Charlie Kirk chuckled as he looked up from his phone, his face reflecting the glow of a half dozen cable news channels, each flashing silent White House headlines from across the dimly lit room.
Kirk sat at a V-shaped desk stamped with his personal logo, surrounded by his life’s work: a sprawling Phoenix campus housing the nation’s preeminent conservative student group, Turning Point USA, and its increasingly influential campaign arm, Turning Point Action. At 31, the GOP juggernaut couldn’t help but grin — it had been a good summer.
Fresh off a week co-hosting “Fox & Friends,” where he had made his national debut more than a decade before, Kirk was riding high. A recent cameo on South Park only added to his swagger. The irreverent satire had mimicked his debate tactics almost word-for-word, which Kirk took as proof his college tours had reached complete cultural saturation.
After years of rapid growth on the coattails of President Donald Trump, and now as one of the self-appointed stewards of Trump’s “America First” movement, Kirk had, he told me, become “too big to ignore.”
He has a point.
During the 2024 presidential race, Kirk’s bare-knuckle approach to campus polemics was everywhere. In 2024 alone his content garnered more than 15 billion views across social media platforms, according to a Turning Point spokesperson. Judging by what drew the most cheers and clicks, Kirk’s appeal to young voters owed as much to his willingness to break liberal taboos as to his social-media-savvy style.
Since coming of age as an anti-Obama libertarian, Kirk has developed a “populist nationalist” worldview on issues like immigration, gender and the political process, all while amplifying provocative figures on his popular podcast.
Despite his proclivity for sparking controversy, Kirk’s real interest lies in changing his followers’ behavior. Just outside his studio, a pack of well-dressed Gen Z employees of Turning Point offered a glimpse into the demographic Kirk hopes to convert. Their buttoned-up professionalism contrasted with the anti-establishment energy of a conservative movement that has become countercultural.
Chatting with Kirk between meetings, the team of 20-somethings — half of them members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Kirk said — reclined before large monitors, crafting their boss’s next viral clip.
But Kirk’s massive online footprint is just the beginning. His aspirations have always been much bigger. Clicking his pen for emphasis, Kirk explained how his $100 million-a-year Turning Point empire intends to win more than social media clout. It’s the institutions of power they want.
To “save Western civilization,” they are willing to upset the entrenched elite — in universities, the media and government — by whatever means necessary even as they build alternatives from scratch.
“We want to be an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as The New York Times, Harvard and tech companies,” Kirk said. “And we believe we’re creating that.”
Kirk’s national vision has found an opportune home in the American West. Since relocating his headquarters from his native Illinois in 2018, Kirk has gone all-in on remaking Arizona politics. Under the direction of COO Tyler Bowyer, a Latter-day Saint, Turning Point Action has overhauled the state’s electoral landscape, galvanizing the grassroots and targeting incumbents in primaries.
Skeptics and supporters alike agree the duo have transformed Arizona into a blueprint for their national ambitions and, in turn, initiated an experiment: Can adopting the left’s tactics of voter mobilization shift the state to the right? Or will it relegate the GOP to an angry minority?
The recent struggle to win statewide races in Arizona has fueled criticism that elevating outrage over nuance, and prizing allegiance to the president over independence, has alienated voters. But Kirk insists his aim is higher than partisan pit fighting.
He sees no tension between his Christian calling to be a peacemaker and his role as one of the country’s most recognizable culture warriors. His scheduled visit to Utah this week has already prompted a burst of backlash from students that consider him too inflammatory for campus.
Unlike some of his fellow pundits, however, Kirk says he plans to build a positive foundation that outlives his digital fame. For Kirk, the true test of Turning Point is whether it can extend MAGA’s mission well beyond the political career of its founder in the White House.
Can Kirk keep Trump’s coalition together?
In July, Kirk gathered more than 7,000 Turning Point proteges to Florida, for the largest-ever Student Action Summit. Over the previous decade, Kirk and Bowyer have made semiannual events a cornerstone of their organization. But this time was different.
