They are Charlie Kirk

0:00Turning Point USA's last big event, America Fest, was held in December, without founder Charlie Kirk. Had Kirk been alive, it might have gone differently, but it was a mess. Ben Shapiro went ham on Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TV USA. Or to mirror her bullshit lines of questioning because you love Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly. Kelly and Tucker hit back at Shapiro. to hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event. I'm like, what? This is hilarious.

0:39I don't think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben. Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shapiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the Fox News channel. Erica Kirk tried to keep it light. The enemy has thrown a lot of curveballs at us today. My iPad won't even turn on. Nicki Minaj was there. Why not? And those people are adult professionals. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college students. It was a campus organization first. So what are the students thinking? That's coming up on Today Explained.

1:20You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explained or Try Explains? Explained. Explained. I'm Noelle King with Simon Van Zylenwood. He's a features writer for New York Magazine. All right. So, Simon, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah in September, the question was, what would happen to Turning Point USA? You went looking for answers. What did you find? Yeah, I think the question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and sort of electoral apparatus. It's such a multi-pronged organization that's grown over the last decade. But also what was going to happen to youth conservatism.

1:55And as everybody probably remembers from the post-Charlie Kirk assassination moment, there was a swelling of energy on the young right. There was the massive 100 ,000-person memorial at the NFL Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. I would see his videos, and whether I agreed or disagreed, I knew that he was doing his best to serve the country, serve his family, and serve the Lord above. For me, he was the person that showed me, like, it's okay to speak up about your faith and your beliefs. And that's something that I'm going to live by to this day forward. There were reports of surging Bible sales. There was reports of booming TPSA chapters in high school and in colleges.

2:32We now have 37 ,000 applications to start chapters around the country. So I went to the memorial and started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie Kirk moment was the campus. I started fanning out around the country, especially in bigger state schools and conservative-leaning campuses where the TPSA presence was much stronger and prouder. Although I also talked to students starting chapters at smaller liberal arts colleges or even Ivy League institutions in the Northeast. And I wanted to investigate this question of what was going to happen.

3:08And the short answer, which we'll get into, is that the answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December, just three months later. If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, and I think people started writing this story, I would have thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place. Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, he was personally a very pious individual. To our own detriment and to our own failure, we as Christians have decided to cast away resting on one of the seven days. That idea of marriage being a covenant is a big, big deal.

3:47In fact, only marriage in the Bible is compared to Christ's relationship with the church. He didn't drink. He observed the Sabbath on Saturdays. He sort of, you know, had the persona of a family man. And in many ways, his most ardent followers on the young right saw him in that light. And the kind of evangelical feel of the memorial, where there was Christian rock for hours, where he was eulogized by the president and his cabinet. Charlie would have been so pleased to hear his friends and colleagues today giving testimony and giving glory to God. And explicit sort of martyrdom terms compared to a number of biblical figures.

4:25So it's about 2 ,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and they hate it. And they become obsessed with making him stop. This guy's got to stop talking. And there's always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, I've got an idea, why don't we just kill him? He was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone. He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more sort of malign forces that were creeping up on the young right. And without Charlie Kirk there, they started to become much more prominent.

4:57And so you had students who were both radicalized against the left by his death. They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance. But they also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who is actually keeping these darker forces at bay in a way that has only become more evident after his death. All right. So you talked to a lot of young people as you were reporting out this piece. Tell me who stood out to you. Who was illustrative of these themes? There's two poles in the piece, and they're represented by two big state schools that I spend time at, the University of Mississippi and Clemson University in South Carolina.

5:32And the University of Mississippi, basically the main character in my piece is the president of the TPUSA chapter at Ole Miss. I am Leslie Lackman, president of your Ole Miss chapter of Turning Point USA. She's 20 years old. She's from Westchester County, New York. She represents a kind of micro trend in the piece, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big, quote unquote, all-American schools in the South. And I met a lot of these kids, actually, at Clemson and Ole Miss, at other places. She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom, the post-TPSA boom, where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status grows.

