The Charlie Kirk blueprint

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1:21Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash Washington Wise or wherever you listen. When Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, he did so with very little support from young conservatives. But eight years later, he swooped back into power with throngs of faithful young MAGA fans, in major part because of one man. I go around universities and have challenging conversations, because that's what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements respectfully, because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens.

2:11Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old right-wing activist, was murdered this week at a rally on a college campus in Utah. He was a fixture at universities, trying to make conservative ideas cool and debating young people, anybody who wanted to challenge him. But he was also a culture warrior and a polarizing figure. The spiritual battle is coming to the West, and the enemies are wokeism or Marxism, combining with Islamism, to go after what we call the American way of life. You're comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Absolutely, I am. In fact, it's worse. The cancer of transgenderism, which is from the pit of hell.

2:51America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign board percentage to its lowest level ever. If I'm dealing with somebody in customer service who's a moronic black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence or is she there because affirmative action almost creates. And in the last few months, he had even taken his message overseas to the UK, Japan and South Korea. I am back fresh from Asia on Wednesday evening. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And today on The Global Story, what was the Charlie Kirk blueprint? And why does his influence extend beyond the U.S.

3:33borders?

3:44First time I talked to Charlie Kirk was a phone call when he was ramping up Turning Point USA, and he built Turning Point to a couple of organizations, ramping it up as a sort of anti-Bernie Sanders operation. David Weigel covers politics for the news outlet Semaphore. I've known him and his reporting on the conservative movement for years. And so when this news broke, he was one of the first people I wanted to hear from. And I remember at the Republican convention that year, I mean, there weren't a whole lot of young people. I, in fact, remember going to some parties with young Republicans and some focus group events, And it felt like the Republican Party was really in search of and in angst about the fact of, well, hey, there's not a lot of young voters coming out right now to support Donald Trump at that time in 2016.

4:27Kirk was an innovator in that, working on the youth vote. And that's one of the white whales of the Republican Party. How do we get young people excited in this party? How do we shake our image? You meet in covering conservative politics, young people who are trying to organize their campuses and don't deliver. And he was delivering at the level of a very much older, more experienced political operative. Where does he actually come from? Can you give us an idea of his origin story, please? Oh, yes. Kirk came from Illinois, from the Chicago area, which was part of his origin story. I come from a place that liberals had failed.

5:02I saw that liberalism, when implemented, does not run a healthy society. So he was a young conservative activist. He starts before I met him. It's 2012 is when he he's starting a group. It's first called SOS Liberty. Then it's renamed Turning Point USA. He started out making memes and anti-debt, anti-socialism, little things you could share online. And the effort was about building campus chapters. And he hustles. He goes, he gets a TV appearance. And then in the green room or after an event, he'll say, hey, I know who you are. I'm doing this new thing. Do you want to help fund it? He gets some of his early funding that way because he'd say, look, there are lots of groups in my space, but I know how to reach young people.

5:46He builds that and he gets momentum so that Turning Point becomes this juggernaut. What's he doing in his life at that stage? Is he a student? He's just doing this. He goes to college for a brief period. He leaves to do this, which also in modern conservative politics, that's a great origin story. That was a knock that liberals would have on this guy. What is his expertise? He's not William F. Buckley. He's not an intellectual who has great credentials. He's just a kid who quit college. And he says, that's right. I quit college and I'm still teaching myself. And yet he spent so much of his time over the last several years dedicated to energizing conservatives on college campuses.

6:22Yes. He and a lot of conservatives saw campuses as a place where conservatism was always going to be the rebellious choice. He's doing this at a time where different understandings of gender, transgender rights, etc. are in vogue on campus and being implemented. What already had happened were more tolerant policies about race. So your campus now has different clubs that are this is the African-American diaspora club. This is a club for Palestinians, et cetera, et cetera. And Kirk would go on to campuses and say, you're being censored. You're being told what to think. You can break free of this and you can question what your professors are telling you.

7:04And so he would see these campuses as not just petri dishes of what the left was up to, but look at them and say, look, if you if you are a conservative donor, you should worry about these campuses because what is going to come out of them? if this jumps from campus to the rest of our lives, it's going to destroy the sort of not just America, but the sort of West I believe in. So this is why campuses are so important. But increasingly, their argument was not just vote Republican, you're going to get low taxes. It was the left makes you unhappy. If you follow the left on your campus, you're going to be on antidepressants.

7:41You're never going to ask a girl on a date. You're going to blame society for why you can't succeed. And if you're on our team, you're going to get married, be successful, be happy. There was also a religious component. And this was Kirk's own Christianity and religiosity was very important in this. So a question that has been on my mind is what Charlie Kirk figured out about young conservatives to make his movement so successful. And he clearly figured out something that other young conservatives were not able to answer, you know, going back to 2015, 2016, when, as you say, so many young Republicans were kind of disavowing Donald Trump at that point.

