Who is Charlie Kirk?
Charlie Kirk was an American novelist, television personality, and political activist who lived from October 14, 1993, to September 10, 2025. In 2012, he served as executive director of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an organization he co-founded. He was a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the CEO of Turning Point Action (TPAction). He reflected the rise of Christian nationalism in the Republican Party and was one of the most well-known representatives of the populist MAGA movement in his final years.
He grew up in Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, Illinois, two suburbs of Chicago. Kirk was politically involved in high school, backing Republican Mark Kirk (no relation) in his bid for the U.S. Senate. Influenced by Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, he attended Harper College for a short period before leaving to pursue full-time political action. Kirk established TPUSA, a conservative student organization, in 2012, and it expanded rapidly with support from donors such as Foster Friess.
Through programs like the Professor Watchlist and School Board Watchlist, which opponents claim aimed to suppress or fire professors and educators through targeted harassment campaigns for voicing views contrary to Turning Point’s, Charlie Kirk increased the organization’s influence. In order to mobilize religious communities on conservative concerns, he and Pentecostal pastor Rob McCoy launched Turning Point Faith in 2019. He also founded Turning Point Action, a political advocacy arm. He was the host of the conservative talk radio show The Charlie Kirk Show. Charlie Kirk was a prominent Trump supporter who championed far-right and Trump-related causes.
He held a number of controversial beliefs, particularly in relation to his opposition to LGBTQ rights, gun control, and abortion; his criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and his support of Christian nationalism, COVID-19 disinformation, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and unfounded allegations of electoral fraud in 2020.
During his American Comeback Tour, he was speaking at his signature Prove Me Wrong table at a TPUSA public debate event on the Utah Valley University campus on September 10, 2025, when he was shot and killed.
Early Life and Education
Born in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, on October 14, 1993, Charlie Kirk grew up in Prospect Heights, which is close by. His father is an architect, while his mother works as a mental health counselor. As an Eagle Scout, he was a member of the Boy Scouts of America. He volunteered for Illinois Republican Mark Kirk’s victorious U.S. Senate campaign in 2010, while he was a student at Wheeling High School.
Charlie Kirk launched a campaign in his senior year to overturn a cookie pricing hike at his school. Additionally, he appeared on Fox Business after writing an essay for Breitbart News accusing high school textbooks of liberal bias. He left Harper College, which is close to Chicago, before earning a degree or certificate.
During a speech at Benedictine University’s “Youth Empowerment Day,” Kirk got to know Bill Montgomery, a retired man over 50 years his senior who was then a legislative candidate supported by the Tea Party. He was urged by Montgomery to devote himself full-time to political activism. Later, he established a “grass-roots organization to rival liberal groups such as MoveOn.org” called Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Kirk convinced Foster Friess, a well-known Republican donor, to provide funding for the group during the 2012 Republican National Convention.
Organizations
Turning Point USA
From Turning Point USA’s inception until his passing in 2025, Charlie Kirk served as its CEO, top fundraiser, and public spokesperson. At the age of 18, he co-founded the group in 2012. His transformation of the group into a “well-funded media operation, backed by conservative megadonors like the Wyoming businessman Foster Friess” was reported by The New York Times. The Professor Watchlist and the School Board Watchlist are two of TPUSA’s initiatives. These watchlists’ detractors claim that they have resulted in the targeted harassment of academics and endanger academic freedom. The site provider of the Professor Watchlist temporarily halted it in 2019.
When ProPublica looked into TPUSA’s finances in 2020, they discovered that the group had made “misleading financial claims,” that an independent auditor had not conducted the audits, and that the executives had amassed wealth while supporting Trump. According to ProPublica, Kirk also purchased a condo in Longboat Key, Florida, for $855,000, and his pay from TPUSA jumped from $27,000 to almost $300,000. Turning Point USA’s revenue in 2020 was $39.2 million. Kirk received almost $325,000 in compensation from TPUSA and associated companies.
An online academy aimed at students in schools “poisoning our youth with anti-American ideas” was launched by TPUSA in 2021. Families looking for a “America-first education” were the target audience for Turning Point Academy. With intentions to build the academy by the fall of 2022, Arizona education business StrongMind first collaborated with TPUSA, evaluating its “potential to generate over $40 million in gross revenue at full capacity (10,000 students)”. After StrongMind faced criticism from its own staff, the collaboration came to an end, and Freedom Learning Group, a significant subcontractor that created the academy’s course materials, also withdrew.
Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty
The “Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty” is a right-wing think tank that is owned, sponsored, and hosted by Liberty University. Kirk and Jerry Falwell Jr. co-founded it in November 2019. The term “Falkirk” was a combination of the words “Kirk” and “Falwell”. Among the fellows were Jenna Ellis, a senior legal counselor for Trump; Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to President Trump; and Antonia Okafor, director of outreach for Gun Owners of America. At least $50,000 was spent by the Falkirk Center on political Facebook ads in 2020 that supported Trump and other Republican candidates.
The group’s combative political tone was criticized by students and alumni, who felt that it went against the university’s goal. Kirk’s one-year contract was not renewed by Liberty University in late 2020, and Falwell retired as president in August of the same year. The university changed the organization’s name to “Standing for Freedom Center” in 2021.