6:10As I'm spending time with her on campus, I mean, she's a queen bee. Everybody knows who she is. Everybody wants to come to her table outside the student union, outside the big campus grove, a famous gathering spot in Oxford, Mississippi on campus. There was a posthumous tour that Charlie Kirk was supposed to be on. The tour that he was killed on, they continued. TPSA continued after his death, and they brought VIPs to kind of speak and debate with students in his stead. So Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow, and J.D. Vance came to Ole Miss. The greatest contribution that you can make to Charlie Kirk's legacy is getting involved in saving this country.

6:44Love this country. Defend her and serve our God. Do it for Charlie. So not only was Leslie Lachman, the TPSA president, sort of presiding over this newly ascendant campus organization, She was also kind of helping run this, you know, this massive confab on campus. And I was there for all of it. What are Leslie Lockman and other students who are joining TPUSA, what are they looking for? Some of them, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, are finding a way to kind of achieve some sort of catharsis, I think. Some way to honor his legacy or some way to get further involved in campus politics.

7:17A lot of them are, even before his death, were trying to fulfill Kirk's legacy of kind of retaking the campus from the left. I mean, it's not an accident that Charlie Kirk started his organization on campus. These universities have become complete opponents to Western civilization. This has been a goal since William Buckley on for the last 50, 60, 70 years, which is to kind of do counterrevolution basically on campus. And Charlie Kirk arguably was the most successful of it of all time. But it really isn't until his death that TPSA becomes something that feels like hegemonic in its own right. I mean, TPSA existed.

7:53My character Leslie was running this chapter before his death, but it doesn't boom until afterwards. It doesn't become a kind of social signifier that you are the top dog on campus, that you are not just sort of running a club for engaged students, but you're doing something possibly God-like. I mean, the University of Mississippi is the kind of place where like all the pressure runs in not just a kind of baseline conservative direction, but also Christian. Like it's the kind of place where if somebody asked you, do you believe in God, you'd feel kind of awkward saying no if you didn't. Whereas in a lot of liberal campuses, the pressures run in the total opposite direction.

8:24And so the implicit Christian element of a group like TPSA, just like the baseline pro-Trump conservatism, and it's very aligned with Donald Trump, TPSA, in a way that some of the other campus conservative groups are not, actually, because of Charlie Kirk's close relationship with Trump in the administration, makes it sort of a natural place, not just for political junkies, but for all kinds of students who aren't even that plugged in politics. How are they changing the organization as they process Charlie Kirk's death? I don't know who they, it's a great question because it's, there's no, Erica Kirk nominally is the leader, but she's also a widow who is dealing with the murder of her husband.

9:07She is not the sort of ideologue or sort of polemicist, pugilist that Charlie Kirk was. And so what I saw was a organization that was kind of running on autopilot up to the whims of its campus leaders. Like it is ostensibly answerable to the national organization, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona. But there's this paradox which informs everything I started learning, which is that TPSA is more powerful than ever, but functionally leaderless. And that leads to this question of sort of like what's going to creep in and come next.

9:46New York Magazine's Simon Van Zylenwood. In the second half of the show, he's going to come back to tell us what is coming next.

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14:07This is Today Explained. Simon Van Zylenwood of New York Magazine is back. All right, so there is Turning Point USA, that's Charlie Kirk's group, and then there is conservatism on college campuses. And you discovered that these two things are not one and the same. What does the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now? There's a bunch of different groups. TPSA being the sort of top dog right now, but there's Young Americans for Liberty, which is kind of the Ron Paul-style libertarian group. Young Americans for Freedom, an outgrowth of an old William Buckley group. Then there's the classic college Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into all these various—they're sort of like situated in all these umbrella groups.

