe

During the first run of the president of the president, a stoker from Trump, Kirk took the turning point of one of a constellation of well -funded conservative groups to the center of the just universe.

The political wing of Turning Point helped with the efforts of the Vote for the 2024 campaign, in an attempt to ratify dissatisfied conservatives that rarely vote. Trump won Arizona, the home of Turn Point, with five percentage points after he has closely lost it in 2020 and the group. The group is known for its events that often have strobe lighting and pyrotechnics. It claims more than 250,000 student members.

Trump praised Kirk on Wednesday, who started as an unofficial consultant during the Trump 2016 campaign and became more recently a confidant. “He was a very good friend of mine and he was a huge person,” Trump told the New York Post.

Kirk showed an apocalyptic style in his popular podcast, radio show and on the campaign track. During a appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he said that Democrats stand for everything that God hates. ” Kirk called the Trump vs. Kamala Harris choice ‘a spiritual fight’.

“This is a Christian state. I would like to see it that way,” Kirk told the approximately 10,000 Georgians, who at one point came to Kirk in a deafening singing of “Christ is King! Christ is King!”

Influence a new generation of conservatives

Kirk was a regular presence at university campuses. Last year, for the social media program ‘Surrounded’, he faced 20 liberal university students to defend his views, including that abortion is murder and should be illegal.

The author of various books, including one in the second amendment, Kirk was an avid supporter of armor rights.

“I think it is worth cost, unfortunately, some gun deaths every year, so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other rights given by God,” Kirk said during a turning point event in Salt Lake City in 2023, adding that the deaths of weapons can be reduced but will never disappear.

Admirers emphasized that, for all confrontational rhetoric of Kirk, he enjoyed the debate and the free exchange of ideas. “His entire project was built on reaching over the gap and the use of speech, no violence, to tackle and resolve the problems!” William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, posted on X.

Kirk’s style was influential for a new generation of conservatives. Republican rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida spoke about the steps of the Capitol after the shooting on Wednesday, which reflects on Kirk’s influence on her political journey.

“I had to go to the medical school. Charlie Kirk called me the day before I had to leave and recruited me to be the National Hispanic Outreach director for the organization,” Luna said. “I was with him with many of them, debated about those children, and that conversation must happen. You can’t insert that.”

Kirk was married to Podcaster Erika Frantzve. They have two young children.

Zeal for challenging liberals

Turning Point was founded in 2012 in the outskirts of Chicago by a then 18-year-old Kirk and William Montgomery, a tea party activist, to proselyen at university campuses for low taxes and limited government. It was not an immediate success.

But Kirk’s zeal for confronting liberals in the academic world eventually won an influential series of conservative financiers.

Despite early doubts, the turning point enthusiastically supported Trump after he had conquered the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal assistant to Donald Trump Jr. during the general election campaign.

Kirk soon became a regular presence on cable TV, where he bowed into the cultural wars and praised the then president. Trump and his son were just as exuberant and often spoke on turning point conferences.

Kirk announced that he organized buses to travel to Washington on January 6, 2021 to support Trump and later raised the fifth amendment instead of answering questions from the subcommittee of January 6.

Also in 2021, when he performed the criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement at university campuses, Kirk George Floyd, the black man whose murder in 2020, called by the police of Minneapolis protests that Trump’s last year in office, a ‘bastard’, a ‘bastard’.

“Just this is not completely messing around,” said Kirk during the event in Mankato, Minnesota. “It was built by beautiful Scandinavians, and it seems like it is being destroyed now, rather deliberately.”

While the money came in, Kirk bought an estate in $ 4.75 million in Spanish style in a Gated Arizona Country Club. Turning Point sent millions of dollars to contractors owned by Kirk and his employees, and some Republicans were skeptical when it announced that it would be an attempt to turn out to be rare voters during Trump’s 2024 campaign.

But while younger voters shifted in 2024 and Trump ran a five -point margin of the victory in Arizona, Kirk and his allies claimed the justification of his vision of a sharp oriented conservatism on a sharp setting.

In favor of a new Christian conservatism

Kirk’s Evangelical Christian beliefs were intertwined with his political perspective and he argued that there was no true separation of church and state.

He also referred to the Seven Mountain -Mandate that specifies seven areas where Christians must lead – politics, religion, media, business, family, education and art, and entertainment.

In the preface of a book written by a pastor and Turning Point Staffer to be published next week, Kirk wrote: “In present -day America, Christian believers are confronted with a frightening and broad range of dangers and threats. We are not threatened by new false gods, but by the return of demons of long ago.”

Kirk argued for a new conservatism that argued for freedom of expression, challenging Big Tech and the media and the centering of Americans of working class outside the capital of the country.

“We must ask ourselves a question as a conservative movement: are we going back to the party of the status -quo -riging class?” He said in his speech that opened the conservative political action conference in 2020.

“Or are we going to learn from what I call the Maga doctrine? The Maga doctrine, a doctrine of American renewal, Revival, one that is America the largest country in the history of the world.”

Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, Joey Cappelletti, Brian Slodysko and Matt Brown in Washington and Hillel Italy in New York have contributed to this report.