It is grimly fitting that Charlie Kirk was killed doing what he did best: debating others in public.
Back in May, he visited the United Kingdom to pit his legendary rhetorical skills against the students of Oxford and Cambridge. As an admirer of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the English language, he found himself shocked at how blinkered Britain’s supposedly brightest young minds had become.
I asked him to write a diary about the experience for the US edition of The Spectator, which I edit. The result was a well-observed, trenchant and funny piece about the state of England. ‘A distressing number of students seem unable to deliver a question without reading it off their phones,’ wrote Charlie.
He was struck by one student who seemed preoccupied with the salacious story of Donald Trump and the porn star Stormy Daniels. ‘Don’t Brits have their own dumb sex scandals to follow?’ he asked, baffled. He was also particularly distressed that British students seemed not to care that ‘their country has less free speech than 50 or 100 years ago’.
Away from hallowed halls of Britain’s most prestigious universities, Charlie found that everybody he met – ‘from drivers and blue-collar workers to journalists and the shockingly large number of people who recognised me in the streets’ – turned out to be far more engaging that the Oxbridge set. ‘They’re furious at the Biden-esque levels of immigration inflicted on them by their “Conservative” government in the past decade… Over and over, they told me they were ready to smash the British party system to bits,’ he said. ‘The great turn in Britain is coming.’
The ‘great turn’ was Charlie Kirk’s specialist subject. In 2012, the year Barack Obama was re-elected, he co-founded Turning Point USA, his campaigning organisation for young conservatives who felt a seismic shift to the political Right must happen if America is to thrive again in the 21st century. He proved to be an exceptional networker, and soon raised large sums of money from older conservative donors who desperately hoped America’s youth would embrace conservative values.
He was not, initially, a fan of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But he quickly noticed the unstoppable momentum of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, as well as the similarities between what Trump was promising and his own agenda.
After Trump won, Turning Point soon established itself as the semi-official youth wing for the growth of the MAGA movement. By 2018, the group even had a transatlantic arm, Turning Point UK, which Charlie founded along with the media commentator Candace Owens and her soon-to-be husband George Farmer, the son of Lord Farmer, a Conservative Peer.
Charlie was an evangelical Christian who believed strongly in the Protestant work ethic. Through intense effort, he achieved more in his 31 years than most people do in a lifetime. He transformed Turning Point into a juggernaut; a campus network that stretched across America. He also strove to pull inner city African-American children out of poverty and into better education programmes.
Trump elevated Kirk because he noticed these extraordinarily high energy levels and his ability to connect with people. As Trump put it, in his first tribute to Charlie following his death yesterday: ’No one understood or had the Heart of Youth in the United of America better than Charlie.’ In 2024, Kirk played a key role advising Trump and his 2024 election campaign team, as they successfully set about wooing more young voters.
Most of all, perhaps, Kirk excelled at challenging those with whom he disagreed and winning political arguments in front of a crowd. He became most famous of all for doing what he was doing yesterday in Utah Valley University: taking on often antagonistic questions from students in a civilised yet forthright way. In other words, Charlie Kirk believed passionately in free speech and yesterday he was murdered for speaking freely. RIP.
Freddy Gray is the US editor of The Spectator magazine.
