Politics
Deep in grief, Charlie Kirk’s supporters say his work is just beginning
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.
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LOS ANGELES — Despite months of controversy beforehand, Friday’s encounter in Seattle did not turn out to be much of a “Pride Match” at all. Expressions of sexual and gender identity were sparse in the crowd, perhaps due to the random lottery pairing of Iran and Egypt, which have two of the world’s least hospitable societies and most repressive governments towards LGBT people.
Chance has produced a political pairing today that has a much stronger political claim to a “Pride Match” designation: the opening round-of-32 fixture in Los Angeles this afternoon. Canada and South Africa will meet because of the tournament’s bracket architecture, but they are parallel pioneers in gay and lesbian rights — the first two non-European countries to legalize same-sex marriage.
Canada got there first. Courts in its most populous provinces began to rule in 2003 that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, making it possible for gay men and lesbians to marry in much of the country. In 2005, the Liberal Party government led by Prime Minister Paul Martin introduced the Civil Marriage Act, creating a single legal standard for all provinces and territories. It passed a parliamentary vote on July 19, 2005, and became law the next day — placing Canada alongside the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain as the only countries that allowed same-sex marriage nationwide.
South Africa joined them the following year. In December 2005, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that the common-law definition of marriage violated the equal-protection promises of the country’s post-apartheid constitution, which specifically protect people from discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation.” After the court essentially ordered Parliament to rewrite the law, lawmakers drafted the Civil Union Act, which passed and became law on November 30, 2006.
Now more than three dozen countries allow same-sex unions, including the World Cup’s three North American co-hosts and all of the tournament favorites including Argentina, France, Brazil, Germany, Portugal and England (which along with Wales legalized them in 2014). South Africa, however, remains the only country in Africa.
Canada and South Africa have different constitutional regimes and cultural traditions, but one person links their shared arc as pioneers in LGBTQ+ rights: Montreal human-rights attorney Irwin Cotler, who served on Nelson Mandela’s legal team before becoming Canada’s justice minister. In that role, he was the driving force with Martin’s government to codify same-sex unions through the Civil Marriage Act.
LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump has stayed away from the World Cup after making himself the main character of the months leading up to it. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum prominently gave away her tickets to Mexico’s matches in what was seen as a populist rebuke to FIFA.
But one North American leader is reveling in the fact that his country is hosting the world’s top sporting event, and that its national team is doing well.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney attended two of Canada’s group-stage matches, a visible
and gave a locker-room talk to the team after its defeat of Qatar that spread widely on social media. Carney has been such an omnipresent component of his team’s group-stage run that its one defeat, against Switzerland, has been blamed on the “Carney Curse” because the prime minister briefly stepped away from his seat when a crucial goal was scored.
Carney has not said whether he is traveling to Los Angeles for today’s knockout fixture against South Africa, but he did use the match-up as an occasion to call President Cyril Ramaphosa, where the two men discussed “growing cooperation in agriculture and agrifood,” according to a readout provided by the prime minister’s office.
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