Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.
A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.
Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.
He continued this mission until the very end.
“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.
Thorderson rose from the Turning Point USA chapter president at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now, Thorderson is a sitting member of the Utah Republican State Central Committee. He attributes his trajectory, in large part, to Kirk’s personal mentorship.
“I really got to view him as a mentor and as a personal friend, as he would invest in me one-on-one, on many occasions,” he told The Epoch Times.
Thorderson is among many whose political voices Kirk amplified since co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012.
“I owe my entire political career to Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post the day after Kirk’s death.
“I would quite literally not be in office today if it weren’t for him. Even when my own party was working against me, Charlie endorsed me and campaigned to help me win election.”
Luna’s communications director, David Leatherwood, also came into his own, politically, through Turning Point USA and Kirk’s personal support.
Leatherwood, 37, a self-described gay conservative, first met Kirk in 2017.
“I met Charlie at one of his campus tours in Fort Lauderdale, and we actually filmed a video together where he said that he, you know, supports the gay community, and that e pluribus unum, represents all Americans,” Leatherwood told The Epoch Times.
“And ever since that day, he was always supportive of me, and he invited me to be an ambassador for his organization.”
Hallie S., 26, from Gainesville, Florida, credits Kirk’s organization with helping her and other conservative students at Santa Fe College be more outspoken with their views.
“I’ve always been more conservative. I was raised conservative, but was never big about speaking up, especially in Gainesville, which is such a liberal area, and you never know how people are going to react,” she said.
Hallie said she was able to revamp the College Republicans chapter at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, thanks in large part to the influence of Kirk and Turning Point USA.
“Charlie Kirk was a huge portion of that. He had a huge impact on politics on college campuses, especially in Santa Fe,” she told The Epoch Times.
“You had all these students that were like, ‘wow, my conservative values are being represented in a way that really had never been represented before.’”
Kelly Shackelford, a First Amendment attorney and president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said he invited Kirk to speak at a fundraising event in Houston, Texas, shortly after discovering the young influencer.
“Typically at fundraisers, everybody’s 60-and-older,” Shackelford told the Epoch Times.
“And so I wanted to encourage these older people that there are younger people who are coming behind them, and it’s not going to die with them.”
With much of his content shared online, Kirk’s influence spread beyond the numerous college campuses he visited over the years and reached millions online.
Tucker, a teenager who requested his surname not be revealed due to fear of retaliation, told The Epoch Times that Kirk was among a limited number of political influencers whose content he liked to engage with.
“I don’t really like watching political stuff. I mean, it'll come up like on TikTok or something like that, and I just scroll past it,” Tucker said.
“But when I saw his stuff, I would always click on it cause it was always interesting and he was just somebody that you could look up to.”
During an interview on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast in March, the Democratic governor confessed that his 13-year-old son wanted to skip school for a chance to meet Kirk.
“Literally last night, trying to put my son to bed, he’s like, ‘Dad I just—what time, what time is Charlie gonna be here? What time?’” Newsom said.
“And I’m like, ‘dude, you’re in school tomorrow.’”
Leatherwood said he was comforted knowing how many moments of Kirk’s life were captured on camera, preserving his thoughts and views.
“The beautiful thing about today and modern technology and our access, our access to media, is that, you know, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of him speaking. And those will live on, and I think they'll actually memorialize his legacy in an even greater way than people can anticipate,” he said.
Kirk made debate a core component of his mission. As he visited college campuses around the country, he often did so with a pop-up tent emblazoned with the words “prove me wrong,” and he offered up a microphone to those with differing points of view to confront him directly through dialogue.
“He went from campus to campus, engaging with students that he didn’t really view as the enemy ever. It was just that he felt they needed to be educated and that they needed to have proper discourse,” Thorderson said.
“And it was through that that they would end up being convinced of our ideas.”
Not all of Kirk’s interlocutors were swayed by his arguments, but they credited him for allowing a discussion.
“I stand by so little of everything that [Kirk] said, but one of the things he stood by was conversation,” Hunter Kozak said in a video post the day after Kirk’s death.
Kozak, 29, is a student at UVU and was the last person to debate with Kirk before he was shot.
Kirk was just minutes into what was meant to be the first stop of his latest campus speaking tour when he was assassinated.
Dean Withers, who had debated Kirk, broke down in tears while filming a livestream on Sept. 10, as he learned Kirk had been shot. Addressing his initial reaction, Withers filmed another video that evening, acknowledging his disagreements with Kirk.
“Does that mean I think he deserved to lose his life? No. Does that mean I think his two young children, who were in attendance at the event where he was shot, deserved to watch their father die? No. Does that mean I think they deserve to grow up without him? No. Does that mean I think that his wife, who was also there, deserved to lose her husband? No,” Withers said.
“And honestly, if you answered yes to any of those questions, there’s a very clear line drawn between me and you. I don’t want your support, and I don’t support you either.”
Throughout his stardom as a conservative political influencer, Kirk frequently looked beyond politics and emphasized his Christian faith.
Speaking with The Epoch Times, Thorderson recalled a morning when he and Kirk were traveling for an event and went for a workout in the hotel gym. It wasn’t long before their exercise turned philosophical.
“I remember at the time, I was struggling with my own faith and kind of just playing devil’s advocate with him,” Thorderson recalled.
“And he was just so steadfast in his faith and impressive with his knowledge. And that was a moment where I didn’t feel like he was necessarily preaching to me, but really just trying to connect on a personal level and trying to see me where I was at.”
At other points, Thorderson described Kirk being able to hold a knowledgeable conversation on matters beyond politics and articulate a connection back to his core values.
“He was a savant,” Thorderson said.
Thorderson also recalled having the chance to know Kirk when the Turning Point USA leader was getting to know his wife, Erika.
“He just always valued family and wanted to start a family. And that was just, even before he had kids, that was a core value for him,” Thorderson said.
Kirk leaves behind his wife Erika and two children.
John Haughey, Savannah Pointer, Nanette Holt, and Natasha Holt contributed to this report.