14:45What's really important, and I found out, is that TPSA, I kind of assumed that because of Charlie Kirk's identity and the way that he would sort of debate liberal students as, you know, this is his calling card, basically, was going to be the group on these campuses engaging in kind of bare-knuckle culture war, especially after the radicalization that followed Charlie Kirk's death. It turns out it doesn't really work that way. The group was very loyal to Trump, and it actually kind of serves as sort of a pep squad for Team MAGA. That might sound really right-wing to a lot of listeners, but they end up looking like the moderates in this arch-right conservative ecosystem.

15:19The radicalization of Gen Z is sort of the through line of my piece. And what happens is that a young woman like Leslie Lachman, who's running TPSA, she's got impeccable conservative bona fides. But actually, there are many, many students, even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate. J.D. Vance is suspect. Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a moderate. And they loved him anyways because of what he stood for and the power that he had and also that devout persona I talked about. But he was barely acceptable to them on any number of issues, from immigration to Israel especially, which is a major flashpoint for Gen Z conservatives right now.

15:57I think we should question any foreign country's relationship with our government. That's totally fine, but I'm just wondering why you should... ... preserve American interests. And so as you start to get into college Republicans groups, which I assumed would be kind of the bow tied, milk toast type conservatives. In fact, a lot of them are much more radical than TPSA. And they're not really hemmed into by this loyalty to the administration that TPSA is. Describe what the more radical thing looks like. There's a couple of moments in your piece where you talk about these events where people stand up and they speak and they're collaborating with each other.

16:30Tell me about that. This is like a really interesting trope that seems to exist on the right in a way that it doesn't on the left. and Kirk had a lot to do with it. You know, Charlie Kirk used to go to colleges and initially he'd do these, they're called tabling or tenting events where he would basically sit at a table under a tent and just have anyone come up to him for one, two, three hours. We know deep down it's wrong to murder a baby. You're not murdering a baby. Yeah, yeah. All right, so without looking at the phone, look at me. What should the penalty be for breaking into America? I think there should be a system where it's more merit-based.

16:59Do you feel proud of yourself for debating college kids who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself. Are you a voter? I am a voter. Oh, so I vote and you vote. So I'm talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of Western civilization. What's happened is that there's a whole microculture where kind of Kirk-type imitators will do the same thing. And so they'll show up on campus. You know, these are 19, 20-year-old students, and they'll just organize their own tours. They'll bring their videographers. They'll connect with TPSA or College Republicans Group, and then they'll get grilled.

17:30What happens at the conservative-leaning colleges is that they end up getting grilled by other Republicans, not leftists, because there's not really that many leftists around anyways. And they're getting grilled from the right. So that right after Charlie died, there was this guy called Brylin Hollyhand, who's an evangelical Christian who goes to Auburn University. I remember one of the last things that Charlie and I talked about was that the day that civil discourse dies, America goes to a civil war. And he immediately started. It looked like he was kind of trying to take up Charlie Kirk's mantle or even replace him.

17:57So I went to Clemson University, one of the 10 schools that he'd visited, and he got absolutely ambushed. He was seen as too moderate on Israel because he was too Zionist. He was too pro-Israel. He was too in favor of the U.S.-Israel relationship and U.S. support for Israel's war on Gaza. He was seen as too pro-immigration. And mind you, this is somebody who wants to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country. He was too in favor of legal immigration. The big flashpoints on the young Gen Z right now is the question of legal immigration and H-1B tech-oriented visas. especially at STEM schools, a lot of these kids basically just think, well, we can't compete with foreign labor.

18:34It's too good. It's too cheap. It's too whatever. And there's these litmus tests. So they'll just grow over and over again. It's like you sit in these rooms and it's like the only two policies in the entire world involve Israel and H-1B visas. Like you cannot say those words enough on conservative campuses right now. And so Charlie Kirk used to get grilled the exact same way. And he would get grilled by the so-called groipers. Is that the troll that keeps tweeting about? He's not a troll. He's a very intelligent guy who has a lot to say. He's somewhat of a troll, but he seems to be getting a lot of you guys to say stuff for him tonight, so.

