How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right: Part Two

Part One of this story was published yesterday, February 13, 2025.

Kirk was, at 23, the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. A California donor, Carla Sands, then put him in touch with Doug Deason, the president of a family investment management firm in Dallas with over $1 billion in assets. Just before Kirk was to fly to Dallas, Deason informed him that he had a fund-raising luncheon to attend that same day in Fort Worth and that Kirk could be his plus-one. The honoree at the event was the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Kirk had yet to meet Trump. A late convert like many other Republicans, he had initially supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Senator Ted Cruz. At lunch, Kirk sat at a table with Trump but did not get a chance to have a conversation with him. The highlight of the day instead turned out to be when Deason introduced him to two other well-heeled Dallasites, Gentry Beach Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., both of whom happened to be close friends with another Junior, the nominee’s eldest son. The two men asked Kirk’s thoughts on how the Trump campaign could better attract young voters. Most of Kirk’s suggestions — more campus events, a more aggressive presence on social media — were standard-issue. But he added a novel thought. “The kids need to go out there and advocate,” Kirk said of Trump’s own children. “You’d have this Avengers squad of Trumps everywhere.”

Shortly after the Fort Worth event, Hicks and Beach took Kirk to Trump Tower to meet Don Jr., who told me: “I was pretty reluctant to bring on another so-called campaign expert, especially when I learned how young he was. I said, ‘We don’t need another person who doesn’t know anything — we’ve already got plenty of those.’ But within five minutes of listening to him, I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re on my team.’” Don Jr. confessed that his campaign schedule was slapdash and that he hadn’t given much thought to how to use Twitter. By the end of their meeting, the 22-year-old Kirk decided to take a three-month hiatus from Turning Point to become Don Jr.’s scheduler, social media coordinator, and steady provider of diet Red Bulls.

Following Trump’s astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton, Kirk returned to duty as the MAGA movement’s campus organizer. He drew a modest $49,000 salary from Turning Point USA, still stayed in the homes of donors, and still wore a shabby wardrobe, until Don Jr., Deason, Deason’s father, Beach, and Hicks chipped in to buy Kirk a $10,000 gift certificate at a men’s clothing store in Trump Tower as a Christmas gift. But things were about to change.

In 2017, he experienced the frisson of a sitting president’s retweeting his 140-character outbursts. He eagerly signed on to every available Fox News slot, cognizant of the channel’s faithful viewer in the White House. At the end of the year, Kirk attended Don Jr.’s birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. There, for the first time, he felt the stare of the president, then saw his hand motion for Kirk to come sit beside him. The two spoke for 40 minutes. At the end of their conversation, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, walked up to their table.

After Trump made the introduction, Kushner and Kirk discussed how the administration had been getting hammered by right-wing media ever since the former Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon was pushed out of his job as White House senior adviser. Kirk assured Kushner that he was well acquainted with the journalists in question and could help broker peace. Kushner told me recently that Kirk would prove himself useful in many ways. “The thing about Charlie is that he always delivers,” he said. “When I first met him, he started out with this ambitious goal of trying to explain Trumpism to the younger generation — which, back then, popular culture and the media were against. But he was willing to take that on. And the ideas he always came to us with were good ones. He was professional and easy to deal with. Nothing ever leaked to the press. He just got stuff done.”

After that evening at Mar-a-Lago, Kirk had no difficulty gaining access to the Oval Office, and his calls to Trump were regularly patched in by the White House switchboard operator. Now and again, the president called him on his cellphone. “He came to gain the trust through consistency, loyalty, intelligent commentary, and building a spectacular network,” Don Jr. told me. “He earned that seat at the table.”

Still, amid the Darwinian maneuvering in the Trump orbit, Kirk’s growing influence seemed to escape notice. “I was known as the youth guy,” he told me with evident amusement. “I was seen as harmless. So no one attacked me.”

By this time, Turning Point was well on its way to muscling aside the pre-existing conservative youth groups, Young America’s Foundation (started by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1960) and Young Americans for Liberty (founded by Students for Ron Paul in 2008). The memberships of the older organizations were once proudly curated — bow-tied intellectuals for Y.A.F., libertarians for Y.A.L. — but they were seeking relevancy in the new zeitgeist of the right. Y.A.F. sponsored provocative speeches on campuses by conservative personalities like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro, while a member of a Y.A.L. chapter at Iowa State University invited the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to speak on campus in 2018. Kirk was one step ahead of them: Turning Point had become an advocacy arm for Trump.

Kirk’s competition did not recede quietly. In 2017, the Y.A.L. chairman, Jeff Frazee, circulated an email in which he accused Turning Point of stealing a Y.A.L. chapter’s email list. The following year, Y.A.F.’s general counsel, Kimberly Begg, wrote a 12-page memo detailing instances where Turning Point had exaggerated its reach on college campuses. (Kirk denied these claims. Frazee did not respond to an email seeking comment. Begg, in an email, would not address her earlier assertions but instead praised “the great work of TPUSA.”)

