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Today, check out: The assassination of Charlie Kirk (free); NATO shoots down drones over Polish airspace (free); Kamala Harris blames the Democrats for her loss; and RFK Jr. releases the latest childhood health report.
By Max Towey
To have grown up on social media in the last decade is to have seen Charlie Kirk tell college students to “prove me wrong!” The students would challenge the 31-year-old conservative firebrand, who would debate them on whatever topic they chose.
Yesterday, he was assassinated while doing exactly that on the campus of Utah Valley University.
“Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” the student asked.
“Too many,” Kirk, sitting in a tent in front of thousands of students, replied to cheers.
“Five,” the questioner said. “Five is a lot…I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?” countered Kirk.
They may have been the last words he ever said.
There was a crack, and Charlie’s body slumped over. The crowd started screaming. Medics rushed Charlie to the hospital. And the internet went into a frenzy.
Was he alive? Was he dead? Nobody knew. The AP reported he was in critical condition; Glenn Beck and other conservatives claimed to have heard the same from “inside sources.”
It seemed to be the only thing the internet could talk about. Within an hour and a half, over 3M posts had been made with “Charlie Kirk” on X. Viral clips of MSNBC enraged the right. In one, commentator Matthew Dowd said, “You can’t stop with these awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.” (MSNBC fired Dowd hours later.) Another MSNBC guest suggested it may have “been a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,” as though a Kirk campus event were a Pakistani wedding.
The internet waited with bated breath as unconfirmed reports of Kirk’s death trickled in. Everyone from California Governor Gavin Newsom – who recently interviewed Kirk on his podcast – to Hollywood star Chris Pratt issued statements offering their thoughts and prayers.
And then Trump posted, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”
Charlie Kirk was dead. And across the country, millions of young people – particularly young men – went into mourning.
We can confidently say this: The editors and anchors at the country’s largest news outlets can’t understand the impact Charlie Kirk had. The purpose of this piece is to explain his rise and chart how he helped move young people right, orchestrating one of the most monumental political transformations in American history and earning him a closer seat at Inauguration Day than any sitting member of Congress.
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Charlie Kirk was born on October 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, IL, just outside Chicago. His mother worked as a mental health counselor, while his father was an architect who designed a number of projects including – coincidentally – Trump Tower in New York.
“My dad always said very positive things about Trump,” Kirk told Newsweek in 2019. “That he always worked hard, he had an attention to detail and was relentless.” Kirk says he supported Trump’s presidential ambitions as early as 2011, when he was 17.
Kirk was deeply involved in the Boy Scouts, achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. He advocated for the organization for the rest of his life, although he later clashed with it, tweeting in 2018, “I am a proud Eagle Scout. It is a national disgrace that girls are being allowed into the Boy Scouts.”
His life changed in high school when he discovered conservative firebrand and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Kirk recalled to the NYT, “I started listening to Rush when I was a junior in high school. Listening, I was like, This guy is unbelievable! Because you’re looking for someone in high school to affirm your beliefs. I would never forget: On my lunch break, from like 12:17 to 12:55, I’d listen. Just me. I went all in on Rush.”
His foray into politics continued at Wheeling High School, in the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights, where he channeled his Tea Party sentiment into “Wheeling High School Against Cookie Inflation,” a group that protested prices in the school cafeteria. That year, he volunteered for the successful congressional campaign of Mark Kirk (of no relation). The next year – as a high school senior – Kirk penned his first op-ed in Breitbart, the right-wing news organization, criticizing the bias in textbooks:
Our public education system is supposedly one without bias, a place where any student can come and learn without any form of partisanship. Instead, our classrooms are slowly becoming political lecture halls with teachers being pawns to further the doctrine of liberalism and ‘equality.’
This op-ed launched the young Kirk onto the political scene. It secured him an appearance on Fox News and landed him a speaking gig at Benedictine University in Illinois. In the audience for that talk was the Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery, who would change Kirk’s life.
Montgomery encouraged Kirk to skip college and go straight into political activism. Kirk had been rejected by West Point but accepted at other colleges, including Baylor University and – according to a host on Kirk’s Real America’s Voice network – Brown University. With Montgomery’s urging, Kirk decided to skip college and strike out on his own.
Montgomery introduced Kirk to prominent conservative donors and centimillionaires: Foster Friess, Bruce Rauner (later governor of Illinois), and Greg Gianforte (currently the governor of Montana). They gave Kirk seed funding for Turning Point USA, which sought to educate students about conservatism and spread “free market values.”
