How Charlie Kirk’s social media machine rewired a generation’s politics

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By Cat Zakrzewski, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Drew Harwell

September 14, 2025 — 9.52am

Last month, as social media buzzed with news that Taylor Swift was engaged to Travis Kelce, Charlie Kirk advised one of the world’s most successful female musicians to leave “the island of the wokeys” and start having children with the star football player.

“Reject feminism,” Kirk urged the billionaire singer, in a video that has garnered 7.5 million views on TikTok. “Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift at a game in Las Vegas last year.

The video drew accusations of sexism from liberals and Swifties, but it found an enthusiastic audience among Kirk’s Gen Z fans. The clip’s viral spread illustrated how the 31-year-old activist and provocateur harnessed the attention economy to build a political empire credited with shattering the left’s grip on young voters.

A self-described “happy digital warrior,” Kirk blitzed young Americans with his conservative message by meeting them on social media, mastering algorithms that reward posts that elicit passionate reactions and conflict.

His posts promoted traditional family structures, mocked diversity initiatives and labelled trans identity a “mental delusion”. He embraced messages that energised the right in the Trump era, challenging the results of the 2020 election, questioning masking and vaccine guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic and criticising affirmative action.

Kirk presented these views calmly and with a smile – which his admirers said was central to his appeal and his detractors said masked the extreme nature of his message. That put him at the vanguard of a generation of political influencers who built their audiences in the Trump era by fighting the culture wars online, using provocative language that captured attention.

Charlie Kirk hands out hats on the day he was shot at Utah Valley University.

“If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified,” Kirk said on an episode of his eponymous podcast, as he criticised United Airlines’s 2021 announcement that 50 per cent of graduates from its flight training academy would be women or people of colour.

After the remarks were decried as racist, Kirk said on The Megyn Kelly Show that his comments were intended to illustrate that “DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] invites unwholesome thinking”. He added that he thought “anybody of any skin colour can become a qualified pilot”.

Kirk’s political opponents reviled his views and tactics alike, but it helped his organisation, Turning Point, and related entities attract billions of views on social media, earn credit for boosting President Donald Trump’s youth turnout in the 2024 election, and take in more than $US90 million ($136 million) last year, according to public tax and campaign filings. The organisation’s political arm became a critical prong of the Republican Party’s strategy to mobilise young voters, who historically have low turnout rates.

Charlie Kirk arrives at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Las Vegas last year.

Kirk fed off the liberal anger, travelling the country to debate his political positions with left-leaning students on college campuses. “To quote Christ, I come not to bring peace, but a sword,” he wrote in his 2024 book, Right Wing Revolution. He was fatally shot during one such event on Wednesday on a Utah college campus.

A representative for Turning Point did not respond to requests for comments.

The Arizona-based Turning Point apparatus includes a non-profit organisation that educates students about conservative policies, a grassroots political advocacy group and a religious division.

The organisations produce popular conservative media, register and mobilise voters, and stage high-production value conferences, including a Trump inauguration party featuring the Village People.

Major donors have included the late businessman and co-founder of Home Depot, Bernard Marcus, and Donors Trust, a fund that receives money from wealthy donors whose identities are not disclosed and steers it towards conservative causes.

Tributes are left for Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, where he was shot.

A day after Kirk’s death, Turning Point leaders fanned out on the online broadcasts of other conservative media influencers, including Stephen Bannon and Benny Johnson. Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point Action’s chief operating officer, called for viewers to honour Kirk’s spirit by visiting Turning Point’s website and getting involved in its efforts to change American culture.

“The difference with Charlie, unlike even legends like Rush Limbaugh, is that he built something and led the way,” Bowyer said on the Bannon’s War Room podcast. “We want millions of Americans to march to the beat of Charlie’s drum for the rest of their lives.”

Kirk got his start in online conservatism as a high school student, shaped by tea party energy and lunch breaks listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. He penned pieces like a 2012 Breitbart blog post on the liberal bias of economics textbooks and spoke forcefully for right-wing values at youth events. With help from conservative donors, he launched Turning Point that year with a plan to mobilise student activists across the country.

Dwight Kadar, a Republican from Arizona, met Kirk in 2013, after Kadar’s wife, Andrea, heard Kirk speak at a conference in Colorado. Inspired by the speaker’s vision of evangelising conservatism to young people, Kadar said, Andrea rushed up to Kirk, asking him how they could support his budding movement.

Charlie Kirk joins Republicans Mia Love and Ben Sasse in a conservative panel discussion in 2015.

Kirk asked them to buy him a plane ticket from Chicago to Phoenix. Soon after, they held a fund-raiser in their home for Kirk’s fledging organisation, and the young activist spent the night in their guest room.

“He just touched something in our hearts and we knew this young fellow was on a precipice of something really big,” Kadar said. He would go on to donate tens of thousands of dollars to the organisation and its affiliates.

By 2015, Kirk’s group had a presence on more than 800 college and high school campuses; a year later he became one of the youngest speakers at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Turning Point USA’s attention machine was in high gear, further boosted by its release of a “professor watch list” targeting what it called “leftist propaganda” in college classrooms. Supporters said academia had it coming, while free speech advocates and liberals decried a chilling effect.

Beyond deploying organisers to knock on dorm-room doors, Kirk and Turning Point began building a massive following with posts and videos on Twitter, podcasts, and YouTube – identifying the platforms where young people’s political views were being shaped, ahead of establishment political operatives.

