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“We finally meet,” Charlie Kirk said to me.
I’d come to a Phoenix hotel in September 2022 to see Kirk host a conference on the offenses of the “radical left.” I remember that he gripped my hand, unbuttoned his suit jacket, and then eyed the long table in the drab, airless meeting room where I’d sat waiting for him. “This is like a show trial,” he said.
Kirk wanted to debate, which was his stock-in-trade. By the time we met, I’d been reporting on him for several years—about his campaign tactics, his opposition to coronavirus-vaccine mandates, and his mission to remake American education—and he didn’t like my coverage. “We disagree,” he told me. But he was also disarming, appreciating that we shared Chicago roots and joking that my round, thin-rimmed glasses made me look “woke.” Maybe he saw me as a prospect for conversion. “So how do you view the world?” he asked me. I told him that my job as a reporter was figuring things out and explaining them to the public.
In that spirit, I want to explain a few things that I learned about Kirk that day. The interview was off the record. But last week, after Kirk’s assassination, his spokesperson told me that I could bring his words to the public. Over the course of an hour with me, Kirk reflected candidly on his priorities and—it’s strange to write this now—on his own legacy. He wasn’t trying to win the next election, he made clear to me, so much as an entire generation.
Kirk didn’t want to be seen principally as a political activist. Because of his success in mobilizing voters to elect Donald Trump, he’s often portrayed that way. But electoral politics accounted for only a small part of his work, he told me. He professed to be less interested in evaluating the merits of political candidates than in arguing, for example, about “the Marxist construction of labor.” He didn’t just want to change how people voted; he wanted to change how they thought. “You can decide to believe me or not, but the politics stuff, I’m just kind of like …” he trailed off and shrugged. “I do show up to the events, happy to see it. I’m more focused on educational, transformational, multi-decade change.”
I believed him. This is why Kirk spent hours each week ministering to young people on his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. It’s why he steered his conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, to churches and schools, not just to voting booths. “It’s fine, I love Trump, all that,” he told me, but he lamented that Turning Point’s political victories attracted “all the sexy headlines,” that “Trump-endorsed group” was its primary identifier. “See, politics is always an outgrowth,” he said. “If you’re able to get people to believe philosophy, anything’s possible.”
As Kirk pivoted our conversation from politics—the upcoming midterms, plans for 2024—to religious faith, his voice rose. Countering left-wing ideas, he told me, “that’s the thing that fires me up the most.” He spoke of his desire to imbue young people with Judeo-Christian values to help them build a “cogent worldview” and reject policies that he opposed, such as “stupid race stuff.” A year earlier, he had formed a religious branch of Turning Point called TPUSA Faith, which used summits, study groups, and online courses to spread ideas about the Christian foundations of the United States and “eliminate wokeism from the American pulpit.”
With missionary zeal, he laid out his catechism for me: “What does it mean to be a biblical citizen? Where do rights come from? What kind of form of government is best? Who are you as a human being? Why does that matter? Does the Bible have an intent to how we actually create a system of order?” He dispensed with one-line answers and spoke in full paragraphs, showcasing the rhetorical style that made him appealing to his followers. “Was the founding of the nation a deist roll of the dice, or was there a robust Protestant movement,” he asked, “actually laid into this complex, incredible experiment that we still live through?”
He told me about his techniques, how he built his flock by keeping them entertained. “You can’t keep on doing the same thing over and over again,” he said, quickening his speech. “You gotta be sharp; you gotta be new; you gotta be fresh; you gotta know your stuff.” I asked Kirk how he kept sharp. “I’ve been reading a lot of old stuff,” he said, with the pride of an autodidact: “Aristotle’s Politics, Metaphysics, the Ethics; Plato’s Republic; love Augustine, Aquinas.” He argued that America’s founding principles drew from the well of evangelical Protestantism, the ideas about Christian faith propounded by the preachers of the Great Awakening—Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, George Whitefield.
Kirk aimed to create a modern-day religious revival that would convert unbelievers into biblical citizens. On his podcast and in his public appearances, he launched blistering attacks on Muslims, racial minorities, and transgender identity (the last, he said, was “a throbbing middle finger to God”). He argued that America was being threatened by immigration, affirmative action, feminism, environmental regulation, and the separation of Church and state—and that it could be saved only through a recommitment to the Bible, faith, and family. “That’s my passion,” he told me.
His pulpits of choice had always been at educational institutions—colleges and high schools across the country. Kirk viewed Turning Point’s field program, aimed at establishing campus chapters to promote conservative viewpoints, as his greatest accomplishment. “You say, ‘What’s my baby?’ That’s the thing I love,” he told me. Polls in the years since I spoke with him, along with the results of the 2024 election, reflect the headway he made, especially with young men. His organization’s platform at high schools, in particular, afforded him influence—“persuasive ability to really make people think differently” while they were still impressionable. “When we’re approaching 1,000 high-school chapters, which we’ll hit in the next 18 months, that’s a big deal,” he said. “That’s a very big educational monolith.”
Kirk had even bigger ambitions. In the months before I spoke with him, he introduced a new educational initiative, Turning Point Academy, which pledged to combat what it called “woke ideology” in public education by forming Christian schools “where all areas of study are rooted in God’s truth.” The project promised to transform Turning Point’s education work from recruiting at existing schools—encouraging students to engage in political activism and change their community—into creating an alternative. There would be “teacher training, curriculum, podschooling, homeschooling,” he said, marketed to “people who believe in a free society, the constitutional order, all the stuff we believe in.” It would offer a nine-month “Prep Year” program for high-school graduates.
He seemed unfazed by a setback in his efforts to develop K–12 educational curricula that I’d uncovered: Plans for an online academy marketing an “America-first education” had fallen apart. “A mountain of a molehill,” he said of my story, telling me that I would see that “God works mysteriously.” What did that mean, I asked, in tangible terms? The first brick-and-mortar Turning Point school, Dream City Christian, had just been inaugurated in the Phoenix area, Kirk told me, promising that he would soon plant Turning Point schools in every major metropolitan area—an ambition that remains very far off. “Education, I think, is the greatest growth opportunity in the next 50 years,” he said.
Kirk was then nearing 30, and I wondered what would come next. “How do you run a youth organization if you’re no longer in your 20s or 30s?” I asked him. He said that he was confident about his legacy and that he saw himself not as the symbol of a student group, but as the leader of an educational juggernaut. “People can run colleges when they’re 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old,” he told me. “So you can be in the education space the rest of your life.” (In the days after his death, his team said that Turning Point USA had received 32,000 inquiries about forming new campus chapters.)
“Look, here’s the thing,” Kirk told me. “We’re here to win.”
He meant more than the upcoming midterms or the next presidential election. “Politics, it’s fine,” he told me. “It’s just that politics is moments in time.” Kirk wanted to refashion America itself, and he believed that he was laying the spiritual foundations for it.
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