The weekend marked exactly one year since Trump evaded death by an assassin’s bullet, 10 years to-the-day since Bowyer hosted Trump’s first major campaign rally in Phoenix and 13 years since Kirk met his first donor across the street at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa.
Amid what felt like an ascendent moment for the movement he helped to mainstream, Kirk stepped out onto the convention stage. Emerging from behind a jet of sparks, Kirk joined a chant of “USA, USA, USA,” barely audible over the electronic battle cry blasting from the speakers.
Kirk touted the unprecedented rightward shift among young voters during the 2024 election and declared this the time for the Republican base to unite around zero-tolerance deportation policies, subsidies to Americans for family formation and primary challenges for anyone who failed to toe the line.
But Kirk’s focus on bringing together the disparate elements of MAGA quickly faded. Influencers like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly challenged the Trump administration on Iran and Jeffrey Epstein, suggesting to the crowd that the president had not done enough to end foreign entanglements or destroy the deep state.
Meanwhile, Trump appointees, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan, hyped Trump’s historically productive first 100 days. The students in attendance were left to wonder whether the man in the Oval Office had succeeded beyond all expectation — or sold out.
A month later, standing on the set of his show, Kirk pointed to Trump’s autograph on a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The glass-paned parchment was scrawled with the signatures of every Turning Point speaker from 2018 to 2022.
Maybe more so than any of his conservative media contemporaries, Kirk has staked his reputation on real-life political outcomes. During the lead up to November, Kirk worked tirelessly to secure Trump’s reelection. In the months since, Kirk has spent hours defending Trump’s air strikes on Iran, lobbying lawmakers on the “Big Beautiful Bill” and downplaying the administration’s puzzling stance on Epstein.
“We have an aim and a destination towards our commentary,” Kirk told me. “We want to win, and so we’re not just talking to talk … we want to try to build a narrative, build a show, towards victory.”
To that end, Kirk dreams of creating an activist infrastructure that rivals anything on the left side of the aisle.
“From 4 to 84, you could be involved with some Turning Point project,” Kirk said. “We are creating a full life cycle of involvement and engagement for someone that wants to save their country.”
Beneath the umbrella of Turning Point USA there is now Turning Point Academy, which provides “pro-American” curricula to more than 250 K-12 partners; and Turning Point Faith, which collaborates with more than 3,700 congregations to encourage bold “biblical citizenship.”
Turning Point also supports student body president races, recruits precinct leadership teams and keeps school teacher “watchlists.” But the “lifeblood” of Turning Point USA remains its national field program, according to Kirk.
In recent semesters, Turning Point’s chapter model has appeared at more than 900 college campuses and 1,100 high schools, registering voters and providing civics education for approximately 850,000 members.
Turning Point’s 2026 goal is to renew or begin 1,000 college chapters and 1,650 high school chapters, under the name “Club America” — with the promise of reaching 10,000 over the next five years.
Kirk’s grassroots involvement has given him a closer look at the conservative movement “than perhaps any other person over the past half-decade,” he wrote in his 2024 book “Right Wing Revolution.” Last year, Kirk dedicated around 200 hours at more than 60 colleges for his “Prove Me Wrong” crusade — which he plans to bring to two Utah universities this month.
The events follow an open-mic format: Kirk sets up a chair and students line up to question him surrounded by boisterous onlookers, with the encounters quickly uploaded to social media. When he isn’t shutting down college students, Kirk said he is “actively trying to understand where people are coming from,” contributing to his credibility as a MAGA mouthpiece for the next generation.
His hold on the youth Republican vote has also made Kirk the occasional kingmaker in the current Trump administration — playing a key role in several cabinet member nominations — and potentially over what succeeds it.
Kirk was one of the earliest advocates for then-Sen. JD Vance, a 41-year-old millennial, to serve as Trump’s running mate. Vance has “lived MAGA,” Kirk said, by growing up in a “forgotten” part of the country with “the whole world rigged against him.”
If Kirk has his way, Vance will take Trump’s place at the helm of wherever the GOP heads next. “I’m going to put my power behind JD for whatever I can,” Kirk said. “That is a very good chapter two to the MAGA story that we’re writing.”
