Charlie Kirk

Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co‑founded the conservative student organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and served as its executive director until his assassination in 2025. A key ally of Donald Trump, he became one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, publishing several books and hosting The Charlie Kirk Show.

Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, Kirk became politically active in high school. He briefly attended college before dropping out to focus on building TPUSA, which later expanded into affiliate groups such as Turning Point Action and Turning Point Faith. His activism centered on mobilizing conservative students and promoting Republican causes nationwide.

Kirk advocated for a range of conservative positions, including opposition to abortion, gun control, DEI programs, and LGBTQ rights. Over time, he aligned with the Christian right and advocated for Christian nationalism. His more controversial positions included criticism of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as promotion of COVID-19 misinformation, false allegations of electoral fraud in 2020, and the white genocide conspiracy theory.

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was fatally shot by a rooftop sniper while speaking at a TPUSA debate event at Utah Valley University. His assassination drew international attention and condemnation of political violence, while also sparking partisan dispute. On September 21, almost 100,000 people attended his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The following month, on what would have been Kirk's 32nd birthday, Trump posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Early life

Charles James Kirk was born on October 14, 1993, in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois, and raised in the nearby city of Prospect Heights. His father, Robert W. Kirk, is an architect who was involved in the construction of Trump Tower. His mother, Kathryn (née Smith), is a former trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who subsequently worked as a mental health counselor. He had one sibling, a younger sister, Mary, who went on to become an art curator in Chicago.

Kirk described his parents as moderate Republicans. They were active in conservative circles, and his father was a major donor to the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign. Raised in the Presbyterian Church, Kirk was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. He experienced a political awakening in middle school, during which he read books by economist Milton Friedman and became more attracted to the principles of the Republican Party.

In 2010, during his junior year at Wheeling High School, Kirk volunteered for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk (no relation). Also during his junior year, he began listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show, a prominent conservative talk radio broadcast. In his senior year, he initiated a boycott of cookies at the school's cafeteria to reverse a price increase. He also wrote an essay for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in high-school textbooks; it led to his first media appearance on Fox Business at age 17.

In 2012, Kirk applied to West Point but was rejected. Although he was accepted that same year to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he enrolled instead at Harper College, a community college in Palatine, Illinois. Withdrawing after one semester, he left Harper to concentrate on his work with Turning Point USA, the political group he co-founded with conservative businessman and mentor Bill Montgomery. In 2015, Kirk enrolled part-time at King's College in New York City, taking online classes. Kirk did not receive a college degree during his lifetime, a fact he noted in debates with academics and students.

Organizations

Turning Point USA

In May 2012, Kirk gave a speech at Benedictine University's "Youth Government Day", where he met Bill Montgomery, who was then a Tea Party-backed legislative candidate. Montgomery later said that the speakers at the event had bored the audience of a few hundred high-school kids, but they began to pay rapt attention when Kirk started speaking. Montgomery then encouraged Kirk to pursue political activism full-time. A month after they first met, Montgomery and Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA, wanting to start an organization rivaling liberal groups such as MoveOn. Kirk described it as a student organization advocating for free markets and limited government. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Kirk met Foster Friess, a former investment manager and prominent Republican donor, and persuaded him to finance the organization.

Kirk remained the executive director, chief fundraiser, and the public face of Turning Point USA until his death in 2025. He became known for visiting college campuses hosting informal debates with ideological opponents, typically students, and attempting to persuade them to consider conservative candidates. According to the Associated Press, video clips of Kirk's campus appearances spread online, helping him "secure a steady stream of donations that transformed Turning Point into one of the country's largest political organizations". Turning Point eventually began holding massive rallies in which top conservative leaders addressed tens of thousands of young voters. In 2025, TPUSA said it had chapters at more than 2,000 college and high school campuses, and that it had received 32,000 inquiries about starting new chapters in the days after Kirk's death.

TPUSA's activities include publication of the Professor Watchlist and the School Board Watchlist. Critics of these watchlists say they threaten academic freedom and have led to the targeted harassment of academics. In 2019, the Professor Watchlist was briefly suspended by its web host. In 2020, ProPublica investigated TPUSA's finances and found that the organization made "misleading financial claims", that the audits were not done by an independent auditor, and that the leaders had enriched themselves while advocating for Trump. ProPublica also reported that Kirk's salary from TPUSA had increased from $27,000 to nearly $300,000 and that he had bought an $855,000 condo in Longboat Key, Florida. In 2020, Turning Point USA had $39.2 million in revenue. Kirk earned a salary of more than $325,000 from TPUSA and related organizations.

Turning Point Academy

In 2021, TPUSA announced it would launch an online academy as an alternative to schools "poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas". Turning Point Academy was intended to cater to families seeking an "America-first education". Arizona education firm StrongMind initially partnered with TPUSA with plans to open the academy by the fall of 2022 and assessed its "potential to generate over $40 million in gross revenue at full capacity (10,000 students)". The partnership ended after StrongMind received backlash from its own employees, and key subcontractor Freedom Learning Group, which prepared course content for the academy, also backed out. In 2022, Turning Point partnered with Dream City Christian School, a private school that has campuses in Glendale and Scottsdale, Arizona, and is affiliated with Dream City Church. In the 2022–2023 school year, the school received $900,000 in Arizona school voucher funds.

Turning Point Action

In May 2019, it was reported that Kirk was preparing to launch Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4) designed to elect more conservatives. In July 2019, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action had acquired Students for Trump along with "all associated media assets". He became chairman and launched a campaign to mobilize the youth vote for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign. The unsuccessful effort led TPUSA and the 2020 Trump campaign to blame each other for an overall decline in Trump's youth support. In December 2022, Kirk announced the Mount Vernon Project, an initiative by Turning Point Action to remove members from the Republican National Committee who were not "grassroot conservatives".

On January 5, 2021, the day before the Washington, D.C., protest that led to the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack, Kirk wrote on Twitter that Turning Point Action and Students for Trump were sending more than 80 "buses of patriots to D.C. to fight for this president". A spokesman for Turning Point said that the groups ended up sending seven buses with 350 students. In the lead-up to the storming, Kirk said he was "getting 500 emails a minute calling for a civil war". Publix heiress Julie Fancelli gave Kirk's organizations $1.25 million to fund the buses to the January 6 event. Kirk also paid $60,000 for Kimberly Guilfoyle to speak at the rally.