Charlie Kirk obituary

The US political activist Charlie Kirk, who has been murdered at the age of 31 by a sniper at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, enjoyed an influence far greater than his years or his lack of formal public service would suggest. A fluent debater and effective organiser, not least on college campuses, he stood for the darker themes of the newly resurgent US nativism that have accumulated around the US president Donald Trump, who called him a “martyr for truth”.

At recent Republican conventions Kirk was a conservative star, and he had a direct line to Trump through being a frequent visitor to both the White House and Mar-a-Lago, the president’s base in Florida. Though not a household name outside America, in the US he was well known enough to have been recently satirised by the animated TV show South Park, along with Trump, JD Vance and the secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem.

His omnipresent posts on social media regularly disparaged trans, gay, black and Jewish people. He was a proponent of the racist “great replacement theory”, and on his podcast in 2023 he blamed Jews for “pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”. Increasingly drawn to Christian nationalism, he believed that women – including the pop star Taylor Swift, to whom he offered unsolicited advice on her recent engagement – should “submit” to their husbands.

He rejected efforts at gun control, opining only a few months ago: “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” A climate change denier and an opponent of abortion, he promoted a number of conspiracy theories, including Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden, and spread misinformation about the Covid pandemic.

Kirk’s admirers in the US and elsewhere – including the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson – mourned his killing as the loss of a free speech advocate. In reality, Kirk believed in the right to speak only his kind of views, and sought to silence others, despite his willingness to debate with opponents. Through Turning Point USA, the organising platform that he founded at the age of 18, in 2012, in response to liberal organisations such as MoveOn.org, he encouraged students to report professors whom they suspected of embracing “woke” ideas, including on the issue of gender.

With the culture wars seen increasingly by Republicans as a point of leverage in appealing to disaffected young white men, Kirk quickly attracted both financial backing and support. In a Twitter/X era where a specific kind of often hypocritical hate-inflected speech has emerged as a defining political currency, Kirk was a star, courted by Trump and his coterie for his ability to break through.

The New York Times journalist Clay Risen observed that “whereas activists like Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos went too far too early in their embrace of baldly racist and homophobic ideas, Mr Kirk had an innate polish and was able to tack quickly among far-right activists, establishment Republicans and sceptical young voters”.

Donald Trump with Kirk at AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix, Arizona. Photograph: Brian Cahn/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock

Born in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Charlie was the son of Kimberly, a mental health counsellor, and Robert Kirk, an architect. His parents were active in conservative politics, but Charlie’s political style would not be shaped by the stuffy figures his father had donated to, such as Mitt Romney. While at Wheeling high school he first heard the rightwing shock jock Rush Limbaugh, and his reaction was: “This guy is unbelievable!”

Despite his strongly held opinions, Kirk developed a knack of encapsulating what a succession of rightwing benefactors and mentors wanted to hear, from Breitbart News, where he first claimed that teenagers like himself were being indoctrinated by liberal textbooks, through to Trump, who would later enthusiastically embrace him.

With his establishment of Turning Point, after pitching the idea to a potential benefactor, Kirk had his vehicle. He gave up his course at Harper College, Chicago, and transformed the group into a substantial, well funded organisation based in Phoenix, Arizona. It melded a freewheeling politics of abuse, perfectly aligned with the Twitter era, with a highly effective Get Out the Vote organisation.

Not initially a Trump supporter, in 2016 he was recruited by Trump’s son Donald Jr as a social media coordinator, and so began an association with Trump Sr that would continue for the rest of his life, with Kirk’s support as a gatekeeper seen as important for candidates for high office under Trump.

In April Kirk posted online his thoughts on what he called an “assassination culture” that he claimed was spreading on the left – comments picked up by his admirers as prophetic. Unmentioned was his own contribution to the language of political violence, not least his advocacy for bailing out David DePape, the man given a life sentence for attempting to kill the husband of the former Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi with a hammer. Nor was he shy of using apocalyptic language in support of Trump at the last election, telling a rally: “These next 12 days will define the future of our republic. The forces of darkness have tried everything they possibly can.”

Kirk was at the university in Orem, Utah, south of Salt Lake City, on the first leg of what he called his American Comeback Tour, when he was shot. He was responding to a student over the sort of discriminatory question that defined him: how many transgender people had been involved in perpetrating mass shootings over the last decade. “Too many,” he replied.

In 2021 he married Erika Frantzve. She survives him, along with their daughter and son.