Kirk centered his conservative movement around engaging young minds in political debate and raising up new voices.
By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.
A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.
Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.
He continued this mission until the very end.
“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.
Thorderson rose from the Turning Point USA chapter president at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now, Thorderson is a sitting member of the Utah Republican State Central Committee. He attributes his trajectory, in large part, to Kirk’s personal mentorship.
“I really got to view him as a mentor and as a personal friend, as he would invest in me one-on-one, on many occasions,” he told The Epoch Times.
Thorderson is among many whose political voices Kirk amplified since co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012.
“I owe my entire political career to Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post the day after Kirk’s death.
“I would quite literally not be in office today if it weren’t for him. Even when my own party was working against me, Charlie endorsed me and campaigned to help me win election.”
Luna’s communications director, David Leatherwood, also came into his own, politically, through Turning Point USA and Kirk’s personal support.
Leatherwood, 37, a self-described gay conservative, first met Kirk in 2017.
“I met Charlie at one of his campus tours in Fort Lauderdale, and we actually filmed a video together where he said that he, you know, supports the gay community, and that e pluribus unum, represents all Americans,” Leatherwood told The Epoch Times.
“And ever since that day, he was always supportive of me, and he invited me to be an ambassador for his organization.”
By Ryan Morgan