Kirk’s attempts at mainstream respectability earned him attacks from far-right influencers, who at times argued he was too supportive of issues such as legal immigration and too deferential to the kind of institutional conservatism they’d combated.

In 2019, followers of the white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes launched what they called a “Groyper war” by showing up at his campus appearances with trolling questions seeking to corner him as an “anti-white” fraud.

But Kirk countered by wielding his digital footprint to flex political influence in support of Trump and his positions. In April 2020, near the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Kirk urged students to lead a “peaceful rebellion” against governors of states with stay-at-home orders. He was briefly suspended from Twitter the same year after he posted the false claim that the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 per cent effective” in treating the disease.

Kirk’s tactics came under scrutiny ahead of the 2020 election, when The Washington Post revealed that Turning Point Action paid teenagers to produce messages that reflected Trump’s talking points on social media – an operation experts compared to a troll farm. Facebook permanently banned a marketing firm that worked on the campaign on behalf of Turning Point and Twitter suspended 262 accounts associated with the campaign for what it said was “platform manipulation and spam”. The companies did not suspend accounts affiliated with Turning Point or Kirk, citing insufficient evidence.

President Donald Trump joins Charlie Kirk on stage at a teen student action summit in 2019.

Before January 6, 2021, Kirk tweeted that his group was “sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president”. He later was named the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to a consortium of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington and other organisations called the Election Integrity Partnership, which analysed false claims about the election on social media. Kirk later condemned the day’s violence but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions about Turning Point’s role in the rally when he was deposed in 2022 before the United States House Select Committee investigating the US Capitol riots.

Turning Point continued to attract donors who for years had seen the Republican Party struggle to connect with young people. Kirk attracted eyes online and donors through his debates on college campuses, which were clipped and posted on his social media accounts, which had millions of followers. Kirk’s willingness to debate anyone, any time, coupled with a bench of media personalities prone to go viral, made him a singular force that transcended politics, Don Tapia, who served as a US ambassador to Jamaica during Trump’s first term, said.

Charlie Kirk posted clips of his debates on TikTok.

“He was talking to the young people about life, about family values, human values, morality,” said Tapia, who donated tens of thousands of dollars to Turning Point’s efforts after meeting Kirk during the 2024 campaign.

Kirk’s critics on the left argued his debate model was a shtick, built on racist and sexist tropes and the mockery of sputtering liberals. The pro-Trump propagandist, they argued, could not be persuaded, no matter how many times he asked college students to “prove me wrong”.

Kirk retorted by raising the stakes. In September, he starred in a widely watched YouTube debate show Surrounded, jousting with a circle of 25 liberal college students about abortion, gender identity and affirmative action.

“You’re evidence that college is a scam, my friend,” he said to one questioner.

Jared Holt, a researcher at Open Measures, a company that tracks online influence, said Turning Point is not just a youth activist movement but a digital media operation that invested in promoting Kirk and other right-wing influencers in pursuit of political impact.

“He blazed the trail that so many other pro-Trump influencers have used to forge their own careers,” Holt said. “So much of Kirk’s online personality and media presence had been to stir the pot and push conservative audiences toward more extreme positions.”

Donald Trump shakes hands with Kirk during a Generation Next White House forum in Washington in 2018.

Kirk’s focus on debates, with their simmering undercurrents of combat, worked particularly well on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app that many on the right had strenuously avoided. Turning Point drove viral attention to Republican talking points with short clips from Kirk’s hours-long college appearances, helping introduce him to millions of young viewers off campus.

Many of the clips pulled out contentious exchanges and played the questioners for laughs; one early video shared by Kirk’s account said the activist had hit “the factory reset button on [an] ignorant Lib,” with a cry-laughing emoji. But some of his most viral moments showcased a more soft-spoken Kirk, asking about the questioner’s life and politics, even if he ultimately disagreed.

“Everyone, do me a favour, please be respectful,” Kirk said in the intro to one of his most popular clips, with roughly 50 million views.

Trump credited Kirk with his youth support in the 2024 election, telling Fox News on Friday that Kirk helped shape his TikTok strategy. Trump delivered his first post-election, rally-style speech at a December Turning Point event in Arizona, strolling onstage after a triumphant three-minute video, as fog machines billowed and thousands of young conservatives cheered. He thanked Kirk and Turning Point for their “relentless effort” to secure his White House comeback.

“It’s not my victory, it’s your victory,” Trump said.

Liberal groups and politicians who disagreed with Kirk’s message appeared eager to learn from his tactics. California Governor Gavin Newsom hosted Kirk as the first guest on the podcast he launched in March, commenting that his son begged him to stay home from school so that he could meet the conservative social media star.

Hunter Kozak, the liberal student debating Kirk at the time of the shooting, attended the event on behalf of the Unf--k America Tour, a group created by the National Ground Game PAC that brings Democratic content creators to Turning Point events to generate their own social media content.

Hunter Kozak was the last person to speak to Charlie Kirk.

Kirk’s critics also clipped his speeches into sound bites, posting segments that they argued espoused fringe or dangerous views. After a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2022 and struck her husband in the head with a hammer, Kirk urged his listeners to post bail for the attacker. He called George Floyd a “scumbag” and described passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake”.

In his last X post on Wednesday, he said it was “100 per cent necessary to politicise” the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, a young White woman stabbed on a Charlotte train by a Black man with a long criminal record and a history of mental illness. He said politics had “allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her,” as Republicans claimed that the suspect, Decarlos Brown, was free due to Democratic policies. The victim’s family asked people to stop circulating the video.