Less than two weeks after the murder of the conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, his widow, Erika Kirk, the organization’s new chief executive, convened a senior staff meeting at the group’s Phoenix headquarters to discuss its future. “A murderer tried to silence my husband,” she told them by video conference from her home in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to two of the attendees. “I won’t let that happen.”
Mrs. Kirk directed the Turning Point staff to keep her husband’s personal X account active with regular posts. She reiterated her desire that the two-hour daily radio broadcast “The Charlie Kirk Show” remain on the air, although with rotating hosts and with her husband’s studio chair deliberately left empty. Mr. Kirk’s debate tour on college campuses would also continue, she said, with conservative stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly standing in for her husband.
The message, in essence, was that the show would go on at Turning Point.
That may be easier said than done. For now, the group has reported a surge in new Turning Point high school and college campus chapters by conservative students affected by the loss of Mr. Kirk, while President Trump and Vice President JD Vance both announced they would speak at the group’s annual AmericaFest this year. Still, more than a dozen associates and conservative allies of Mr. Kirk said in interviews that they were concerned about what his death would mean not only to Turning Point but also to the MAGA movement itself.
Mr. Kirk, they said, was more than a leader and organizer of a sprawling, well-funded conservative youth organization. He also helped build, define and unite Mr. Trump’s movement, all while selling a right-wing Christian vision to a new generation. Despite Mr. Kirk’s attacks on the Civil Rights Act, feminism, Islam and transgender people — and the fact that he helped pull formerly extremist views into the mainstream — his tone in his speeches and debates was less angry than that of other leading figures on the right.
Friends describe Mrs. Kirk as fiercely determined to build on her husband’s work, but she is not a political figure. Mr. Kirk spoke at hundreds of campaign rallies during his life; she has spoken at only one. While she will give a talk at one campus on the college tour that Mr. Kirk began at Utah Valley University, she has decided she will not spar with students as her husband did. Nor is Turning Point likely to deputize one of Mr. Kirk’s lieutenants for the task, at least until security concerns are assuaged, according to a person familiar with the decision-making.
In the meantime, one of the group’s associate producers, Ryan Marty, has begun the task of putting together a streaming loop of all Mr. Kirk’s campus debates that he intends to offer up for public consumption on the internet. “Altogether, it’s about 150 hours,” Mr. Marty said in an interview.
Turning Point employees, many of them in their 20s, are continuing to take their place at their laptops in the group’s Phoenix headquarters and silently churn out content for Mr. Kirk’s radio show and social media platforms. Their expressions have been stoic if vaguely shellshocked. To them Mr. Kirk was both a charismatic leader and a wisecracking, 6-foot-5 eccentric who carried around bottles of olive oil and homemade hot sauce wherever he went and who sometimes paraded around the office in shorts and knee-high socks which, he claimed, “improve circulation for tall men.”
Dropping by to guest-host Mr. Kirk’s show one morning, Mr. Carlson grabbed a couple of the young employees by their shoulders and exhorted them: “Be emotional! It’s OK to let it out!”
In reality, more questions than answers now occupy the space that Mr. Kirk once inhabited. They range from how to interpret his views on free speech and Israel to conspiracy theories about his death, including speculation that Tyler Robinson, the suspect charged with the fatal shooting of Mr. Kirk, was supported by a left-wing network and that the body rushed to the hospital was not that of Mr. Kirk.
(Far from quashing macabre theories, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has appeared respectful. “We are meticulously investigating theories and questions,” he said in a recent statement, and then listed over a half-dozen of them, including “hand gestures observed as potential ‘signals’ near Charlie at the time of his assassination.”)
In the meantime, Mr. Kirk’s legacy has become a subject of disagreement. “It was Charlie who helped bring online censorship, free speech and cancel culture to the fore of our political debate,” Mr. Trump said in his tribute at Mr. Kirk’s memorial service on Sept. 21.
And yet Turning Point staff members openly celebrated ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from his late-night show for baselessly suggesting that the shooting suspect had been a fellow conservative. The group’s position did not change even after some conservative leaders, including Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, denounced Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, for publicly threatening ABC with disciplinary action if it did not act against Mr. Kimmel.
Mr. Kirk has also been second-guessed about his evolving view on America’s commitment to Israel. He told donors in Palm Beach, Fla., last December that at Turning Point, “we are unapologetically for Israel.” But in recent months his unflagging support had given way to frustration as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued Israel’s nearly two-year war in Gaza, according to two close associates.
Mr. Kirk’s willingness to showcase Turning Point events with Mr. Carlson, a forceful critic of Israel, infuriated one of the group’s top donors, Robert J. Shillman, a conservative tech billionaire who two associates described as a father figure to Mr. Kirk. Two days before Mr. Kirk’s death, Mr. Shillman angrily questioned Mr. Kirk for giving a platform to Mr. Carlson and informed him he was withdrawing a $2 million pledge to Turning Point.
Mr. Shillman did not respond to a request for comment. On a podcast tribute to Mr. Kirk nine days after the shooting, Mr. Shillman made no mention of any discord between them but said of Turning Point USA, “Without a leader, it has no particular direction.”
In the conservative ecosystem, Mr. Kirk occupied a host of spaces: youth organizer, broadcaster, faith leader, get-out-the-vote mobilizer and loyal adviser to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance. But his influence on the right took on other, more subtle forms that associates say may be hard for someone else to replicate.
“Charlie represented this very positive, productive path for young men,” said Tyler Cardon, the chief executive of Blaze Media, the Texas-based conservative media company whose marquee talent is the broadcaster Glenn Beck. In an interview, Mr. Cardon went on to contrast Mr. Kirk’s family-oriented Christian ethic with those of two other prominent right-wing influencers.
One of them, Andrew Tate, a former kick boxer and self-described misogynist, wrote on social media last year that “women shouldn’t vote because they don’t care about issues outside of how THEY feel.” The other, Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white nationalist, described his appeal to young men on his streaming show in August by saying, “Anything you want to say — incel, racist, Trump supporter — I represent all those facets of the disaffected white male.”
Just as Mr. Kirk projected wholesomeness, he also worked to expand the appeal of Mr. Trump’s movement. In his speech at Mr. Kirk’s funeral, the president described the 31-year-old activist as a “master builder of people,” adding that Mr. Kirk had led efforts to bring the president’s message to “young Black conservatives.”
Several close associates interviewed for this article cited what they saw as Mr. Kirk’s unity-building efforts as an underappreciated virtue at a time when warring factions on the right threaten to undermine the Republican Party’s current dominance.
Mr. Kirk’s inner circle had watched his evolution at close range over the past decade, from a teenager with ill-fitting suits and less than exemplary hygiene to a smooth power player in Republican politics. Nearly all these associates said they believed Mr. Kirk would himself be president one day.
Those staff members have now rallied around their new leader, taking comfort in Mrs. Kirk’s devoutness as well as her previous experience as a public speaker and entrepreneur of a Christian-themed clothing line. “I know she can step into Charlie’s position here,” said Marina Minas, the group’s chief marketing officer, “because she was a boss babe before she even met Charlie.”