Less than two weeks after the murder of the conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, his widow, Erika Kirk, the organization’s new chief executive, convened a senior staff meeting at the group’s Phoenix headquarters to discuss its future. “A murderer tried to silence my husband,” she told them by video conference from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to two of the attendees. “I won’t let that happen.”
Mrs. Kirk directed the Turning Point staff to keep her husband’s personal X account active with regular posts. She reiterated her desire that the two-hour daily radio broadcast “The Charlie Kirk Show” remain on the air, although with rotating hosts and with her husband’s studio chair deliberately left empty. Mr. Kirk’s debate tour on college campuses would also continue, she said, with conservative stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly standing in for her husband.
The message, in essence, was that the show would go on at Turning Point.
That may be easier said than done. For now, the group has reported a surge in new Turning Point high school and college campus chapters by conservative students affected by the loss of Mr. Kirk, while President Trump and Vice President JD Vance both announced they would speak at the group’s annual AmericaFest this year. Still, more than a dozen associates and conservative allies of Mr. Kirk said in interviews that they were concerned about what his death would mean not only to Turning Point but also to the MAGA movement itself.
Mr. Kirk, they said, was more than a leader and organizer of a sprawling, well-funded conservative youth organization. He also helped build, define and unite Mr. Trump’s movement, all while selling a right-wing Christian vision to a new generation. Despite Mr. Kirk’s attacks on the Civil Rights Act, feminism, Islam and transgender people — and the fact that he helped pull formerly extremist views into the mainstream — his tone in his speeches and debates was less angry than that of other leading figures on the right.
Friends describe Mrs. Kirk as fiercely determined to build on her husband’s work, but she is not a political figure. Mr. Kirk spoke at hundreds of campaign rallies during his life; she has spoken at only one. While she will give a talk at one campus on the college tour that Mr. Kirk began at Utah Valley University, she has decided she will not spar with students as her husband did. Nor is Turning Point likely to deputize one of Mr. Kirk’s lieutenants for the task, at least until security concerns are assuaged, according to a person familiar with the decision-making.
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