Sommer: Why Charlie Kirk Mattered So Much to the Right

More than anyone not named Trump, he changed the way conservatives understood modern media.

By Will Sommer The Bulwark

Hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, conservative personalities Michael Knowles and Benny Johnson both posted the same thing on social media: Kirk would have been president someday. Donald Trump, on Thursday morning, mused about it too.

It’s not hard to see why they believe it. Over just a decade, Kirk transformed himself from an obscure young college dropout and conservative activist into a major political organizer and fundraiser. He had become a confidant to the president’s family, an accomplished entrepreneur, and a Republican party powerbroker. All by the age of 31.

He did this all in a way that was often brutal and acidic to our politics, using insulting and sometimes dehumanizing language to describe his opponents and even creating a database of liberal academics for his followers to harass.

We shouldn’t ignore that. But it’s also undeniable that Kirk reimagined what it means to be a modern right-wing political figure. His most lasting legacy may be that he showed the Republican party the way to compete in today’s frenetic media world. More than anyone else without the surname Trump, Kirk is the figure whose rise best illustrates the changing of the American right.

A Limbaugh fanboy. As a teen Republican in suburban Chicago, Kirk studied talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh and thought about how to adapt Limbaugh’s mix of bombast, politics, and entertainment to his own generation. He launched Turning Point USA in 2012 as a sort of next-generation vehicle for campus Republican activism. It was wildly different from the stodgy, nerdy, buttoned-up, loafers-and-slacks contrarians that had defined college Republicanism for generations.

TPUSA’s early mishaps and Kirk’s Boy Scout persona made him a ripe target for ridicule on the left. But Kirk, like Trump himself, understood something fundamental about the moment: All attention is good attention in a world dominated by social media. When South Park lampooned him this year, Kirk made the show’s cartoon version of him his profile image on social media.

Kirk relentlessly toured college campuses to debate leftist students, bringing his message to places where it wasn’t popular.

The attention economy created nasty incentives, and it undoubtedly encouraged Kirk to up the ante as a provocateur. But it also allowed him to accrue even more footage for his burgeoning online media empire. Confrontation, friction, showmanship, and debate were integral to what he was doing.

And it was most easily achievable through the simplest of acts: showing up in places where Republicans typically weren’t expected. In no small way, Kirk laid the groundwork for the Trump campaign’s 2024 embrace of podcasts and the manosphere.

But that was not the only groundwork he laid.

Kirk also set the model for the always-on, always-combative conservative media personality that has now been replicated by hundreds, if not thousands, of imitators. And he turned TPUSA’s media apparatus into an incubator for similar talents.

It’s no accident that some of the biggest names in the right wing’s new generation, like Candace Owens and Benny Johnson, reached new levels of reach and influence after they started working for Kirk.

It’s also no accident that TPUSA’s conferences became tentpole events for conservatives—replacing CPAC’s place on the calendar. Unlike those stuffy, blazers-and-pearls CPAC gatherings, TPUSA put on spectacles—typically in a Sun Belt hotspot like Miami, and typically featuring rowdy parties where budding Kirk wannabes networked and accelerated their own social-media brands.

Foes on the right. Reaching those heights that fast and through those methods does create foes along the way. And Kirk had many—not just on the left. On the right, some defined their own media careers in opposition to him. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes picked frequent, typically one-sided, feuds with Kirk.

The main source of their disagreement centered on Kirk’s support for legal immigration. Kirk had once said that a green card should be given to every foreign student who receives a diploma from an American university.

But after Fuentes whipped his “groyper” fanbase into a frenzy they dubbed the “Groyper War”—and after Fuentes supporters began crashing TPUSA events on college campuses—Kirk shifted far to the right. This year, Kirk called for a moratorium on even legal immigration from the “third world.”

The transition didn’t just underscore the degree to which nativism and restrictive views on immigration had become driving forces of Republican politics. It said something about Kirk, too. He cared more about maintaining the connection to his audience than about the consistency of his convictions. Perhaps Knowles and Johnson were right: Maybe Kirk could have been president.

A true power broker. He certainly had the foundations in place to make a run for office.

With a massive organization and the president’s family’s seal of approval, Kirk was a true power broker. He could decide who was really conservative and who had gone too far. He helped vet candidates for the new Trump administration, and he became a crucial figure in the right’s reaction to the Justice Department’s attempt to close the Jeffrey Epstein case—reportedly earning a personal call from Trump asking him to stop calling for the files to be released.

In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, a number of his compatriots in conservative media have analogized him to other past luminaries. There’s Kirk’s old hero, Limbaugh, and the late right-wing media icon Andrew Breitbart, too.

But Kirk is different from both. He wasn’t a creature of media or conservative advocacy. He was the merging of them.

Will Sommer covers the influence of online culture and communities on national politics for The Bulwark. Subscribe to his “False Flag” newsletter here.