8:20He's part of a young generation of conservatives who say we are going to reject pop culture as it is. We're not going to say, well, what's our how do we get along with people who love Disney? How do we how do we get along with people who love hip hop, etc.? No, we're going to say that the culture is rotten. He was not trying to be cool. He was trying to who a lot of this is teaching himself, reading the Bible, reading philosophy, reading history, and say, no, it is, it is, I'm going to be less cool than maybe the conservative who skateboards or something. But trust me, if you get really educated on the meaning of life, the why we believe what we believe, why it's good to start a family.

9:01Yeah, your friends make fun of you in college, but it's going to pay off. You've attended Turning Point rallies. Can you give us a sense of what it's like at these rallies? Yes, there are rallies and there are conferences. They're, first of all, very patriotic in their semiotics and their design. There's America branding. The biggest rally every year is called America Fest. It interprets elements of what works in megachurches, but also just entertainment, period. So probably the most politically important turning point event, turning point action, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quits his campaign, endorses Trump, and it's at a turning point rally.

9:37And for people who had not been to these events, they're shocked. Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walking out to this WWF wrestling championship sparklers and rock music? Because that's how Turning Point operates. And if you are familiar with the milieu of kind of American megachurch conservatism, they're anti bad pop culture. They're anti cursing and pro LGBT messaging. But they like masculine displays of patriotism. They like the movie Top Gun, maybe except for the volleyball scene. And like that is part of the design of Turning Point. We are proudly American and it's fun to be American. It's fun to wear American flag design suits.

10:18It's fun to wave the flag. It's fun to put the flag on your house. And it's fun to walk out to rock music as fireworks go off behind you. How does he go from this to getting into Trump's inner circle? Where does the story start for that? Well, remember that in 2016, Trump wins, but the Republican Party writ large is not comfortable with this. and Kirk is more of a believer that Trump, because of his ability to punch through, that he is the one driving the Republican Party into new spaces, making conservatism more popular. So he gets in with the family, I guess, starting really with Don Jr., who has a lot of the same ethos, because that's his offer.

11:05Well, behind one door is the old GOP that didn't really like you. Behind the other door are these movements that love you, that wear your merchandise, that have boat parades, where they fly Trump flags. And I'm the one who wants to organize those people. And so Kirk becomes more and more influential for that reason. In 2020, he is on campaign planes, campaigning with the Trump ticket. After Trump loses the election, he's on his show coming up with strategies where Trump could delay the electoral count or stop it from being counted. There are a lot of people in the Republican Party who want to concede.

11:37Charlie Kirk doesn't. When Trump is out of power, he's one of the figures saying this is this is the leader of our party, not anyone else, because this man is suffering for what we want. When Trump is appointing his new not just cabinet members, but down the list of who's going to staff the administration, Kirk is in those rooms, especially through his connection to J.D. Vance, who he talked to all the time. And the person who can text somebody whenever they want to and tell them this is the right guy to hire, this is the wrong guy to hire, that is more influential than somebody with maybe more money or more of an elected office.

12:07Kirk becomes one of the most important people in the Trump political operation. And when Trump wins the election this past November, he seemed to credit Turning Point for really energizing support amongst young Republicans. And one of the first places he went was to a Turning Points event to sort of deliver his things to them. Trump gives them a lot of credit. Kirk has more influence and access to the president than some elected Republicans because what are they doing for him? They're getting elected and they're running in their districts, but they depend on Trump to win. Kirk is trying to build something that supplements what Trump is doing and getting more converts to him.

12:45That's much more useful. And Kirk to Trump seems to have his finger on the pulse of not just young people on campuses, but people born in the 1980s who would never have voted Republican before. that's very thrilling to Trump. The idea that he has broken the party dynamic, maybe even moved us into a new era of what each party's base is and how they vote. Thrilling. And who's doing that? Well, it's Charlie Kirk, more than the head of the Republican National Committee. And in 2024, they looked at the electorate and said, well, we proved it. We proved this works. We've changed American politics. Donald Trump gives him a lot of credit for doing that because that was not obvious in 2016.

13:25There were not a lot of liberals who thought, oh, in eight years, there's going to be a tremendous cultural hold Donald Trump has over young people. That was not how they thought. It seemed unimaginable. No, definitely not. We are a show that is really focused on the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. How do you see Charlie Kirk in the context of a larger movement of conservative youth around the globe? Very important. Probably one of the most important figures in that, because a lot of people in this country and around the world are taking notes from what Kirk did.