Turning Point Faith
Charlie Kirk and Rob McCoy started Turning Point Faith, a nonprofit that urged pastors and other church leaders to get involved in local and national politics, when Liberty University declined to extend Kirk’s contract with the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty in 2021. TPUSA’s basic beliefs are instilled and faith-based voter drives are among its operations. TPUSA’s 2021 Investor Prospectus states that the $6.4 million program “will ‘address America’s crumbling religious foundation by engaging thousands of pastors nationwide’ in order to ‘breathe renewed civic engagement into our churches’.”
Media
Charlie Kirk presented The Charlie Kirk Show, a three-hour radio talk show on Salem Media’s “The Answer” radio channel, every day from October 2020 until his passing. In 2024, Kirk’s podcast was downloaded between 500,000 and 750,000 times daily, according to Turning Point USA’s internal data.
The Charlie Kirk Show podcast was the twenty-first most popular podcast on Apple Podcasts as of December 7, 2021. Targeting Generation Z, Kirk’s “Turning Point Live” was a three-hour streaming conversation show. In 2021, the average monthly number of unique visits to Turning Point USA’s website increased to 111,000. According to a Brookings Institution analysis published in February 2023, out of 36,603 episodes created by 79 well-known political podcasters, Kirk’s podcast had the second-highest percentage of unsupported, misleading, and fraudulent claims.
Charlie Kirk asked for a “patriot” to free the man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and used a hammer to attack her husband in a 2022 episode of his podcast.
In 2022, writer Bari Weiss published a story called “The Twitter Files” that included internal Twitter papers and claimed that the social media site was blocking conservative figures. Weiss shared screenshots of Twitter tools that allowed moderators to restrict the visibility of accounts and postings. Kirk’s Twitter account was marked as “do not amplify” by Rolling Stone magazine, meaning that tweets from that account would not be highlighted by algorithms.
He, who has previously expressed skepticism about TikTok, opened an account in April 2024. After posting multiple videos of himself speaking to college students while on campus tours, Kirk’s account became well-known on the platform; some of the videos received up to 50 million views. Kirk joined Trinity Broadcasting Network in February 2025 to anchor Charlie Kirk Today, a chat show that airs during the week.
Charlie Kirk Books
Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations, published by Simon & Schuster in 2016, was co-written by Charlie Kirk and Brent Hamachek. He authored Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters, which was published in 2018. The book’s foreword was authored by Donald Trump Jr. Adam Rubenstein called the book a “hot mess” and “nothing more than a marketing pitch for [Turning Point USA]” in a review for The Weekly Standard. He also noted that the “thin” book was “stuffed with reprintings of his tweets and quotes from others.” Among the other works are Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024), The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth (2022), and The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020).
Faith
Charlie Kirk was as an evangelical Christian. He was a member of the Calvary Chapel Association, a Christian denomination. Kirk was seen as secular and an opponent of religious influence on politics and the state prior to the early 2020s. He later adopted a Christian nationalist stance. Kirk founded TPUSA Faith in 2021 with California pastor Rob McCoy in an effort to encourage conservative Christians to cast Republican ballots. Events like Trump’s relocation of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and church closures during the COVID era, which he and his supporters characterized as religious persecution, had an impact on Kirk’s change.
He promoted Christian creationism, claiming that Charles Darwin had been refuted and that evolution was untrue. He has discussed this subject at his campus Prove Me Wrong table. In a podcast interview with creationist Stephen Meyer, Kirk expressed his interest in Meyer’s claim that, in contrast to Darwin, intelligent design has scientific support. On his podcast, he has talked about the Institute for Creation Research’s support for Young Earth Creationism with its president, Randy Guliuzza.
Charlie Kirk Marital Status
In May 2021, Kirk wed Erika Kirk (née Frantzve), a philanthropist, podcaster, and businesswoman who took home the 2012 Miss Arizona USA title. In August 2022, a daughter, the couple’s first child, was born. In May 2024, a son, their second child, was born.
Net Worth
According to a number of estimates, Charlie Kirk is thought to be worth $12 million. He also wrote a number of books and started working in conservative politics and the media at the age of 18 in 2012.
Death
During a TPUSA event called “The American Comeback Tour” at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck and died. About 20 minutes after the event started, at 12:23 p.m. MDT (18:23 UTC), the shooting occurred in front of over 3,000 spectators.
Charlie Kirk was talking about mass shootings just before he was shot. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” was Kirk’s final response before being shot in response to a student who inquired, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” Kirk, 31, was declared dead later that afternoon after being transported to the Timpanogos Regional Hospital in severe condition. “In its early stages” is how FBI special agent in charge Robert Bohls characterized the probe and urged the public to come forward with information.
Achievements
The Forbes 30 Under 30 in Law & Policy for 2018 featured Kirk. Charlie Kirk received the honorary Doctor of Humanities (D.Hum.) degree from Liberty University in May 2019. Donald Trump declared that Kirk would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on September 11, 2025, one day after his passing.
