“No one understood or had the heart of the youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”
So said US President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post on Thursday morning, Australian time, confirming 31-year-old influencer and activist Charlie Kirk had died after being shot on a college campus in Utah.
Born in the affluent northwestern Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights in 1993, Kirk leaves behind his wife Erika and two young daughters.
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He pioneered a new model for conservative campaigning, using social media — increasingly TikTok — to court the youth vote while also relying on more traditional methods such as radio, town hall-style meetings and get-out-the-vote drives.
The non-profit Turning Point USA, which he co-founded aged 18 in 2012, became the envy of Democratic rivals with its direct line to the Republican Party and was a key contributor to Trump’s shock election victory four years later, at a time when young Americans were increasingly drifting to the left.
“We have lost one of the most important voices that we’ve had in my lifetime on the right,” former Fox News host turned podcaster Megyn Kelly said in a live stream with Glenn Beck.
Trump lost Kirk’s home state of Arizona narrowly in 2020, en route to losing the White House to Joe Biden.
Four years later, the Grand Canyon State — which had voted red in every presidential election bar one between 1952 and 2016 — was firmly back in the Republican camp, and by the largest margin (5.5 per cent) in any of the seven swing states Trump carried in his stunning return to power.
‘Prove me wrong’
The words Kirk lived and died by were front and centre on Wednesday as he kicked off a college tour across the US, billed as the American Comeback Tour.
The event was expected to include the Prove Me Wrong table giving audiences the chance to stump him, which was lampooned in a recent episode of South Park.
A staunch defender of the Second Amendment, Kirk was answering a question about gun violence the moment he was shot.
“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years,” he was asked by an audience member.
Kirk replied — in his last words — “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Utah had just four months ago passed laws permitting open carrying of firearms on college campuses, a law which realistically came into effect only in the past fortnight with the start of the new academic year.
In April 2023, at another Turning Point event in Utah, Kirk said: “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death.
“That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I ... think it’s worth (it) to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
‘America will never be the same’
Kirk’s final post on X, hours before his death, was a reference to the alleged murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 22-year-old Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a train by a homeless man with an extensive criminal history in North Carolina last month.
“If we want things to change, it’s 100 per cent necessary to politicise the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her,” he wrote.
“America will never be the same,” he posted earlier accompanied by a screenshot from the murder, footage of which had been widely shared on social media.
As for a future he did not live to see, Kirk made his ambitions clear in an interview with the Deseret News, a Utah newspaper, in the days leading up to the college campus event.
“We want to be an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as The New York Times, Harvard and tech companies,” Kirk said.
“And we believe we’re creating that.”
Kirk’s most controversial moments
On abortion: “There’s no such thing as an unwanted child. It is never right to justify the mass elimination or termination of people under the guise of saying they’re ‘unwanted’. That’s how we get Auschwitz.”
When challenged over whether he was comparing abortion to the Holocaust, Kirk replied: “It’s worse. It’s worse. It’s 45 million babies. It’s nearly eight times worse than the Holocaust. What’s the moral difference between a small baby in the womb and a grown Jew who is killed at Auschwitz?”
On transgender issues: “I refuse to lie. I will not call a man (a woman) or a woman a man, like, I refuse to do that. And in fact, I reject the entire premise of transgenderism. I don’t think it really exists. I think it’s a mental disease, and we’ve allowed it to all of a sudden become an identity. I think that there are two sexes, zero genders and unlimited personalities, and what we used to call a personality disorder we now call a gender disorder that we treat with body treatment when it should be brain treatment. So, transgenderism is a brain problem, not a body problem, and that’s how we should go about it.”
On empathy: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.”
On then-vice president Kamala Harris in 2024: “She’s like the most unlikable, fakest person ever to run for the presidency. She’s also super dumb.”
— With CNN
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