In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk’s killing, the breadth of people — particularly younger ones — sharing grief and shock on newsfeeds, Instagram stories, or TikTok livestreams might have been surprising.
They were not just avowed conservatives or loyal Trump voters, but seemingly apolitical people: old classmates or hometown friends who never posted much about current events — until now. For liberals or people in their 30s it might have seemed unexpected.
But the reactions are just one sign of Kirk’s influence, and how his movement and style of politics might linger after his death.
Kirk was a generational figure, who redefined how politics, political media, and Gen Z culture worked for his followers, allies, and political opponents.
To understand that lasting influence — why he resonated with Gen Z — it might be helpful to break down the elements of his appeal:
1) He redefined conservatism, creating a new generation of leaders and groups
At least for the conservative Gen Z, Kirk held a kind of mythic status: He went from being essentially a nobody — the barely 18-year-old founder of a scrappy activist group — to a conservative kingmaker before age 31.
He made himself indispensable to the Republican Party. President Donald Trump was reelected last year with levels of youth voter support not seen for a Republican since the 2000s. Kirk was largely credited with helping to bring that about through his nonprofit, specifically by going after disengaged or passive young men.
The organization Kirk launched, Turning Point USA, started off in 2012 as a ragtag group trying to establish a foothold on any college campus. In their first year, it had about 9,200 Facebook followers, 15 campus affiliates, and 40 bloggers.
By the 2020s, Turning Point had essentially become the “youth faction of the Republican Party,” according to the Gen Z writer, researcher, and consultant Rachel Janfaza — a massive national network of more than 800 college chapters, millions of social media followers, and nearly $100 million in fundraising in 2024, that also supported other right-leaning youth-focused organizations.
Before Turning Point’s arrival to campuses, “you had shells of organizations with College Republicans and Young Republicans, who weren’t entirely influential by any means, and Turning Point was the cool new organization,” Joe Mitchell, a 28-year-old former Iowa state representative who Kirk mentored, told me. “People actually wanted to go to their events, and you didn’t have to beg people to come.”
Kirk advised and helped financially support the launch of Mitchell’s own nonprofit, Run Gen Z, which aims to get young conservatives elected to local and state office. Kirk provided the same mentorship and launching pad to a whole generation of young conservatives activists, he said.
But Turning Point also changed the way conservatism was viewed on college campuses — turning it into a mainstream cultural and social identity, not just a set of political beliefs.
“He totally changed the game on a culture perspective of what is cool and what people wanted to be a part of, and that had a huge impact on the way that the conservative movement has been viewed over the past few years,” Mitchell told me. “It’s much more culturally cool and there’s a good vibe around conservatives, because people are energized. … And it’s not like boring old white people all the time. … You go to these Turning Point events, and [you would see] the [pro-gay and lesbian] Log Cabin Republicans, and the Black conservatives, and the Jewish coalition.”
Combining these annual Young Black Leadership, Young Women’s Leadership, and Young Jewish Leadership Summits, plus the tentpole Turning Point annual conference, young conservatives suddenly had large-scale gathering spaces on campuses and events around the country, complete with slick festival-style production and A-list political celebrities.
“Don. Jr was going, Tucker Carlson was going, the president was going — every hot new speaker on the conservative circuit was going to be at a Turning Point event,” Mitchell said.
And that new coolness didn’t remain in the political sphere: It blended into the mainstream culture, contributing to the sense that society in general was shifting right, Janfaza said.
“Republicans have been so good at politically coding culture [in the 2020s] — that was Charlie,” she said. “You see all these athletes and celebrities and others who are coming out and speaking out, and I don’t think that would have happened for anybody. He was unique in that way, where he had these relationships and people respected what he was doing in the cultural zeitgeist.”
2) Kirk understood — and exploited — the new attention economy
Kirk’s mastery of social media was another of his skills. He changed the way political debate and discussion spread, while building a personal brand that stretched beyond his supporters and into the mainstream.
It’s not far-fetched to say that his followers and his opponents developed parasocial ties to him as they would to a celebrity, an artist, or even a podcaster. He was easily recognizable, his voice was ubiquitous online, whether in videos promoting or sharing his views, or in counters and rebuttals by his political opponents or critics. And he was well-known enough by people across the political (and apolitical) spectrum to be parodied on TV shows like South Park.
“I’ve seen, a lot of people saying, in the aftermath of his assassination, people have been saying that they felt like they knew him, even though they never did,” Janfaza told me about her own conversations with young people this week. “That’s something that is rare. You feel that with celebrities or with athletes or people like that, people who are public figures. But for there to be a political figure who can draw that type of appeal and that type of engagement — that is something that’s really hard to come by in this era of politics.”
And that was in no small part due to the way he used and quickly adapted to the changing political and social media ecosystem, employing short, quippy podcast clips, in-person confrontations like the one he was hosting when he was assassinated, and longer style debates of the “1 woke teen vs. 20 Trump supporters” style that now go viral.
“A lot of [his] most viral videos are of in-person events, the debate videos — those are things that are happening in person, and that’s what went so viral,” Janfaza said.
That sense of interpersonal connection boosted that sense of closeness between his audience and him, and it changed the way other conservative and liberal influencers began to share their own content.
“He had surpassed the Jesse Watters and the Tucker Carlsons and the Ben Shapiros and he was the top guy,” Mitchell said. “He reached so many different types of demographics and age groups, he just hit so many different aspects.”
It wasn’t just that Kirk had a podcast, or a youth organization, or a faith-based program, Mitchell told me. It was also that he developed a network of other young conservative influencers, like Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, and Alex Clark — a young conservative media universe that both saturates young conservative media diets and offers aspirational examples of the kind of activists and speakers some young conservatives want to be.
3) He tapped into a nascent oppositional culture on campuses, and among youth
Finally, Kirk also tapped into the idiosyncrasies of Gen Z — a generation that is simultaneously more progressive and more Republican than young people have been in the recent past.
Central to this is a rejection of the establishment. As the mainstream of America grew more progressive in the 2010s, some young people’s rejection of the status quo, and distrust in established institutions and voices, created a kind of oppositional counterculture among the new youth. This led to an embrace of open debate, scrutiny, and skepticism that has made Gen Z more open to conservative and Republican entreaties over the last five years.
“I keep hearing from young people since this happened, that again, people may not have agreed with everything that he said, but they respected the fact that the conversation was being had at a time when young people are prioritizing freedom of speech more than I’ve ever seen before,” Janfaza told me.
She said that part of the frustration that young people have with the status quo, with older leaders and generations, including college administrators, politicians, or other activists, is the sense that “they are afraid to touch certain subjects.”
Kirk talked about anything and everything “and that’s what was so impressive about what he was doing, it was really tapping into that sense, and he was very cognizant of the fact that people wanted to have these conversations, the controversial conversations.”
That Kirk said controversial or, at times, bigoted things wasn’t something that turned off young people — even some of his opponents. His brand, and his practice of his belief in free speech, was about inviting debate, offering opportunities to disagree with someone or sharpen your own arguments.
And this brand of debate arose at a time when Gen Z was unwilling to be defined in neat ideological or partisan categories.
“Young people don’t want to be boxed in on one side or the other; they have nuance in their beliefs, they can take a little bit from this point of view and a little bit from that point of view, and they want to hear and have their positions challenged,” Janfaza said. “Kirk created a place where that’s possible. And there’s going to be a lot lost.”
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