How Charlie Kirk Used Controversy—Often Delivered in Person—to Construct Our New Media Ecosystem

When Gavin Newsom made his much-debated debut as a podcaster in March, he entered the arena by calling on Charlie Kirk as his first guest. The California governor drew significant blowback for his congeniality with Kirk, who had made opposition to a sweeping concept of “wokeism” his calling card, especially as Newsom split from Democrats by telling the star right-wing personality that he believes the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports is “deeply unfair.” But Newsom told Kirk that his 13-year old son had wanted to take the day off from school to meet him, and the next day, Kirk told Sean Hannity that he was struck by Newsom’s ambition.

There’s no exact name for the broad online constellation into which Newsom was stepping, but it was clear from the governor’s outreach that Kirk held several of the keys to it. He was eager to charm and please while feeding on backlash and conflict, omnipresent and omnivorous about politics and pop culture, and pithy enough to get his message across in the short video format that has increasingly come to define media consumption. When Kirk was killed on Wednesday by an assassin who remains at large, he was instantly mourned by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, but also by a loosely affiliated set of social media presences who have likewise achieved a foothold in a slippery streamer-YouTube-podcast space: Theo Von, Russell Brand, Jake Paul, Dave Portnoy.

By accounts across the political spectrum, Kirk and his organization Turning Point USA were prescient in understanding that fluency in this ecosystem would become table stakes for public life. “I came on board with Turning Point when social media was just being looked at to spread influence and message,” Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said in an interview on Thursday. “And so I was one of the OG politicos on Instagram, and that’s kind of where I got my start.”

At the time, Luna was an influencer and model debating whether to pursue medicine or politics. “Charlie had the Trump skill in being able to recognize people’s skills, both their strengths and their weaknesses, early on,” Luna said. She became Turning Point’s director of Hispanic engagement in 2018 and went on to join Candace Owens as one of the organization’s breakthrough alumni.

Luna was able to reach federal office on account of her social media presence, she told me, “not just with fundraising, but messaging, taking on legacy media. And so I’d say that me, JD Vance, other people who have been able to target this and use it in the way that Charlie taught me how to do it early on, have been some of the more influential and effective people in US politics.”

Kirk’s trademark event—and source for his unflagging streams of content—was the college campus drop-in, where he’d debate students about politics and his intense Christian faith. The genre was time-honored (Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza), but Kirk achieved new heights of saturation owing to the serial consistency of his online output. In his depictions, the young left was rootless, flimsy, decadent, and miserable, in contrast with his smirking command. That ease delivered even his most provocative positions and rhetoric: that rape could not justify an abortion; that Kamala Harris was a “DEI candidate”; that the idea of Muslim mayors leading both London and New York didn’t “feel right.”

“If you really do want to run for office,” Luna said. “I would say that you should probably get on the college campus and debate random college kids.”

After Trump’s election victory, Newsom was among the throngs of Democrats seeking to reinvent themselves for the media era Kirk so readily embodied. In the post-mortems, there emerged a sense that they had failed not only to capture a broad vein of influence, but to identify it in the first place.

“There are some really, really intelligent, well speaking, well-intentioned creators on the left who have tremendous impact, tremendous reach as well, and they do a really good job,” the 22-year old liberal influencer Harry Sisson told me. “But the difference between the left and the right is that the Republicans have groups like Turning Point USA who embrace their creators.”

“I have a philosophy that I take into content creation and just life,” Sisson added, “which is if you see your enemies doing something, don’t be afraid to use their tactics if it’s working.”

Before he reached his ultimate stage of cultural saturation, Kirk, like most of his peers on the young online right, started from a place of virtual anonymity. The 28-year old social media operative and political advisor Alex Bruesewitz, often credited with the Trump campaign’s facility with podcasters, mourned Kirk on X on Wednesday night. They first connected on the same platform, he wrote, when he was 17 and Kirk was 19, “both of us with just a few thousand followers.” They had just this month both spoken at a conference held by Build Up Korea, a conservative youth movement in the image of Kirk’s.

“I’ve traveled all over the world,” Bruesewitz added later, “and in every country, people have approached me with the same question: “Alex, how can we find our own Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk?””

In a February New York Times Magazine profile, Kirk grew nostalgic while discussing how he started listening to Rush Limbaugh in high school. “I was like, This guy is unbelievable,” he recalled. “Because you’re looking for someone in high school to affirm your beliefs. I would never forget: on my lunch break, from like 12:17 to 12:55, I’d listen. Just me. I went all in on Rush.” The network of conservative media personalities grew far more scattered in the time since, but Kirk ultimately cultivated a similar level of sway and personal connection.

“I think Charlie Kirk has the ability to be Billy Graham meets Rush Limbaugh combined,” the Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur and podcaster Patrick Bet-David said in a clip he resurfaced in the aftermath of the shooting, before adding another bite-size claim about Kirk’s impact. “I have him as top five on getting Trump elected.”

When I reached Bet-David on Thursday to expand on the comparison, he noted that Kirk’s use of online levers wasn’t, on its own, the source of his power. “There’s a lot of guys that know that as well,” Bet-David said. “The second part is he actually believes in what he’s talking about.”

The full upshot of Kirk’s work, he figured, wouldn’t materialize until years into the future. Turning Point “just woke up a lot of kids who have been listening to his content for the last few years,” Bet-David said, “and there may be hundreds of Charlie Kirks that may be rising up the next five, ten, 15 years.”