Rewriting Extremism: Right-Wing Seeks Nation to Mourn Charlie Kirk
The Right’s ‘martyr’ was an ideologue, a conspiracy theorist, a bigot, and an agitator who glorified violence.
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
On Wednesday, the head of one of the most influential right-wing dark money groups in the country was shot and killed in an act of violence decried across the political spectrum. In the wake of the killing, the Trump administration, GOP lawmakers, and right-wing personalities have paid tribute to their fallen ally—and sought to silence critics who pointed out his long history of extremism, violent rhetoric, and derogatory and conspiratorial statements.
Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old Christian Nationalist podcaster and internet personality, was at Utah Valley University for one of his signature “Prove Me Wrong” debates at which he would invite college students to confront him with questions challenging his regressive political views. The outdoor event, which was organized by Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the dark money group he co-founded to promote right-wing ideology on college and university campuses, was set to be the first stop on a national tour. Over 3,000 people were in attendance, including Kirk’s wife and two young children, as the far-right activist was shot in the neck.
The horrific slaying by a suspect with thus far unclear motivations comes at a precarious time for the nation—one defined by extreme polarization and rising political violence. Just last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus was shot up by a radicalized individual who believed the COVID-19 vaccines were killing him and other people. One responding police officer was killed. In June, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, and State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were left wounded, by an anti-abortion gunman. In April, a man with anti-government views threw Molotov cocktails into the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion.
Kirk was a high profile member of the so-called New Right, a neo-fascist movement that has engulfed the Republican Party under Donald Trump. With his death has come an outpouring of support from Trump and other Republican politicians, right-wing personalities, and political operatives, who have been lionizing the fallen extremist as a champion of free speech and open debate. Some have even called him a ‘martyr,’ including Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and Newsweek senior editor at large Josh Hammer.
Trump called Kirk a “Great American Patriot,” announced that he would posthumously award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and ordered all flags throughout the country to fly at half mast to honor him. Vice President JD Vance escorted the far-right activist’s casket on Air Force Two from Utah to Arizona where his body was laid to rest. A memorial service for Kirk is planned for Sunday night at the Kennedy Center.
Coupled with the hagiographic tributes has been a campaign to silence Kirk’s critics. Trump and his allies have rushed to blame The Left, with some prominent right-wing voices calling it—or for—“war.” The president vowed in a video Wednesday that his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” The State Department issued a warning that it would be reviewing the legal status of immigrants who celebrated or mocked the killing and the Pentagon implemented a “zero tolerance” for military personnel who did the same.
Others, like Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), have been trying to get Kirk’s online detractors fired. McCormick demanded the University of Pennsylvania take “decisive action” after renowned climatologist and geophysicist Michael E. Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media and an Accountability Journalism Institute advisor, after he reposted criticisms of Kirk on X. Olivia Krolczyk of the right-wing Leadership Institute’s Riley Gaines Center—so named for the former college swimmer turned anti-trans crusader who appeared at events with Kirk—announced that while it was ”free speech for liberals to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death” it was also her free speech to “call their employers and let them know 💅.” On Wednesday, a website went up, www.charliesmurderers.com, which featured a list with pictures, social media screenshots, and personal details about those speaking ill of Kirk.
The rewriting of Kirk and the efforts to shut down criticism of him appear to be part of a deliberate strategy to not only whitewash his extremism, but normalize and mainstream it—and perhaps use his death as a pretext for the Trump administration to continue targeting its political opposition.
But there is a chasm between Kirk’s emerging right-wing legend as a champion of open debate and free speech and the reality of who he was in life. The TPUSA chief had been one of the major drivers of the nation’s polarization and division, especially amongst younger voters. His incurious, black and white thinking and intuitive understanding of rage-baiting in the digital media landscape was useful to the big money interests bankrolling the conservative movement.
