Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot last week at a campus event in Utah, was a hero to a generation of young conservatives; last week, my colleague Christian Paz wrote about how he and his organization, Turning Point USA, redefined what politics and political media looked like for many in Gen Z.
I sat down with Christian to talk about that appeal for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can also sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
Where did Charlie Kirk come from, as a figure in the conservative movement?
He came pretty much from nowhere. Around the time that he was 18, he decides that he wants to start a revitalized movement of conservatism. His idols were Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, and he was a believer in the old “lower taxes, smaller government”-style conservatism. Essentially, the way that a lot of people describe him is somebody who was unique in the talents he had in communicating and talking and connecting with people.
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You get to 2024 and he goes from being an outsider, somebody who’s never ran for office before, who had no connections, to becoming friends with Donald Trump Jr. He becomes close to Tucker Carlson. He becomes close to the new Republican power center.
And that’s part of the myth of him: somebody who is not college educated, somebody who started a movement by himself when people doubted that it would take off and slowly builds until it’s more than 800 college chapters and millions of followers. They raised $100 million last year in the presidential election, and they were one of the groups responsible for the Get Out the Vote effort that Republicans used last year.
How did he connect with and then transform youth and Gen Z politics on the right?
A lot of what he did was old-fashioned retail politics: showing up to places, going to centers of liberal elitism and intellectualism, the places where it wasn’t cool to be conservative, where it was weird to be a Republican. He embraced a personality of saying bombastic things, of sparking outrage, and cultivating that outrage and that anger to make an even bigger name for himself on college campuses.
What he was able to do was like, clip content well, share it widely, and then use that to found more chapters and grow the organization. And once you have people who are fans of you, who have clubs that they’re starting at their schools, they form a sense of community, and they form a sense of not being alone anymore on a college campus. It’s no longer that taboo to say certain things, or to say that you’re a conservative, or to argue conservative positions. That builds a sense of, you know, social connection on campuses.
In that process, you make this a lifestyle, and I think that’s the key here. He wasn’t just building a political movement, he was becoming a lifestyle and a social and cultural identity, and that’s what ends up transforming campuses and Gen Z in general. It becomes a fact of the culture. And once it becomes a fact of the culture, it becomes its own universe, and that’s the big shift.
Why Charlie Kirk? What did he see about Gen Z that helped him achieve this?
The thing that defines Gen Z is how swingable they are, how open to taking in any perspective. Charlie Kirk saw that there was a countercultural response against the doctrine of the millennial era of liberal progressivism that everyone got used to, and assumed that Gen Z would easily hold onto. Gen Z ended up not simply adopting all those views and becoming much more idiosyncratic. He saw a way to feed it, a way to cultivate it, to offer those debating spaces that maybe weren’t proliferating as much on college campuses.
The other thing that I think he understood is the specific nature of Gen Z, social media nativism, of being ready to immerse themselves into parasocial relationships. A whole generation gets their news or gets more informed through podcasters, through influencers. They interpret life around them based on shows or specific people, and not so much a shared sense of monoculture that we were used to in the past.
Whether you liked him or hated him, you grew to have some kind of a relationship with him, whether it was in disgust or in really liking what he was saying, seeing him not just as a political figure but as an influencer who talked about faith and religion and health and wellness. There were different aspects to what his messages were, and that made it connect with people much more intimately than any politician.
What do you think is misunderstood about what he was doing and what his legacy is going to look like?
He did say a lot of controversial, offensive, in many cases bigoted things, and that wasn’t a disqualifying thing for the way that people consumed his content.
I think one of the things that was shocking for a lot of people is just how broad his reach was and, essentially, the cinematic universe he created, where so many stars in the conservative movement were connected into the fabric that he built. You could easily consume culture that was connected to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk without realizing it. And I think that’s the factor that is really interesting. He wasn’t just a political activist. He became a celebrity, he became an influencer. He became somebody who represented various aspects of people’s lives.
