National politics today are largely built in Trump’s image. But for young people in New England and beyond, Charlie Kirk — heralded for his charisma and willingness to debate anyone, anywhere — stood as a star in his own right.
It was Kirk who visited college campuses coast to coast to tussle with liberals over immigration, gender roles, and gun control. He appeared constantly on students’ TikTok feeds, arguing provocative positions such as the idea that gun deaths are “worth it” in exchange for Second Amendment rights, that the claim that Black Americans are under attack is a “false narrative,” and that Democrats “stand for everything God hates.“
Though many found Kirk’s views abhorrent, Republicans credit him with making conservatism feel young again. Some whispered that he could be president someday.
Kirk started Turning Point in 2012, when he was 18. Today, it has chapters on more than 850 college and university campuses nationwide. There are at least 15 in Massachusetts, according to its website, including at Harvard, Boston University, and Fitchburg State, and conservative students here said Kirk led the charge to create space for their ideas at schools where the culture can feel overwhelmingly blue.
“Kirk understood that on the national scale, you need to create alternative avenues to get students into conservative politics and internships,” said Leo Koerner, president of the Harvard Republican Club and a senior at the college. His “biggest legacy” will be leaving students “more motivated to make a place for the right on campus — not a place to merely engage in discussion and in reading groups, but in coordinating political action.”
Part of Turning Point’s effectiveness comes from the fact that it can feel closer to a counterculture than a campus club. Kirk maintained a nonstop presence on podcasts and social media, where he openly rejected feminism, preached anti-immigrant rhetoric, and argued that Christianity should be at the heart of American politics. He chose not to pursue elected office with hopes to “transform the culture” from the outside.
All the while, Turning Point became a focal point of the conservative campus experience. The nonprofit is well known for its “Professor Watchlist,” which aggregates news to identify professors it says are biased against conservatives, and also attempts to influence student government elections by offering assistance to right-leaning candidates.
In occasional trips to New England, Kirk did not hesitate to be provocative, nor shy away from protest.
Despite a backlash at Brown University in 2019, for example, he railed against Donald Trump’s first impeachment and used his first appearance at an Ivy League school to question the worth of a college degree. (Kirk himself only briefly attended community college.) He visited deep-blue Burlington, Vt., in 2021 as part of his “Exposing Critical Racism” tour and also spoke at the University of New Hampshire and University of Connecticut.
“Kirk spoke to a group of people on college campuses who felt like they weren’t being spoken to otherwise, and who did not feel received in many places,” said Suffolk political science professor Ken Cosgrove.
Those efforts, campus conservatives said, brought their opinions closer to the mainstream and increased the tolerance of right-leaning views on college campuses.
At an activity fair at Boston College in late August, incoming students rallied around Turning Point representatives and celebrated Kirk’s political reach, said Ebner, the college’s chapter treasurer.
“The reps were here, gauging interest, and asking [students], ‘Do you know Charlie Kirk?’” Ebner said. “And the vast majority of kids said, ‘Oh, I love him! Is he coming?’”
And when Dartmouth College released tickets for a debate between Kirk and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker that was to be held later this month, the 300-some tickets sold out in under 10 minutes.
John Coleman, president of the Dartmouth Conservatives, took it as a sign that students of all opinions gravitated to Kirk, because he galvanized Gen Z to pay attention to politics. Even Coleman’s high-school-age brother took to Kirk after finding him online.
The Dartmouth Conservatives have seen “tremendous growth” in the last three years, and immediately have around 100 members, said Coleman, a senior history and government major.
“That has been led across the country in many ways by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA.”
In a statement, a Dartmouth spokesperson said the college believes “deeply that free expression and respectful debate are essential to academic life. [Dartmouth’s] scheduled debate with Charlie Kirk and Hasan Piker was rooted in those principles.”
At other schools, Kirk emboldened students as they faced resistance inside their own institutions, some said.
Emerson College suspended its Turning Point chapter in 2021 after members passed out stickers critical of China’s government that read “China kinda sus.” And the president of Suffolk University’s chapter of Turning Point said other students have repeatedly reported both the chapter and him personally to the college because of their online posts, the Globe reported in April.
In the wake of Kirk’s death on Wednesday, Boston University’s College Republicans sent a letter to the university president asking the college to address the political divide on campus.
“Our main goal is to create a place where debate and conversation is genuinely encouraged and not frowned upon and people aren’t intimidated,” BU Republicans president Zac Segal in an interview Thursday. “When only one side is being spoken about, it’s indoctrination. I feel like that’s what Boston University has become and other higher ed institutions as well.”
In a statement, BU spokesperson Colin Riley said, “We’ve had world leaders, controversial speakers, etc. at BU over the years and we take all necessary steps to ensure the safety and security of our guests and the BU community.”
Despite Kirk’s engage-all-comers approach to debating, he remained divisive. Some students told the Globe they blame him for contributing to the terse political moment by sowing division and note that Kirk was addressing gun violence on stage before he was shot in the neck by a shooter’s bullet at the Utah Valley University event.
“You’re not going to make me feel empathy for a man that spewed hate, fear, and disinformation his entire life,” said Melodie Vaval, a senior at Emerson College. “I don’t want to celebrate a person’s death … but the nature and amount of the responses from Republican politicians are incredibly telling” about the political moment.
As Kirk’s public profile grew, so did support among young people for conservatism.
As early as 2018, Donald Trump Jr., a friend of Kirk’s, lauded him with helping his father win the presidency. Turning Point regularly hosts voter registration drives on college campuses, eating into what is typically a bastion of support for Democrats. And last year, Kirk was widely hailed in conservative circles for helping lead and facilitate Trump’s significant election gains among young voters.
He had a prime seat at Trump’s inauguration, claimed to have visited the White House “a hundred-plus times,” and weighed in with Trump directly on potential Cabinet nominees, the New York Times reported.
And it is undeniable that Kirk’s high profile on the national stage trickled down into classrooms and campus quads across New England. In conversations with the Globe, young conservatives called Kirk a “rockstar,” “willing to engage,” “showing up,” and “playing by all the rules” of civic discourse.
“It’s notable that he was never elected to anything. He was never appointed to anything,” said Peter Loge, a political communications expert and professor at George Washington University. “But he was Guy Fieri for politics instead of cooking.”
Nick Stoico of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_. Claire Thornton can be reached at claire.thornton@globe.com. Follow Claire on X @claire_thornto. Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.
About the Author