Targeting Schools
Kirk’s Turning Point operation, which boasts the main 501(c)(3) charity, TPUSA, and various arms, including a 501(c)(4) social welfare group and a PAC, specializes in generating outrage for a young, online right-wing audience. It purports to be the largest youth movement in America. Kirk launched the group in 2012 at the age of 18 with his friend and mentor, the late businessman and conservative activist Bill Montgomery. The aim of the organization was to indoctrinate, organize and train students to wage war on colleges as liberal bastions and turn them into incubators of right-wing thought.
The organization grew into a juggernaut with the election of Donald Trump, establishing itself as a fixture in the president’s Make America Great Again movement. It amassed a staggering war chest—last year, it drew in more than $85 million in revenue—with which it would hold splashy conferences that featured some of the biggest names in GOP politics as speakers and attendees. Kirk became something of a kingmaker on the Right.
TPUSA’s annual AmericaFest conference regularly drew in thousands of conservatives and far-right figures, including white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and other extremists. Among the personalities slated to speak at the upcoming 2025 AmericaFest are white nationalist Bannon, Fox News comedian Greg Gutfeld, who called on conservatives to embrace the label of “Nazi,” and Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, who once called to ‘eradicate’ “transgenderism.” Also speaking is National Institutes of Health Director and public health contrarian Jay Bhattacharya and anti-vax actor Rob Schneider.
The core of TPUSA’s success, its digital operation, was built around Kirk, who would make outrageous remarks—either on his podcast or in his debates with young college students—which the group would then turn into viral clips, generating media buzz and attracting big money support from the Right. The group was launched with funding from multimillionaire GOP donor and businessman Foster Friess but other funders have included various foundations linked to the petrochemical billionaire Koch family, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and more.
The narrative Kirk and TPUSA pushed out over and over again, with little regard for potential consequences, was that the Left was wantonly destroying America and American values—and the colleges were key to the operation. Kirk encouraged conservative students to rat out faculty members with whom they disagreed, publishing a professor “watchlist” on the TPUSA website to identify ostensibly liberal and left-wing professors. The list, which has been compared to McCarthy Era targeting of academics, has been widely rebuked among academics for engendering fear on campuses and exposing the professors on it to online harassment and threats. The group also created a school board watchlist in 2021.
The political Right has long targeted college campuses as bastions of liberal and progressive thought. In his influential 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on American Free Enterprise,” corporate attorney and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell Jr. called on the business community to throw their resources behind changing the culture on college campuses by grooming speakers and right-wing professors. But Kirk’s operation treated institutions of higher learning as inherent enemies in a culture war that did not need to be slowly transformed so much as targeted and crushed into subservience. As The Guardian noted recently, this ideology is reflected in Trump administration policy.
Division and Doubt
Kirk, himself a community college dropout, became known for his invective, his white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and proud anti-intellectualism. He reveled in and celebrated violence, peddled rank misogyny, and dealt in antisemitic tropes, racist myths, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQIA+ hate, and conspiracy theories. Some of his most controversial, viral moments include:
Suggesting that a “patriot” should bail out the man who attacked Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, in their home with a hammer.
Calling President Joe Biden a “bumbling, dementia-filled, Alzheimer's, corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America."
Expressing his support for public executions.
Calling the Civil Rights Act a “huge mistake.”
Stating that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “not a good person.”
Declaring that several high profile Black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee—lacked the “brain processing power to…be taken really seriously” without Affirmative Action.
On multiple occasions, admitting that DEI policies made him question the competence of Black professionals like pilots and surgeons.
Arguing that Black Americans were better off during segregation.
Stating that “God’s perfect law says gay people should be stoned to death.”
Arguing that a hypothetical drunk woman withdrawing consent from an equally drunk man during a late night sexual encounter was a “murky middle gray area.”
Stating that if he had a 10-year-old daughter got pregnant through rape, “the baby would be delivered.”
Claiming that Marxist, secular Jewish financiers controlled America’s cultural institutions like Hollywood, colleges, and nonprofits.
Claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them”.
Calling Democrats “maggots…vermin and swine.”
Declaring that “prowling Blacks” were targeting white people.
Calling gun violence “worth it to” as a cost of having the Second Amendment.
Espousing the white nationalist Great Replacement theory that immigrants were deliberately being brought into America by nefarious left-wing forces to replace white people.
Following Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, Kirk became a major promoter of election denial. Turning Point Action, the social welfare arm of Kirk’s operation, even bused angry Trump supporters to D.C. for the demonstration that devolved into the Capitol Insurrection. Kirk himself called on Mike Pence to ignore the results of the election and has celebrated Trump’s pardons of insurrectionists, who he called “hostages.”
Despite his group’s co-founder, businessman and conservative activist Bill Montgomery, dying from COVID complications, Kirk joined broader right-wing efforts to politicize and undermine economically disruptive public health measures like “lockdowns.” Kirk promoted unproven COVID treatments embraced by the Right, including hydroxychloroquine in early 2020 and ivermectin. Neither drug has proven effective for that purpose. Kirk also pushed fear of the mRNA COVID vaccines, which have saved millions of lives, calling them “experimental” and suggested they were injuring people. Kirk partnered with anti-vax group The Wellness Company, which hawks an unproven “spike detox” to cleanse the body of COVID vaccines.
Promoting White Nationalists
Kirk associated with a number of white supremacist and white nationalists throughout his career. He even considered some friends.
For example, the TPUSA chief was a longtime collaborator of Jack Posobiec, the ex-Alt Right provocateur known for his white supremacist connections, support of #Pizzagate, and antisemitic posts. The pair did a promotional podcast episode for Posobiec’s book, Unhumans:The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), which makes the case that conservatives should follow the lessons of right-wing dictators who tortured and slaughtered leftists. Posobiec, whose podcast, Human Events Daily, has been “powered by” TPUSA, opened the group’s convention last year by walking on stage with another staffer and unfurling flags that read “white boy summer.” He is set to speak at this year’s AmericaFest,
In a recent interview with CNN about Kirk’s murder, Posobiec said the Right was “facing asymmetric warfare.”
Another white nationalist Kirk platformed was Steve Sailer, a blogger that writes for Vdare—a website that is openly associated with white supremacy—and is the founder of a eugenics group called the Human Biodiversity Institute. Sailer is also virulently anti-gay, claiming in a 2003 Vdare column that ”An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It’s probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ.” On October 12th of 2023, Kirk published a podcast episode called “The Crime of ‘Noticing’ with Steve Sailer.”
“Noticing” has a specific meaning on the far Right. In 2019, multiple news organizations began reporting on a Telegram channel that was publishing a hitlist targeting Jews. The list, which had initially started on 4chan, was moved to Telegram after being banned there. It was meant to target Jews for harassment. Each post consisted of the person’s name, photos, and a handful of social media posts. And in some cases potential locations were also included. First on the list was Senator Richard Blumenthal.
That channel was called “The Noticer” and it spawned the far Right irony drenched trend of “noticing.” Noticing happens when you realize racist tropes such as “Blacks commit more crime,” or “Jews control everything.” The schtick behind “noticing” is that it is not racist to just observe and see patterns. Nevermind that the proponents of “noticing” only see the patterns that suit their biases. The term is widely used on social media platforms by nazis and antisemetic trolls.
Sailer joined Kirk to promote his book full of racist stereotypes entitled, “Noticing: An Essential Reader.” Kirk opened the show by describing Sailer as “incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers in the country.” And that “we like to say on the show that people committed the crime of ‘noticing,’” suggesting Kirk’s broad understanding of the phenomena.
Christian Nationalism
Less than three months ago, Kirk was asked how he would want to be remembered. He responded, “for courage for my faith.” Although he initially advocated for the separation of church and state, Kirk became a Christian nationalist and a member of the secretive Christian Right group the Council for National Policy, which connects right-wing activists with big donors and focuses on laying a media ground game for the far-Right.