19:04This has happened for years. Groypers are followers of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who's a podcaster who broadcasts every night alone. And he's sort of a darkly transgressive figure who says stuff that, you know, would have been beyond the pale before him. Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. And we would live in paradise. It's that simple. And a lot of these gropers would, exhorted by Nick Fuentes, would go and do this to Charlie Kirk. And I think what happened over the years is it moved Charlie Kirk to the right because he was constantly protecting his right flank.

19:39In Trump's first term, Charlie Kirk was talking about, quote, stapling green cards to every college diploma. He was talking about increasing immigration to help stem urban population laws. Before his death, he was talking about banning all, quote, third world immigration. America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that. I mean, he'd gone completely far right on immigration. And I think part of the reason is this pressure. And so what happens after his death is the same dynamic just keeps repeating but with new imitators and new antagonists.

20:12At the time Charlie Kirk was killed, I think people who are not familiar with Charlie Kirk were surprised to hear statements like Charlie Kirk got Trump elected in 2024. Right. What does it mean for Trump and for MAGA that Charlie Kirk is gone and now there are lots of kids to the right, even the far right of Charlie Kirk? There's two ways to look at it. One is that it's extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens, who's a conspiracy theorist. and has, you know, rocketed up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out there theories about his death.

20:49Does all of this mean that this somehow proves that Israel was involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk? No, we have no evidence of that. But I don't like little lies. And Nick Fuentes, who's an outright anti-Semite. This is the biggest part of his brand. It is extremely troubling how mainstream that it's become on the right. But as an electoral consequence, it's actually arguably more troubling to MAGA's chances. If you are doing pure identitarian, hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the emerging multiracial coalition that brought Trump to office in November 2024.

21:28So there are already these, quote, anti-Groiper politicians on the right who are trying to sound the alarm. One of the things that was striking about your piece was the presence of so many young women, right? Young women deciding which side of the right, where on the right wing spectrum they're going to fall. And it did make me wonder where you find Erica Kirk in all of this. I think there's two things to separate. I think the TPSA's appeal to young women is actually a little, it's not quite about Erica Kirk. Although Erica Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female dominated nature of TPSA.

22:05This was a really interesting thing is that a lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes are extremely male to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining, like, why can't we get any girls to come to our meetings? Like TPSA, there's all these girls. There was this male president of a TPSA chapter that was saying that, you know, his dating life has never been better since he became president of TPSA. Like it's that sort of dynamic. Even pre-Erika Kirk, part of it is this more kind of ecumenical populist look at politics.

22:33They're not obsessed with immigration in Israel to this kind of debilitating extent. There's a kind of bigger tent. And there's also a handful of issues that TPSA really homes in on that is activating for conservative women in the heartland of the South or Kirk country, as I call it, all over the country. TPSA has an influencer called Alex Clark, who hosts a podcast, and she's a big Maha influencer. What if 2026 was the year of butter? Sounds wild, right? Maha, extremely popular right now with young conservative women. There are other kind of, quote, trad, unquote, influencers who are affiliated with TPSA.

23:08There's also two really, really interesting issues that are activated in the Deep South and in kind of athlete-focused state schools in particular. And I call it the issues of the two Rileys, Lakin Riley and Riley Gaines. Lakin Riley was a nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in 2024 near the University of Georgia campus, a Venezuelan who entered illegally during the Biden administration. and then there's Riley Gaines who is a swimmer who was at the University of Kentucky who competed against the trans athlete Leah Thomas who swam at the University of Pennsylvania. Trans sports issues and illegal immigration are issues that TPSA focused on a lot and especially the trans sports issue and you go to these big state schools and TPSA conservative women especially on the Riley Gaines issue the swimming issue are extremely radicalized against liberals they feel like liberals have sold women like them out a lot of them are athletes or they know athletes or in general embody more conservative values where, you know, they were already coming in extremely skeptical of something like trans rights.