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.