Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, an organization that promotes conservative politics in high schools and colleges, was fatally shot during an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University on the day before the nation remembered 9/11.
He was born in 1993. Kirk described his parents as Republicans, although they were not particularly politically active. During the 1990s, conservatives were castigated for prioritizing free markets and tax cuts over social issues. At the turn of the century, the Republicans gained the presidency primarily as a result of President Bill Clinton’s personal scandals, not because of a strong belief in conservative ideals. Kirk was a child when President George W. Bush attempted to rebrand Republicans as compassionate conservatives, but Bush was unable to gain traction with young people due to what they were taught about conservatism.
In 2004, Humanities Professor Philip E. Agre published a paper titled “What is Conservatism and What is Wrong with It?” According to Agre, liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. To win again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the dominance of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What’s wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
Professor Agre acknowledged the left’s intellectual deficiency, but he did not suggest that the left strengthen its arguments; rather, he proposed that conservatives can be defeated if they are portrayed as infidels unfit for modernity. The problem with this falsehood isn’t what it does to conservatives; it’s how it shapes the leftists who believe it’s true—it imparts in them a false sense of intellectual and moral superiority in which interaction with conservatives is beneath them, and more importantly, they develop contempt for conservative thought, believing it should be censored from the public square.
For the next ten years, conservative speakers were often protested, disrupted, or disinvited from speaking at campuses across America.
A 2014 ABC News analysis of commencement speakers at top universities found no Republican political figure among the main speakers for the previous two years, while 25 Democrats were invited to speak. That same year New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo said conservatives who were pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-gay marriage had no place in the state of New York.
This was the political environment in which a teenage Charlie Kirk dropped out of college to establish Turning Point USA. His purpose was to demonstrate that conservatism was compatible with democracy and that conservatives had a place not only in New York but in every state in the union, particularly on college campuses.
Over the next decade, Kirk completed his mission.
According to a Pew Research Center poll from 2009, 62 percent of voters aged 18-28 leaned Democratic. However, in 2025, Politico reported, “New data out of Yale’s Youth Poll broke the internet last week when it revealed a partisan split within Gen Z. Given a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points. It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today’s youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: according to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine, and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z.”
Kirk and Turning Point USA were single-handedly responsible for large segments of Generation Z converting to conservatism.
Kirk’s assassin was a twenty-two-year-old White male whose family handed him over to authorities. According to The Independent, family members claimed that the shooter had become “more political” recently and expressed negative opinions about Kirk. The shooter also spoke with a family member the day before the attack, who agreed that Kirk was “spreading hate.” After the assassin shot Kirk, he texted his roommate and explained, “I’d had enough of his hatred. Some hate cannot be negotiated out.”
If the shooter indoctrinated himself with Professor Agre’s 2004 argument that conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization; that it constitutes a destructive system of inequality and prejudice founded on deception; and that it has no place in the modern world, then Kirk was doing far more than spreading hate. Kirk was corrupting an entire generation of young people, and he had to be stopped for the sake of America’s future.
Following Kirk’s death, Jillian Michaels, host of the “Keep it Real” podcast, was on a news program to “remember Charlie Kirk.” Michaels was distraught because her high school daughter claimed that her classmates were celebrating the assassination.
The truly corrupted were the youth who cheered Kirk’s murder. Who or what is responsible for perverting their minds?
It wasn’t Charlie Kirk.
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