When Tyler Bowyer logged on to Benny Johnson’s X livestream on Thursday morning, pieces of tissue were stuck to the stubble on his unshaven face. Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, had clearly been crying. Just a few hours before, he’d seen a video of his close friend and colleague Charlie Kirk being fatally shot in the neck.
“What he would want more than anything is for people to channel their anger into proper activism,” Bowyer told Johnson, a few minutes later advising viewers: “Consider yesterday that moment—that turning point for you—of thinking about getting involved in your local community or running for office.” Later, Andrew Kolvet, a longtime spokesperson for Kirk, joined the stream and echoed Bowyer. “Charlie was not a revolutionary,” Kolvet said. “He does not want to see the rage we’re all feeling be misdirected to evil” and would want “more speech, more freedom, less violence.”
This was not a gathering of individuals known for levelheadedness. Johnson is widely regarded as a far-right provocateur, and Bowyer was one of 11 people charged in the 2020 fake-elector plot in Arizona (the case remains active but was sent back to a grand jury in May). But the explicit calls for nonviolence coming from some of those who were particularly close to Kirk is noteworthy and meaningful in a moment when others on the political right, including elected officials, are not being equally careful with their words. Asked on Fox News yesterday morning how to address political violence, President Donald Trump did not seize the chance to lower the temperature. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem.” “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace told reporters on Wednesday after the news of Kirk’s shooting broke. On X, Elon Musk wrote, “The Left is the party of murder.”
Other Kirk allies have similarly characterized this as a crucial moment for the country. “America now has a turning point,” Jack Posobiec, the right-wing influencer and Turning Point contributor, said yesterday on The Charlie Kirk Show, which has been rechristened The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show. He did not explain exactly what he meant. But how and who defines the phrase turning point will determine whether the next few weeks bring confrontation, deescalation, or something in between.
Kirk, who was assassinated on Wednesday at an event in Utah, launched Turning Point in 2012 to create a conservative youth movement in the United States. Following his death, figures from across his movement have called for greater political involvement. Students at Vanderbilt announced on Thursday that they’re forming a new chapter of Turning Point. “Rest assured that TPUSA and the entire conservative movement just got bolder, stronger, and more effective than ever,” Alex Clark, a Turning Point contributor and the host of the podcast Culture Apothecary, wrote on X. She later shared a link for starting a new chapter. “Charlie would want a million Charlie Kirks to run for office over the course of what would have been his normal lifetime,” Bowyer told Johnson yesterday. “And if we can do that, then we’ve lived up to Charlie Kirk’s name and his passion and his desire to save this republic.”
Some of Kirk’s allies are seeking to portray him as a Martin Luther King Jr.–like avatar of nonviolence. Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, herself a former Turning Point organizer, has written a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson requesting that a statue of Kirk be installed in the U.S. Capitol. On social media, mourners, including Kolvet, have shared an illustration of Kirk standing alongside Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus. “Stop calling Charlie Kirk a ‘conservative activist,’” the conservative commentator Glenn Beck wrote on X. “He was a civil rights leader.”
Yesterday, with Posobiec hosting, The Charlie Kirk Memorial Show opened with the kind of tribute usually afforded to former presidents and statesmen by major networks. It aired videos of impromptu vigils for Kirk held on college campuses across the country. Mike Johnson, who joined Posobiec on the show, said that members of Congress were already discussing ideas for memorializing him. Johnson seemed to be trying to avoid inflaming the calls for retribution that emerged quickly from some on the right, urging conservatives to carry on Kirk’s fight “not timidly, but boldly,” before quickly adding, “But in love.”
Still, other Kirk allies have occasionally taken a more vengeful posture—one that seems to support, if not violent reprisal, then some kind of crackdown on Kirk’s ideological opponents. On Johnson’s show on Thursday, Luna warned that “there are going to be examples made of people” and added, “Everyone who has been responsible for coordinating this, you basically just took on the entire U.S. government.” In the Bible, Luna noted, “it says you don’t make peace with evil; you destroy it.” Later, in an interview on Fox News, Posobiec suggested that action should be taken “at the national and the federal level” to “stop the perpetuation” of this violence.
“God, please heal this nation. Our society is sick,” Riley Gaines, a Turning Point contributor, wrote Thursday on X. Yesterday morning, she sounded different. “Publications like @nytimes,” she wrote, “are the reason Charlie is dead.” She followed up a few hours later with “Wednesday: disbelief. Thursday: sadness. Friday: anger.”
As time passes, more news will emerge, and rhetoric may shift. So, too, might interpretations of this moment. Kirk’s allies—and especially Trump—will play an outsize role in determining what happens next. In a press briefing yesterday in Salt Lake City, Utah Governor Spencer Cox appeared to understand the stakes quite well. “History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country, but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us,” he said. “I desperately call on every American—Republican, Democrat, liberal, progressive, conservative, MAGA, all of us—to please, please follow what Charlie taught me.”
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