Turning Point, meanwhile, was playing an entirely different game on college campuses. While other conservative youth groups had contented themselves with offering up celebrity speakers, Kirk’s group was training and even funding student-government candidates, as a kind of PAC for youngsters. While its predecessors merely scolded liberalism in academia, Turning Point established Professor Watchlist, a project to expose “radical” academics, including those who were critical of Turning Point. And where Y.A.L. and Y.A.F. might host happy hours, Turning Point threw high-production national gatherings raucous enough to draw a police response.

Kirk had arrived at a time when #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were met with Trump’s own denial of sexual assault and porn-star-payoff allegations and his revanchist defense of Confederate statues. A post-truth era of performative hyperbole was unfolding. At the end of 2017, with the help of Deason and a few other donors, Kirk hired Turning Point’s first breakout star, Candace Owens, a controversial Black conservative who had gained notoriety for her YouTube comments playing down the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that year. (Owens left Turning Point in 2019, amid an uproar over her comments seeming to defend Hitler, for a more lucrative deal with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. She left The Daily Wire last year following a string of antisemitic comments. Both Owens and Shapiro continue to be featured speakers at Turning Point events; The Daily Wire is distributing a documentary produced by Turning Point USA called “Identity Crisis,” about what it refers to as gender ideology.)

But Kirk was fast becoming a celebrity in his own right — an heir to Limbaugh, his staccato monologues casting liberal views as evil and savaging sacred icons like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“a bad guy”) and the Civil Rights Act (“a mistake”). “I think Charlie made his transition when he became more of a media figure rather than just a college-campus guy,” said the Republican political consultant and Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz, who first came to know Kirk in 2014. “He developed a connection with his audience that very few people in the media have. It’s given him tremendous power.”

“When Foster Friess first started going on about this kid Charlie Kirk who hadn’t gone to college and was so incredibly brilliant, I remember thinking, Well, Foster got scammed by some smart-talking kid,” Tucker Carlson told me during a recent phone conversation. “The reason I’m such a fan of Charlie’s is that I was proven wrong. It’s almost a paradox how young people tend to be more ossified than older people in their thinking, less willing to be disabused of their illusions. But I’ve seen Charlie’s willingness to reassess his assumptions, and that’s, like, amazing to me.”

Carlson was mainly referring to Kirk’s harsh reappraisal of the Iraq war and the national-security state. But the same tendency applies to Kirk’s assessment of religion’s role in American politics. For years, he was reticent on the subject. That changed, he told me, during the pandemic lockdowns — “the stupidest thing ever,” in his view. He was equally appalled by the refusal by most church leaders to lead the charge against lockdowns. “That really got me asking the question: What is the church? What is its role? And it brought me on a journey, a very serious period of studying our first principles, our beliefs.”

Kirk spent the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Phoenix as a guest of the parents of his future wife, Erika Frantzve, a former Miss Arizona who now hosts a podcast and has a line of faith-themed streetwear. “I did a lot of reading on postmodernism,” he recalled. “And I started realizing that what was happening was a slow-motion cultural revolution fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. This was their contention, that in order to usher in something new, this culture must be incinerated. That, I think, is a very objective reading of it. What they were saying was actually the same thing a religious person would say, that everyone lives by some agreed-upon code of conduct. The question is: What code? And by what inheritance do we acknowledge what is good and evil, what is right and wrong?”

The preferred code, Kirk decided, was the canon of Western values that — as he learned from reading the British historian Tom Holland — had their roots in Christianity. Kirk told me he then turned to the writings of Dr. Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, where Kirk had been taking online courses. From Arnn’s 2012 book, “The Founders’ Key,” Kirk concluded “that Western Christian morality gave us these two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” While expressing great admiration for Kirk as “a serious-minded person” who “built a great thing,” Arnn told me that this was a slight misrepresentation of his view. Thomas Jefferson, he pointed out, “was probably not an orthodox Christian” and was more influenced in his writing by the laws of nature than by the notion of a Christian God.

A third intellectual, the conservative author Christopher Caldwell, supplied Kirk’s final eye-opener. “I take the Caldwellian view, from his book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’” Kirk told me, “that we went through a new founding in the ’60s and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the U.S. Constitution as its reference point. In fact, I bet if you polled Americans, most of them would have more reverence for the Civil Rights Act than the Constitution. I could be wrong,” he added, “but I think I’m right.”

He went on. “Covid for me was a lot of thinking and reading time, while the whole civilization was collapsing. And I saw the wokies appealing to a moral order that they said was true and good. And I said, Well, we think ours is.”

Kirk emerged from the lockdowns a Christian nationalist culture warrior determined to fuse his new ideology with MAGA populism. In 2021, he founded Turning Point USA Faith, whose stated mission was “empowering Christians to put their faith into action,” in part by encouraging pastors “to join in civic, social, and cultural discussions.”

That February, he became one of the first conservative leaders to see the political potential in JD Vance. The extent of Kirk’s role in Vance’s ascent, which has not been previously reported, was especially significant because of the Ohio Senate candidate’s earlier view of Trump as an “idiot” and an American version of Hitler. Kirk texted Don Jr.’s political adviser, Andy Surabian, “Andy, I’m telling you, he’s had a conversion, he’s one of us.”

