Commentary
Charlie Kirk: From the Tea Party to MAGA, an ascent imbued with hate
He was a commando in perpetual service in the culture wars, tailored for a student audience he intended to mold into the infantry of a new right-wing hegemony.
He was 31, a scion of Chicago's upper-middle class who rose to become the megaphone of the new right on American campuses, despite never having attended a university or earned a degree. Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a kind of “youth front” for the MAGA movement, and was considered by many to be one of the architects of Trump’s 2024 victory.
He was certainly the primary driver of the comeback among young conservatives that contributed to Trump's re-election. His Phoenix-based organization reports an annual revenue of $90 million, with funds directed toward conferences, university workshops, and even financing for conservative student government candidates.
Kirk was a leading figure in the right-wing “influencer army.” He hosted a podcast second in popularity only to Joe Rogan’s, but in place of Rogan's macho populism, Kirk championed an unyielding reactionary ideological rigor. He was a commando in perpetual service in the culture wars, tailored for a student audience he intended to mold into the infantry of a new right-wing hegemony.
As a high school student, the young Kirk showed an affinity for neoliberal circles and was an admirer of Rush Limbaugh, the dean of neocon talk radio. During the Obama era, he joined the Tea Party “resistance” and was soon noticed as a promising voice, funded by wealthy GOP sponsors as a youth spokesman for their causes. He then maneuvered into the MAGA orbit and became close to the family that began its inexorable conquest of the Republican Party. Crucial to this was his friendship with Donald Trump Jr., for whom he formulated a social media strategy (and with whom he travelled to Greenland to test the waters a few months ago).
His millions of social media followers and natural political skills – but especially his personal loyalty – brought him to the attention of Donald Trump himself, who invited him to speak at the 2016 party convention. During Trump’s first term, he was received at the White House more than 100 times. After the 2020 defeat, he played a central role in the attempted subversion of the election result – Turning Point sent 350 students to the January 6, 2021 rally – and later championed endless attempts to overturn the election results in Arizona. Above all, he remained by the president’s side during the years of exile and planning his revenge.
His task was to rally the party’s youth, but for Trump, he was also a lieutenant and advisor in the purge of insufficiently loyal party cadres. When necessary, he wielded the threat of a primary challenge: if you don’t fall in line, we will finance a more loyal opponent and destroy your political career.
His natural affinity for the Trump era’s brutish methods led him to fill a void in right-wing youth movements. At universities, instead of just issuing proclamations, Turning Point compiles watchlists of “subversive” professors. What might once have been a mere symbolic gesture is now operational McCarthyism. These lists are used to get faculty and administrators fired after being reported by student “observers” for teaching proscribed topics like critical race theory or “gender theory.”
Kirk’s success was predicated most of all on his podcast, which broadcast a familiar platform of attacks, provocations, and grievances to millions of followers each week – an explosive mixture of hatred and recrimination injected relentlessly into the public sphere to keep the movement’s resentment alive.
The targets for Kirk and his fellow apologists of exclusion were women, immigrants, transgender people, and progressives. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was recast as an agent of evil for having supposedly replaced the “original” values of the Constitution with civil rights. This was paired Kirk’s with absolute support for Israel and the denunciation of a “sexual anarchy that is gripping the country,” which he blamed for demographic decline. His platform was the standard diet of “fundamental values”: Western and Christian, with a thinly veiled supremacism expressed as xenophobia with eugenic overtones, seen in his vocal support for mass deportation, and constant deriding of the left’s “obsession” with empathy.
In the days before his death, Turning Point’s X channel had focused exclusively on the murder of Iryna Zaritska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina by a mentally deranged African American killer, using her death as a symbol for the right’s crusade against crime and as an irresistible tool for manufacturing a racially charged moral panic.
Now, Kirk’s death will certainly be the subject of equally cynical operations, already initiated by Elon Musk, who posted on X that “The Left is the party of murder,” and by the president himself. President Trump’s condemnation from the Oval Office was a case in point of the very toxic environment that gave rise to the violence, as he attacked the media and the “radical left” for having poisoned the atmosphere with their criticism of Kirk.
And yet, it is impossible not to see how the poison intentionally and daily injected into the public sphere – the very poison Kirk made bank on throughout his political career – is now bearing its inevitable fruit. Kirk, like Trump, used words like a sniper; both were masters of that dialectic-turned-permanent-aggression that is the hallmark of the nationalist-populist right.
What is surprising, if anything, is that the extreme polarization and performative violence of the government have not already led to something worse. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is now destined to drastically increase the odds of that happening.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/kirk-dal-tea-party-al-maga-unascesa-intrisa-di-odio on 2025-09-12