Charlie Kirk emboldened a new generation of conservatives. His killing Wednesday as he addressed a crowd on a college campus has left those he brought into politics grieving — and vowing to continue his mission.

Nearly every young conservative staffer in Washington was involved with Kirk’s enormous youth organizing group Turning Point USA, whether through a college campus chapter or its national and regional conventions. That created a pipeline of young conservatives, who are now looking to cement his legacy in next year’s midterms and beyond.

“I was passionate before and this movement was important, but now it’s personal,” said 19-year-old commentator Brilyn Hollyhand, who met Kirk when, at 11 years old, he asked Kirk to appear on his podcast. “We have a martyr.”

Young men have become key to the coalition that elected President Donald Trump to his second term, a trend that many in the movement credit to Kirk.

Kirk was divisive — beloved by a generation that is shifting rightward; castigated for controversial and antagonistic remarks that critics deemed hate speech.

But that divisiveness helped him gain national attention and turn out young voters for Trump, particularly Republicans in Arizona, which flipped to Trump in 2024. In 2020, Trump lost young men by 11 points, according to Catalist data. In 2024, he won them by 1 point. And his vote share among young women improved too — from a 35-point deficit in 2020 to a 23-point gap four years later.

Kirk’s killing this week “has awakened an army of believers,” said 25-year-old activist Isabella DeLuca, who was arrested in 2024 for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and pardoned by Trump in January.

“We are at war for the soul of this nation. I will not retreat. I will advance,” DeLuca said. “Charlie’s voice did not die with him. It will live through us.”

Hollyhand, who has worked closely with Turning Point, said he hopes to return to Utah and continue the “American Comeback” tour, which kicked off the day Kirk was shot. On Friday, Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that law enforcement had apprehended a suspect in the shooting, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson, who a judge ordered to be held without the option of bail. Formal charges against Robinson are expected to be announced next week.

The rightward shift among young people is largely credited to Kirk’s megaphone, as well as his grassroots political organization, which he founded at 18. It quickly grew to more than 800 chapters on college campuses, with more than 250,000 student members nationwide.

Turning Point “is what got me interested in politics,” said 24-year-old White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers, who founded Clemson University’s first chapter in the fall of 2020.

“That’s what truly guided my career in politics and where I am now,” Rogers added. “It was really Turning Point and their resources that were able to jumpstart the career of a young conservative like me.”

Kirk has a huge social media platform — he posted TikTok videos of him debating college students to more than eight million followers and hosted a popular podcast. It is likely to be hard for the movement left in his wake to replicate the charisma and political organizing skills of Kirk, who also had a direct line to Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Kirk’s critics noted he utilized provocative language to roil national debate and normalize fringe theories. Some of his most memorable exchanges come from clips of his inflammatory back-and-forths with liberals over LGBTQ+ rights, restrictions on firearms and gender roles.

Kirk once called abortion in the U.S. comparable to, or worse than, the Holocaust. He promoted the “white replacement” conspiracy, which baselessly claims that immigrants are replacing white Americans.

Harry Sisson, a prominent online figure in Democratic circles who has drawn the ire of conservatives online, is one of those who commended Kirk’s legacy as an influential defender of open debate.

“Charlie Kirk did welcome debate from anybody,” Sisson, 23, said in an interview. “Do I think he did it in good faith? No. … But he did encourage debate.”

For college student Matthew Kingsley, his father’s Fox News-informed conservatism didn’t appeal to him while growing up in North Carolina. But he commended how Kirk encouraged young people to do their own research when forming their own political views, and joined his local chapter while in college at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he now serves as chapter president as a rising senior.

Kirk’s impact on the young conservative movement has been “astronomical,” Kingsley said. “I really don’t think this is going to stop it at all,” he said. “I think it is actually going to accelerate it.”

Liz Crampton contributed to this report. 

The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has raised new fears that the country is entering another era of political violence.

One worrying sign: Americans’ attention has moved on faster and faster as incidents have become more frequent, data suggest, indicating the public may be becoming rapidly desensitized to it.

When an arsonist set the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on fire in April, the incident did not make most national newspapers’ front pages. When two Democratic lawmakers were shot, with one killed alongside her husband, in Minnesota in June, it took only a few days for Google search traffic for the incident to drop to almost zero.

It shook the nation when Trump was shot last summer; but when another would-be gunman targeted the then-candidate on a golf course a few weeks later, it was just a blip in the news cycle.

Each attack may seem shocking, but the incidents are leaving less of a mark on the national consciousness. A Blue Light News review of Google search data and newspaper front pages found individual attacks are getting less attention than they did in the past, and Americans are moving on even quicker. The news cycles for incidents of political violence this year are typically measured in a few weeks, if not just days.

“There’s a whole bunch of studies on violence in the news, documenting the fact that people’s emotional cognitive reactions early on are high, and then as time goes on, the more you are exposed, those cognitive emotional reactions lessen,” said Karyn Riddle, a communications professor at University of Wisconsin who studies violence in media.

And while definitions of political violence vary, it’s clear that it has been increasing in the U.S., by any metric. Targets in recent incidents include Trump, a Supreme Court justice, multiple governors, a former speaker of the House, and state lawmakers.

Threats against members of Congress have surged, according to the U.S. Capitol Police, with recorded threats more than doubling from 3,939 in 2017 to 9,474 in 2024.

“You’d have to go back to the pre-Civil War era to find a similar level of threat and acts of physical violence against lawmakers,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at The George Washington University.

There was a time when such political violence, shocking the nation, drew prolonged national attention: When then-Rep. Gabby Giffords was grievously injured in a mass shooting in 2011, and six others killed, it was on the front page of The New York Times for more than a week.

It was in some ways the first of an era, and Giffords became an advocate for preventing gun violence. The Giffords attack has continued to get interest online after mass shootings and other incidents of political violence, Blue Light News’s review found.

But that has largely not been the case for the growing number of later events. Google searches have surged after each event of violence — an indicator of the spike in public interest in the news topic — but quickly returned to normal levels.

That is happening even faster for recent acts of violence, Blue Light News found.

Incidents of political violence over the past decade — such as the 2017 congressional baseball shooting that targeted Republican lawmakers including Rep. Steve Scalise, or the 2022 assault on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi — received relatively little search interest after the first rush of news.

The drop-off in public attention matches the pattern of news coverage: A Blue Light News review of newspaper articles from LexisNexis found that recent events of political violence have tended to disappear from most newspaper front pages within just a week.

The Blue Light News review focused on incidents where individual political figures were targeted for violence. That does not encompass the full scope of political violence in the U.S., which has also included shootings targeting campaign offices and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The review also found that despite the overall trend toward desensitization, many factors influenced the level of attention various incidents received, including the extent of injuries and how quickly the attacker was apprehended.

That’s why Kirk’s death — and the gruesome videos of it that quickly circulated across social media — may register with Americans in a different way than past incidents, Riddle said.

“The graphicness of violence matters,” the University of Wisconsin professor said. “[Kirk’s death] was caught live on camera, it was very bloody and graphic. Are people desensitized to exactly what they saw on Wednesday? Have we seen that a lot? I don’t feel like we have.”