Among Gen Z-ers, clips from Kirk’s debates went viral, circulating on social media and YouTube with headlines such as “Charlie Kirk DESTROYS Liberal Logic.” He modelled arguments for young conservatives to follow. Beginning in her early teens, Joyce loved watching Kirk’s debates on Instagram, seeing in them not carefully honed rhetorical tactics but authentic civility. “He could completely win the argument and debate—no matter how rude, disgusting, and nasty these people would get toward him,” she told me. “He was not fake. He was not stuck up. He was kind. He was caring. He listened.”
Last year, on September 10th, Kirk was assassinated in the midst of a debate, in front of some three thousand people at Utah Valley University. Afterward, Joyce was inundated with D.M.s, phone calls, and visits to the pet store by kids who wanted to get involved in Turning Point or start their own chapters. Joyce knew that her state was growing redder. Still, she said, “I didn’t realize how fast Florida was going until I got a million different requests.” This spring, even as teens launched chapters of Turning Point across Palm Beach County, they grappled with dissension within the organization over Kirk’s legacy and Trump’s wars. Some began to move away from it. Joyce remained. She told me, “There are some kids like myself who have put their faith in their trust and courage in God and continue to walk forward.”
At the time of Kirk’s assassination, he was arguably the most powerful political organizer in America. Beginning in 2016, when Kirk was twenty-two, he spoke at each Republican National Convention. He harnessed his charisma, his organizing power, and his closeness to the Trump family to build the largest and wealthiest right-wing youth organization in the country, with revenue of eighty-five million dollars in 2024. That fall, Kirk visited twenty-four college campuses and travelled with a new Christian arm of his organization, TPUSA Faith, to cast the Presidential election as a fight against evil. Democrats “stand for everything God hates,” Kirk said, calling the Trump campaign “a spiritual battle.”
Kirk had been animated first by traditional Republican topics, such as school vouchers and lower taxes, and he still sometimes spoke about those issues. But, after defending the separation of church and state early in his career, he’d embraced the Christian vision of America that drew Joyce to his movement. The pandemic played a pivotal role in this transformation. As campuses shut down, his college tours were cancelled. Many states and local governments limited in-person worship, deeming large gatherings unsafe; Kirk began speaking to congregations that defied COVID regulations. “Charlie thought that the church was going to push back, and they didn’t,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point and the producer of Kirk’s daily broadcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” told me. “And so he realized that there was a huge void in the space for churches to get on board and to be a part of this liberty movement.”
In the pandemic years, Kirk found common cause with Rob McCoy, an influential pastor from Godspeak Calvary Chapel, in Southern California, and a proponent of a once little-known movement called the Seven Mountains Mandate. Seven Mountains has brought the language of spiritual warfare and demon-fighting into the mainstream of evangelicalism, through a network of pastors who view themselves as prophets and apostles engaged in a battle against evil secular forces. The movement “is both political and religious,” Matthew Boedy, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia and the author of a book about Seven Mountains, explained. Its leaders, who include the televangelists Lance Wallnau and Paula White, urge believers to take control of seven spheres of influence in the United States—education, entertainment, media, religion, family, business, and government. “Seven Mountains isn’t just charismatic theology,” Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University who studies the current Christian right, told me. “This is a vision for a total takeover of society.”