13:57And there's a lot of work between different conservatives around the globe who have the same strategy, which is start with some first principles that you're comfortable defending. There are only two genders. Racism is not a permanent inheritance that white people need to apologize for. Mass immigration is bad, et cetera. Say those things wherever you want. Go in a public place, interview people with a microphone where you're debating them and you can win the debate or just post it yourself on social media and prove that lots of people agree with you. You know that if you're on a campus anywhere, let's say in France or in Austria, and you say something that gets you in trouble, you can reach out to a network of conservative influencers and politicians who might elevate your cause.

14:46And that pipeline is very direct. People who are conservatives who are fighting the liberal norms in their countries through social media can directly reach Americans. And Kirk had a very wide net, but also a style that I think was replicable for people who have drive and talent to say, I'm going to break into this conversation and I'm going to prove that my ideas have the majority support and they're right. You can't stop me anymore by not putting me on your TV show because you don't matter. And social media does.

15:20The premise of a lot of what Charlie Kirk said, which is again very widespread on the American right, is that the United States, because of our tradition and our laws, might be the last Western country on earth. This tradition is being lost first on campuses, and then when people get out of those campuses, lost for everybody. And the worry is this already happened in Europe, so we need to stop it from happening here. So why our campus is so important? Why is there such a focus on what they teach? That is because we might lose the inheritance of the West. And so the idea of American conservatism and America as this particular civilizational bulwark is important.

16:01I don't know where the movement will go from here because what is his legacy going to be? Is the Kirk legacy open debate going on a college campus like the one he spent his last day at, where he is trying to convince people in a big setting, a big raucous setting, one-on-one of his ideas, or is it that you need the state to crack down to prevent what happened to Charlie Kirk? These are intermingled ideas, but one of them assumes that people can save the West through their own behavior and a lack of censorship. One of them assumes that you're going to need some censorship and some, frankly, men with guns on the streets to prevent America from becoming this nightmare vision that they have of Europe.

16:43That's going to be figured out over the next, I think, few years. Thank you, David, so much for taking so much time to speak with us. Oh, thank you.

17:01Coming up, we speak with one young conservative who's hoping to take Charlie Kirk's legacy all the way to Nigeria.

17:16In the last year, Charlie Kirk had taken his message to the world, visiting Greenland, Japan and South Korea. And he went to the UK, where he took part in a debate at the Oxford Union, one of the most prestigious student debate societies in the world at Oxford University. To continue the case for the opposition, I look to Daniel Ogoloma, Regent's Park College. At this debate, Kirk teamed up with Daniel Ogoloma, a British-Nigerian student who was already a huge fan of his. Trump is going where he said he would, loudly, brazenly, and for the second time. He's not overreaching, he's delivering. Together, they argued against the motion this House believes President Trump has gone too far.

18:09Hello, Daniel. It's Tristan. Hi, Tristan. On Thursday, we called Daniel. He's one of the millions of people across the globe mourning Kirk's death. What was the reaction to Charlie Kirk coming to Oxford for this? On social media, when the flyer did go out that Charlie Kirk would be speaking, there was a lot of comments like, oh my God, why are Oxford platforming him? Why would they bring him? Why would they allow him to come? But when I saw this debate and I saw that Charlie was speaking, I said, I've definitely, definitely got to team up with Charlie Kirk on this one.

18:49And what did it feel like in the room that day? I would say the room was a bit tense because everybody was waiting for Charlie to speak he was the last speaker you have a huge crowd of about 300 people or close to 300 to 400 people on a packed evening and I could kind of already tell how the room would be probably a bit hostile you know there was always going to be students who disagreed with him you know everybody came to hear what Charlie had to say so it was quite tense So there was three speakers on the proposition and two on the opposition. And, you know, imagine 20 minutes going by, 40 minutes going by, 50 minutes going by, and then finally Charlie speaks.

19:28Before I begin my prepared remarks, I feel like I got to run the gauntlet. And the first thing you say is this. First, I'll give you a thousand pounds right now. If you could tell me the U.S. citizen that was deported under Donald Trump. You said that twice. Yeah, the U.S. citizen that was deported under Donald Trump. And, you know, it's like everybody's like, OK, this is what we came for, Showtime. Can anyone tell me a thousand pounds? I'll give it to you right now. Yeah. Name? wrong not a u.s citizen salvador citizen el salvador anyone else u.s citizen deported under trump nope that was a lie you should know better than that you go to oxford so that is a correction number two can you tell me when it comes to charlottesville and it was it was quite fun actually and were you sitting next to him on the stage yeah i was sitting right next to him and you know every time the somebody from the proposition would say something that wasn't factual he would just whisper in my ear and go that's complete nonsense can i do a point of information and i'll go just wait it's better to wait and then he'll go oh god and then yeah it was quite interesting actually um can you tell me where you first encountered charlie kirk well i first encountered charlie kirk online um through his work on you know turning point uk that's the first time i heard about him um and at first like many people you know i saw him online probably a larger than i figure somebody who's bold confident uncompromising the fact that he doesn't shy away from challenging prevailing narratives, speaking boldly about issues that many prefer to probably avoid.

