Watch enough Fox News clips from 2014 and you will come across a video of a besuited, gawky 20-year-old delivering a fluent diatribe against regulation, the minimum wage and the indolent youth.
This is Charlie Kirk. He looks like a frat boy at his aunt’s second wedding but he speaks with the conviction and range of a seasoned politician. In the clip, he wins over the anchor, Stuart Varney, within a few swift sentences. “I find this fascinating,” Varney beams, “Charlie Kirk come back and see us again real soon!”.
Ten years later, Kirk, now 31, received a phone call from president-elect Donald Trump the day after the 2024 election. Kirk had organised much of the campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation after Trump took responsibility from the Republican Party and outsourced it to organisations such as Elon Musk’s America PAC and Kirk’s Turning Point Action. The victory on 5 November was a crowning moment for Kirk, who has long been seen as the Maga movement’s tribune to the youth and feted as the future of the American right. Since the election, his influence has reached new heights. As the Republicans prepare to reclaim Washington, Kirk is poised to become a top lieutenant in Trumpland.
Kirk’s rise can be traced back to a decision he took two years before that Fox News interview. In 2012, two days after graduating from Wheeling High School in the Chicagoan suburbs, he shunned college and founded Turning Point USA, a conservative organisation which sought to instil in young people a belief in the supremacy of the free market and small government.
Kirk attracted millions in donations and Turning Point was soon funnelling resources to conservatives standing for student bodies, pumping out ebooks with titles like 10 Ways Fossil Fuels Improve Our Daily Lives, tracking left-wing professors on an online database and railing against attacks on free speech at extravagant annual conventions. It would host workshops for students called “suing your school 101: knowing and defending the first amendment on campus” and “fighting the PC police on your campus”. The atmosphere at universities in the 2010s – the cancellation of speakers, the policing of language and the politicisation of the university administration – was the perfect environment for Kirk to thrive. It meant he could pitch himself as a daring rebel who brought forbidden wisdom to curious students. Turning Point saw itself as an insurgency against the prevailing progressive hegemony. It was literate in memes and online culture; #BigGovSUCKS was a motto plastered on social media. Turning Point now claims a presence on over 3,500 campuses across the US.
As Turning Point grew, so did Kirk’s political weight. In 2016, while working on social media for the Trump campaign, he struck up a relationship with Donald Trump Jr. The eldest Trump son was then on the periphery, suffering constant comparison to his elegant and more centrist sister, Ivanka. Nonetheless, Kirk worked hard for his approval. “I travelled the country for about 70 days straight carrying Donald Trump Jr.’s bags and getting his Diet Cokes,” Kirk said in an interview with radio host Rush Limbaugh in February 2019. “Helping book flights and taking pictures and coordinating media, essentially being the youth director of the campaign and also being Don Jr.’s body man.”
It was a savvy bet. Over time, Trump came to recognise his son as the whisperer of the Maga base. Don Jr. was credited with convincing his father to appoint JD Vance as his running mate. Ivanka and her husband, Jared, a power centre in Trump’s first White House, bowed out from politics. Don Jr has taken their place and brought Kirk along with him.
Meanwhile, Kirk’s preoccupations shifted from lowering deficits to gender ideology, from preaching Milton Friedman to fomenting doubt about the integrity of the 2020 election. Kirk is a figurehead for the nativist, Christian nationalist strain inside the Maga movement. At a Trump rally in October, he led the crowd in a “Christ is king” chant.
On an episode of his podcast , The Charlie Kirk Show, in January, he said: “The southern border is, of course, the Great Replacement. They’re trying to replace us demographically. They’re trying to make the country less white. They’re trying to make the country more like the Third World… The rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting age males – they’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries… The contempt, the resentment that the left-wing ruling class has for white, Anglo, Saxon Protestant males is real!”
These angry monologues enhanced Kirk’s appeal on the right. His profile within the Republican party grew. That Kirk called Republicans like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson “worthless, weak, spineless” did not stop Johnson from paying homage and going on Kirk’s podcast. It is a mark of Kirk’s prominence within the movement – both Don Jr and Elon Musk regularly share his posts on X and his podcast ranks above Tucker Carlson’s – that Johnson is willing to suffer such indignity to curry favour with someone who on paper is podcaster, but increasingly acts like a kingmaker.
On the night of the election, as Trump’s victory came into view, Musk posted on X: “You are the media now”. He meant that X is the voice of the people because the legacy media has been supplanted by activist journalists such as Kirk. Trump’s victory is elevating a new cultural elite from the fringes to the mainstream. Figures such as the mixed martial arts tycoon and Trump’s close friend, Dana White, and the former WWE executive, Linda McMahon, who could get a job in the administration, now find themselves proximate to power.
In the days following the election, Kirk was spotted around Trump’s Mar-o-Lago villa, reportedly advising the President-elect on who should get a job in the new administration. Kirk represents the culmination of alternative media, a consummate practitioner of transforming online influence into political power.
In defeat, fewer Democrats are sneering at the online right than before; some even think the left should fashion their own. They might be too late. As Barack Obama’s former adviser Van Jones said on CNN after the election: “We were making fun of Donald Trump for having thrown away his ground game and doing some weird stuff online. We thought that [Musk and Kirk] were idiots. It turned out we were the idiots. We woke up in a body bag.”
[See also: Postliberalism redux]
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