Joe Walsh – an Illinois Tea Party congressman who later became a Never Trumper – was one of Kirk’s mentors at the time. He recalled to the NYT, “[Kirk] was 18 going on 46. And his mission, to go on college campuses and introduce the idea of free markets, was a slam dunk for getting money from old Republican farts.”
In 2012, Kirk launched Turning Point USA, which he initially called “SOS Liberty.” In the “speech that launched Turning Point USA,” per a later Turning Point USA (TPUSA) post, Kirk told a near-empty gymnasium, “SOS, what does that mean? It is the international cry for help. Our generation is drowning in an ocean of debt. When you graduate from high school, you'll get that diploma, and it'll be a great day. But that's an invoice for over $600,000. You owe, each one of you, $600,000, the federal government. Washington is spending your future away.”
TPUSA aimed to counter liberal dominance on college campuses by promoting free markets and limited government through chapters, events, and tools like the controversial Professor Watchlist, which flagged educators for alleged bias. After the GOP retook the Senate in the 2014 midterms, Kirk attended a prestigious conservative conference called Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach. There, Kirk met Stephen Miller, who was then an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and would later become Trump’s policy architect. Among the donors in the audience was Rebecca Dunn, who gave Turning Point a six-figure gift. The Dunns would become major donors to Turning Point, eventually being the namesake of the Turning Point HQ, the Bill and Rebecca Dunn Freedom Center.
Kirk's career skyrocketed as TPUSA's CEO and public face. An early Trump backer, Kirk addressed the Republican National Convention in 2016. He then focused on rallying students for Trump, then launched Turning Point Action, a political advocacy group, and Turning Point Faith, which sought to politically engage religious conservatives. Kirk authored several books, including "Campus Battlefield" (2018, with a foreword by Donald Trump Jr.) and "The College Scam" (2022), critiquing higher education. His podcast and radio show, "The Charlie Kirk Show," drew massive audiences – ranking No. 13 on Apple Podcasts for news in 2024 with a reported 500,000 to 750,000 daily downloads.
Yet where Kirk had the most impact was on social media.
One after another, quick videos of Kirk debating college students on issues like trans rights, abortion, and taxes would go viral. These clips helped Kirk amass a following of 20M across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while growing his TPUSA network to over 800,000 college and high school chapter members across the country. On TikTok, he garnered billions of views in 2024 alone; on YouTube, one of his 1.5-hour debate videos has 31M views. For context, the most-viewed Kamala Harris interview from the 2024 campaign got fewer than 4M views on YouTube.
Overall, TPUSA generated 15B social media views in 2024. TikTok surveys found that made Kirk the most trusted figure among under-30 Trump voters – more than Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, or any other conservative media titan.
This translated to a lot of votes for Trump – and one of the most rapid overhauls of the electorate in modern political history.
Whereas in 2020, men ages 18-29 went for Biden by a margin of +15, in 2024, they went for Trump by a margin of +14. A July survey from Pew Research found an even starker swing: From 2023 to 2025, men ages 18-29 swung from a +26 Democratic advantage to a +18 Republican advantage – a 44-point swing in just two years. Conservatives had overtaken young men’s podcast libraries and social media feeds – and nobody more so than Charlie Kirk.
Yet it wasn’t just social that did it: At the start of the Trump campaign, TPUSA had over 3,000 campus chapters and $85M in annual revenue. Kirk mobilized it fully for Trump, launching a “You're Being Brainwashed” tour that visited 25 college campuses in swing states. In Arizona, where Kirk lived, TPUSA registered thousands of voters at Arizona State University and contacted over 400,000 voters statewide.
Yet amid all of that work and influence, Kirk’s most iconic content was debates with students on college campuses. Liberals loved to challenge him and tell him off; conservatives loved to cheer him on. When I was a college student, conservative students flew under the radar; today, they’re often out in the open, and he’s one major reason why.
In a tragic twist of fate, the type of debate that made him famous would end his life.
Whether you hate what Kirk accomplished or love it, he was a human being. I’ve heard people who knew him – who had no kind words for other conservative influencers – only say good things about him. He was a diehard Oregon Ducks fan who would schedule his events and media appearances around their games; he was a devout Christian who would frequently post Bible verses and encourage students to pray.
Because of this horrific act of violence, his daughters will grow up without a dad. And the legions of new young conservatives will continue without their leader. How they will respond remains to be seen. But what we know is this: They won’t forget him anytime soon.
Editor’s Note
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See you tomorrow,
Max and Max