Kirk lent his imprimatur by hosting Vance on his podcast, where Vance suggested that people without children should pay higher taxes than parents. (“I totally agree,” Kirk replied.) That September, Kirk’s political arm, Turning Point Action, officially endorsed Vance. Surabian, meanwhile, took Kirk’s recommendation to Don Jr., who was a fan of Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Don Jr. befriended Vance, while Surabian became a senior campaign adviser. Two weeks before the Ohio primary in April 2022, Trump himself endorsed Vance, ensuring his victory.

“There were few louder voices constantly advocating for JD down in Mar-a-Lago than Charlie,” Surabian said. “His support was particularly important because he’s very much viewed by Team Trump as an avatar for where the MAGA base is.”

Two years later, Kirk was again in Trump’s ear talking up Vance — this time as his optimal running mate. As Kirk recalled to me: “I saw JD as someone who would crush it with high-propensity suburban Republicans. People in Scottsdale, Ariz., or Highland Park in Dallas, or Buckhead in Atlanta. They read The Journal. They hate the left. They don’t like Trump, but they like his policies. We’re talking about a couple hundred thousand voters that could determine the future of the election.”

Kirk pitched the 39-year-old Ohio senator to Trump as a fresh-faced MAGA torchbearer who would serve as “a convert on the ticket,” uniquely positioned to sway Trump skeptics since Vance had been one himself. “My father’s always going to come to his conclusions,” Don Jr. said, “but Charlie and Tucker and I and a few others went all in for JD.”

Among the many right-wing media personalities at the Turning Point ball was Ben Shapiro, a frequent speaker at Kirk’s events. Shapiro’s company, The Daily Wire, is distributing a documentary produced by Turning Point USA.Credit…Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Trump’s decision to select Vance is one for which Kirk has been careful not to claim credit. To maximize his influence on the 2024 election, Kirk sought territory all his own. For some time, his digital team had been advising him to make full use of TikTok, the social platform owned by the Chinese government and known for its punchy video snippets. Kirk was hesitant. A TikTok account run by Turning Point staff members had been taken down more than once for violating community standards, and he refused to engage in self-censorship. But in early 2024, as legislators on both sides of the aisle contemplated a ban on TikTok, Kirk sensed that he had leverage.

Last March, he posted on X: “TikTok says it’s not a Chinese propaganda arm and shouldn’t be banned by the U.S. Congress. Well, let’s put it to a test. I am going to make another attempt at starting an official Charlie Kirk TikTok account. We’ve been kicked off the platform several times even while maintaining and growing successful channels across all other social media. If the account thrives without garbage bans, strikes, and throttling I will consider changing my position on the platform.”

What happened next has not been previously reported. Within days of posting his offer, Kirk received a call from Tony Sayegh, a former Trump administration Treasury official who was now lobbying for a group that represented the major TikTok investor ByteDance. “We want to prove to you that we’re for free speech,” Sayegh recalled telling him. After their conversation, Kirk’s digital team began to meet over Zoom with TikTok officials, who described how to avoid A.I.-generated content moderation.

Kirk’s TikTok account, @RealCharlieKirk, went up in April. Almost immediately, he realized that the engagement numbers eclipsed those on Instagram. Kirk began to record videos on campuses for a series titled “You’ve Been Brainwashed,” flying from one to the next on a private plane leased by his donors. He engaged in rapid-fire debates with liberal students 10 years younger than him, demanding that they answer questions like “Do you think men can give birth?” and, regarding Harris, “What’s her greatest accomplishment as vice president?”

The debate snippets went viral, some garnering as many as 50 million views, according to TikTok data. Kirk’s account would end up drawing more followers than the accounts of Fox News, Carlson, Vance and the Harris campaign. According to a national survey done by TikTok, the platform’s users under 30 who voted for Trump trusted Kirk more than any other individual. Still, the viewers were not just young voters. Kirk began to realize this in June, when, he says, Black concession workers at Turning Point’s three-day event in Detroit, the People’s Convention, approached him and asked to take selfies, saying they had seen him on TikTok. It was a revelation of which Washington consultants and even Kirk’s own digital team was unaware: The platform made famous by Taylor Swift fans was also a favorite of the working class.

But Kirk’s most audacious move of the 2024 cycle was one that was well out of his traditional youth lane. That summer, he announced that Turning Point Action would invest $108 million in a Chase the Vote program aimed at turning out low-propensity Republican-leaning voters — those who liked Trump but hadn’t always gotten around to voting for him, or voting at all — in the battleground states Arizona and Wisconsin. Central to the effort would be encouraging early voting.

This amounted to an about-face for Kirk. When I first heard him speak in person at a Republican fund-raiser in Goodyear, Ariz., before the 2022 midterms, he equated the practice with fraud. “And look, I’m going to go out on a limb,” he told his audience. “If we don’t get declared as the winner this November, I will go back, and I’ll say it’s because the moderates in the state did not ban mass mail-in voting, and they did not ban the drop boxes.”

Kirk learned the hard way from that election, in which his entire slate of far-right statewide candidates was defeated, not to discourage any legal method of voting. Many other conservative leaders remained skeptical of voting by mail and early voting in general.