Charlie Kirk, a mobilizing force for young conservatives, shot dead at 31

Trump had called him “a great guy, from top to bottom” in an earlier post immediately after the shooting at Utah Valley University in Orem.

“We must all pray for Charlie Kirk,” Trump wrote.

Kirk’s death came in an atmosphere of growing threats and violence against political figures on both sides of the aisle, from Trump to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to state lawmakers in Minnesota.

Born Oct. 14, 1993, in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Kirk was raised in another well-off suburb called Prospect Heights.

His father was an architect whose firm designed Trump Tower in New York City; his mother was a mental health counselor. And Kirk, starting in high school, was an avid listener of conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh.

Kirk got his first taste of activism when he and a classmate launched a protest against the rising price of food at his high school cafeteria. But it was an opinion piece he wrote while he was still a teenager for the conservative news site Breitbart, in which he discussed liberalism in textbooks, that set him on the road to becoming a national figure.

Soon Kirk was making appearances on Fox News and at tea party rallies, crossing paths with activist Bill Montgomery, who urged him to take his conservative message to college campuses.

Together they founded Turning Point USA to mobilize college-age Republicans. Kirk, who briefly attended Harper College, a community college in Palatine, Illinois, dropped out to focus on the group full time.

In addition to funneling money into campuses to get conservatives elected to student governments, Kirk’s group created a Professor Watchlist to "expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." It later began a School Board Watchlist, as well.

The nonprofit organization eventually attached itself to Trump’s insurgent presidential campaign in 2016 and later became a political juggernaut. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, pitching itself as the key to attracting and building a coalition of young conservatives around the country.

The group’s website says it has 450 full- and part-time staff members and presences on more than 3,000 high school and college campuses nationwide.

Kirk became a fixture on conservative media and a forceful voice on a myriad of issues, including promoting Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and urging Republicans in the Arizona Legislature to send so-called fake electors to Washington, d.C., to be counted on Jan. 6, 2021. His organization also bused supporters to go to Washington before a rally that turned it into a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kirk spun his success in conservative media into his own wildly successful podcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show.” According to the Turning Point site, the show was listened to, watched and streamed by an audience of more than 1 million people every day.

He also wrote a number of bestselling books, including “The MAGA doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future,” “The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth” and “Rightwing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West.”

Kirk was a close friend of Vice President Jd Vance. He campaigned alongside him in the closing days of Vance's competitive Ohio Senate primary in 2022 and advocated for Trump to name him as his running mate last year.

He also played an important role for Trump during the 2024 campaign. Kirk's group hosted several events that were effectively Trump rallies, saving financial resources for the Trump campaign and attracting people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard and other influential MAGA allies.

Kirk spoke on the first night of the Republican National Convention in July 2024, which took place just days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.