20:52He's truly inspirational across the globe. What was it about him that enabled him to connect with young men in particular? I wouldn't go on to specific issues, but I do feel like in the last two decades, you know, there's been this huge rise in social movement, especially things like feminism, the Me Too movement, for example. there are more let's say quotas for women in leadership you know so even if you're qualified as a young man or a man to be get a position you may be sidelined because of a female and because of that we're seeing a huge amount of young men not knowing where to go next after college not necessarily climbing certain corporate and social ladders because there's just no more space and because young men are feeling disenfranchised people like Charlie Kirk's voice gives them that sense of hope again and returning them back to traditional traditional mindset of living being that you can be a leader you shouldn't be a leader as a man but I think only online impressions tell part of a story you know so when I finally met him uh this year physically for the first time it was striking how different he was from you know what you will probably expect from what you see online can you tell me the story of what it was like to meet him for that first time what he actually said to you so there's a dinner um before the debate and we sat opposite each other and he goes hi my name's charlie and I said hi my name's daniel and I was like I'm going to go before you and I'm going to give you a good setup so you can go next.

22:32And then he laughed and then we got talking. He's always talking about faith online. And I think that's where the conversation kind of went straight to. He started talking about his faith. He asked me where I was from, you know, and I told him I was from Nigeria and he started talking about different issues in Nigeria. For example, you know, he was quite vocal about the ongoing persecution of Christians, highlighting that over 125 ,000 believers have been killed, particularly in northern regions of Nigeria over the last two decades and was saying, look, we need to do something about that. How familiar did he seem with issues ongoing in Nigeria?

23:08He seemed quite knowledgeable, actually. He knew quite more on it than me. So I was quite surprised. He hit me with numbers and figures and I wrote it in my notes. I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to go research this. And that's kind of what our bond was really on. And even And after that, you know, we spoke on WhatsApp quite a bit. He made a few tweets about Nigeria as well. And I remember screenshotting a tweet and sending it to him. And I was like, this is a really huge topic. And he was like, yes, let's discuss this, my friend. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, we need to. So we kind of continued the discussion on Nigeria and faith and things like that.

23:42So it was really cool. And then he also tweeted randomly. He took a segment of my speech and he added me and he said, you know, Daniel Ogolomo was my debate partner during this debate at Oxford Junior. We spoke about Nigeria and Nigeria's future, and Nigeria will be very lucky to have him. And then he sent me the tweet, and I was like, oh, wow. That was quite interesting. And that's what made me realize that, okay, he's not just about politics. He's actually a really good person. He genuinely was looking at me thinking, look, you could probably do what I'm doing in the United States in Nigeria if you wanted to.

24:20He genuinely is not just all about the politics. He actually cares about people. How did you hear the news yesterday? I heard the news on X, actually. And I was watching Netflix and I just saw Trump ally, Turning Point USA founder, has been shot at college campus in Utah. And at first I was just like, oh, my God. So I texted the chief of staff and I said, oh, my God, I'm praying. I'm praying for you. I'm praying for Charlie. And I messaged Charlie as well. And I just wrote a message on WhatsApp saying, just seeing the news online, I'm praying for you, brother. And yeah. It was really sad. It was really, really sad because just about two weeks ago, we were talking about faith.

25:17So, you know, it just felt a bit like, no, this can't be happening. Because I really did believe that he was one for the next generation. And I was really, really looking forward to how we could synergize on a lot of things and how his impact was going to benefit a lot of young people globally. But I do believe that can still be the case. What does it mean that he's died for the next generation? It's kind of made him a bit of a hero. And President Trump said in his speech last night that Charlie was a martyr of freedom and truth. And I think that will inspire a lot of people to pick up the baton and also be embodiments of freedom and truth as well.

26:03So I think for the next generation, I do think there are a lot of young people who are looking at this saying, you know, I'm going to be somebody who's going to be bold about what I believe in.

26:24you said earlier on that Charlie encouraged you he said you can do what I'm doing in America in Nigeria yeah I wonder what you think Charlie Kirk's legacy could be outside of the US I think his legacy is one of empowerment and proved that one person can energize an entire generation, regardless of where they are geographically. You know, I think he's left behind a blueprint for young conservatives worldwide to stand by their ideas, you know, communicate them boldly, organize effectively, and never underestimate the power of your own voice. You know, I think he leaves everybody a lesson about the global reach of ideas.