What Charlie Kirk meant to Gen Z
He gave a voice to young people who wanted to rebel against woke orthodoxy.
One of the many things that makes Charlie Kirk’s assassination so horrific and so shocking is that we were so used to seeing him on our screens. Like many members of Generation Z (those born roughly between 1997 and 2012), my own political awakening was fed by a steady diet of Kirk’s videos. He, along with online conservative figures like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder, was doing something few others were at the time – giving a voice to people who didn’t believe that men could become women, that capitalism was the root of all evil and that Western civilisation was built on white supremacy.
The impact that 31-year-old Kirk – who was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University on Wednesday – had on this generation is undeniable. In 2012, at just 18 years of age, he co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA), with the aim of encouraging open debate on college campuses. TPUSA would go on to become one of the most powerful forces of campus conservatism in the US. Today, it has a presence at 3,000 to 3,500 high schools and college campuses, more than 650,000 lifetime student members and hundreds of staff.
His reach went well beyond campus politics. More than one million people tuned in to his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, every day. And many of the young staffers in the Trump administration today credit him with their getting involved in politics in the first place. Reuters notes that Kirk played a ‘key role’ in the 2024 Trump victory by narrowing the youth-vote gap – as Donald Trump said, after announcing Kirk’s death on Wednesday, ‘no one understood or had the heart of the youth in the United States of America better than Charlie’.
Kirk’s ability to turn online enthusiasm into real-world infrastructure was incredibly impressive. In his tribute to Kirk, vice-president JD Vance wrote on X that he ‘didn’t just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government’. Indeed, groups like American Moment used Kirk’s ecosystem to pipeline young staff into the current administration. The White House press secretary, 28-year-old Karoline Leavitt, said that Kirk was the first person ‘to believe in me’ when she unsuccessfully ran for congress in New Hampshire in 2022. The kids who grew up watching Kirk debate gender-studies students on YouTube or on their own campuses have gone on to staff the current US government. That in itself is an incredible achievement.
Yet Kirk’s legacy goes deeper than even that. He made it normal – even cool – to go against the grain of identity politics. He gave a voice to young people who didn’t fall into line with the prevailing woke orthodoxy. Through TPUSA, he reminded students that they weren’t alone if they cared about free speech, questioned gender ideology or voted Republican. He helped to mobilise young conservatives, building a primarily online community into a real-world, national movement that felt youthful, energetic and relevant.
More importantly, Kirk recognised that universities had long since ceased to be arenas of intellectual stimulation and debate. Not only were students not actively having their beliefs challenged, they were also being sequestered away from any ideas that might hurt or offend. Kirk and TPUSA broke through the barriers that had been erected by trigger warnings and No Platformings to force young people out of their Safe Spaces. Kirk dragged debate back on to campuses, kicking and screaming.
Kirk has been described as ‘divisive’, ‘provocative’ and ‘inflammatory’. But far from being contrarian for its own sake, he understood the value of forcing people to confront ideas they vehemently disagreed with or had never heard articulated in the first place. In the wake of his death, clips showing exactly that did the rounds on social media again. In one particularly pertinent interaction, he can be seen explaining to a they / them-looking college student calling himself ‘Mercury’ why he’s doing all this: ‘When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts… What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have reasonable disagreement, where violence is not an option.’ When Mercury accuses Kirk of perpetrating ‘emotional violence’, Kirk shoots back: ‘Isn’t that why we have the First Amendment, to try to push our boundaries and to hear things that might make you feel mildly uncomfortable?’ Mercury specifies that this doesn’t make him uncomfortable – it makes him angry.
One of the most remarkable things about Kirk was his willingness to get up again and again in front of a hostile audience and try to change its members’ minds. He believed in the power of free speech, first and foremost. He also believed in Gen Z. He saw immense promise in a generation that is so often written off as a bunch of useless snowflakes, too far gone down the woke rabbit hole to be saved. He believed, above all, that the generation raised on cancel culture, Safe Spaces and culture-war skirmishes was not only able to have its mind changed, but also that it was worth trying to change it.
Lauren Smith is a London-based columnist for the European Conservative.