Charlie Kirk, who was shot dead on Wednesday at the age of 31, had established himself as one of the most prominent and powerful conservative voices in the United States.
The right-wing political activist, who was killed during a speaking engagement for his “American Comeback Tour”at Utah Valley University, was a leading ally of President Donald Trump.
The president announced his death on social media site, Truth Social. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
Kirk’s journey to political prominence began at a young age. He was born on October 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois into a wealthy family who lived in five-bedroom mansion in Prospect Heights, on the outskirts of Chicago.
His father was an architect who designed and built middle-class luxury estates, while his mother was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who later worked as a mental health counsellor. Classmates described the young Kirk as “rude”, “arrogant”, with “a superiority complex.”
The 2008 housing crisis hurt Kirk’s father’s business but it was the election of President Barack Obama later that year that really began to shape Kirk’s politics. While many in the Chicago area considered Obama a local hero, Kirk was a devoted fan of Ronald Reagan, and described teachers he disagreed with as “post-modern neo-Marxists.”
In 2022, Politico reported that the young Kirk was a passionate gun rights supporter who once argued with a teacher that if guns make people violent, “do forks make people fat?”
Kirk got his first taste of real politics in 2010 when he volunteered for the successful campaign to elect Illinois Republican Mark Kirk (not a family relation) to the Senate.
When he finished high school, Kirk hoped to attend the prestigious U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but his application was rejected. He would later claim that this rejection was not based on his academic performance, but on the fact his place had been given to “a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion.”
In April 2012, at the age of 18, Kirk wrote to the right-wing news site Breitbart News to express his belief that his school textbooks had been politically biased. They commissioned him to write a post, headlined: “Liberal Bias Starts in High School Economics Textbooks”, which garnered significant media attention and landed Kirk an interview on Fox News.
Around the same time, he met 71-year-old Tea Party candidate Bill Montgomery, who encouraged him to dedicate himself to political activism. Together, they founded Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that continues to advocate for conservative politics at schools, colleges and universities.
Ben Shapiro, a fellow conservative activist, recounted meeting Kirk as an 18-year-old and believing he was destined to take over the Republican National Committee.
Kirk never completed a college degree. He was briefly enrolled at Harper College, a public community college near Chicago, but dropped out before graduating. But by then, Turning Point USA had become his full-time job. The organization started out by sponsoring a series of debates between Democratic and Republican students on college campuses in the Midwest.
In August 2012, Kirk attended the Republican National Convention where he bumped into multimillionaire investor Foster Friess in a stairwell and convinced him to bankroll Turning Point USA.