Early in 2023, Kirk’s operation launched an effort called Turning Point USA Faith, to unite various Christian religions behind “Biblical values,” defined by opposition to LGBTQIA+ acceptance and the perpetuation of patriarchy. On October 4, Kirk did an episode of his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, titled, “Is The Pope Catholic?”
“I’m not a Catholic so I can speak freely,” Kirk said on the program. Pope Francis “feels like an infiltrator that is LARPing as a Pope.” He went on to accuse the late Pope of trying to introduce “unclean spirits or even heretical ideas that are rooted in Marxism” into the Catholic faith.
Kirk’s guest for his segment questioning the Pope’s faith was writer and YouTuber Dr. Taylor Marshall who is part of the “traditionalist Catholicism” movement that is virulently antisemitic. “Trad Catholics” seek a return to Latin based services and often refer to church officials they disagree with as “Marxist.” Kirk’s associate Posobiec has spoken at Trad Catholic events.
Kirk was also one of the signers on a statement of principles for so-called National Conservatism, a fascistic, Christian Nationalist movement promoted through the Edmund Burke Foundation. The group recently held its fifth ever National Conservatism conference in D.C. attended by Trump administration officials, Posobiec, Bannon, and other extremists.
The Real Gateway Pundit
Perhaps the most defining part of Kirk’s legacy is his role as a gateway to right-wing radicalization.
Nathan Damigo, who is a white supremacist and was one of the main organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, openly encouraged his followers to attend Kirk’s campus events in February 2025. Damigo founded the group Identity Evropa that was at the forefront of the Alt-Right’s efforts to recruit young men.
He told his white nationalist followers on Telegram, “These events are excellent places to recruit.” He also told them that Kirk and others were able to spread antisemitism more effectively than they could because he had “full license from the Jews to say whatever they need to in order to maintain an audience, in order to deliver a poison pill later on.”
Another example is neo-Nazi Ryan Sanchez, who is one of the original members of the Rise Above Movement and is a sometime fanboy of Groyper podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has criticized Kirk for not being extreme enough for his liking. Sanchez became more known after sieg heiling over journalist Amanda Moore. In his Telegram channel, Sanchez noted that Kirk discussing “whiteness is good” was normalizing the nationalism they all longed for. Kirk adapting their language, he noted, could effectively do more for their cause than anything they were doing on their own.
In April, a mass shooting at Florida State University claimed two lives and left six other people injured. According to a survivor, the suspect had been kicked out of a political roundtable club for expressing “white supremacist” views and had been a member of the Florida chapter of Kirk’s TPUSA.
Politics the (Far) Right Way
The right-wing campaign to rewrite Charlie Kirk has already scored some victories with prominent liberal voices and legacy media outfits participating in the effort.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, who has been positioning himself as the anti-Trump and who interviewed Kirk on his podcast earlier this year, posted on X that “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work. Engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” New York Times columnist Ezra Klein made a similar argument in an op-ed in which he proclaimed that the far-right extremist had been “practicing politics the exactly right way.”
“He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
CBS News had Posobiec on to discuss Kirk’s death with its chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett, who steered clear of the extreme politics of Kirk and his guest in favor softball questions about the slain TPUSA chief’s faith and personality, including one asking if he was really “a happy warrior” as “it has been said.”
“He enjoyed, as I gather it and have read, the engagement—the back-and-forth—and he wasn’t intimidated by people who disagreed with him, he actually was kind of energized by that. Do I have that about right?” Garrett asked in a follow-up.
Comcast executives, meanwhile, sent out a company-wide email to employees of NBCUniversal, which owns a number of major media properties like NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC, calling Kirk an ”advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him.” The email defends the firing of political analyst Matthew Dowd from MSNBC over comments he made about Kirk’s record of fueling division and hate.
“That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions,” it read.
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