But first the movement Turning Point was designed to mobilize must survive Trump’s second term.
Kirk’s full-time vocation has become trying “to keep coalitions together,” he told me, as the pressures of national politics and social media erode the shared interests that put Trump in office. This has renewed the spotlight on Turning Point, according to Kirk, because amid an onslaught of voices, what is most needed is an infrastructure that turns opinions into measurable products.
Kirk’s full time job of avoiding a revolution
Just before 8 a.m. one August morning, Bowyer, the architect behind Kirk’s Arizona operation, stopped in front of a color-coded map, one of dozens lining the walls of the Turning Point Action “Victory Center.”
Behind him, rows of cubicles formed the nucleus of Turning Point’s expensive effort to update the GOP’s get-out-the-vote strategy, representing the realization that their goal of influencing politics by changing culture would also require re-engineering the Republican political machine.
Bowyer explained with a satisfied smile how the chart of “disengaged voters” validated his wager that the secret to electing conservatives in the Trump era has little to do with persuading moderates, and everything to do with getting GOP-disposed voters off the couch.
In 2024, Turning Point Action more than doubled their full-time staff of 400 to around 1,000 to “chase the vote” in swing states. The approach centered on “building relationships,” with multiple visits to those who hadn’t participated in more than one of the previous three elections.
It appears to have moved the needle. In Arizona, where Trump won by 187,000 votes, Republicans activated 95,000 more infrequent and first-time voters than Democrats. Bowyer believes the impact was even greater. Turning Point turned out 86% of the 400,000 “low-propensity” voters they targeted in Arizona, he said.
These tactics worked because Turning Point was able to tap into young people’s grievances like pandemic lockdowns and home unaffordability, Bowyer said, while offering the Republican Party as a vehicle for better solutions.
“The Turning Point brand has really done a good job at saying, ‘Hey, we understand you, because we are you,’” Bowyer, 39, said in an interview with the Deseret News. “We’re talking about a multigenerational youth movement of people who just feel like they were kind of lied to by the left, and now they’re expecting answers from the right.”
Turning Point’s efforts coincided with a remarkable shift among young voters. Overall, 18-35-year-olds moved more than 10 percentage points toward the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 compared to 2020, with a more pronounced jump in states like Arizona and Georgia, and among black and Latino men.
While Kirk has been careful to credit Trump with this success, Turning Point Action has claimed the group “engineered the 2024 victory” by boosting the youth vote by more than Trump’s winning margin in key states.
A Cygnal poll commissioned by Turning Point found that more than two-thirds of young voters recalled seeing Turning Point content during the election cycle, with more than one-third of those saying it made them more likely to vote for Trump.
Another poll by the GOP polling firm found that Turning Point USA was the second-most viewed conservative news source among GOP primary voters. And according to TikTok, where Kirk arguably has the greatest reach with more than 7.3 million followers, young Trump supporters trusted Kirk more than anyone else.
Kirk’s insistence on speaking directly with the nation’s youngest voters is what first convinced one of Turning Point’s biggest donors, Ed Zeman, to invest in the 19-year-old Kirk he encountered in Chicago circa 2013.
At the time, the Republican Party lacked “personal engagement” with the next generation, Zeman said. Zeman, the board chairman of a mobile home company, is so convinced Turning Point can “save the republic” that he helped purchase Turning Point’s second Phoenix facility, named after him, in 2020.
“They’re figuring out what the kids want and giving it to them,” Zeman told the Deseret News. “There’s no money in it. Charlie’s not about the money. He’s about the movement. Always has been.”
Kirk sees a paradoxical relationship between his mission and the platforms that drive it. Kirk previously supported the ban of TikTok and criticized social media for “making you more liberal.” Last year, Kirk reversed course after TikTok executives confirmed he wouldn’t be discriminated against by their algorithm.
“And a couple billion views later, here we are,” Kirk said. However, Kirk still sees his presence on TikTok as “a purely mechanical” move to reach young people through “a very flawed and very addictive means.”
Kirk said he hopes his calls for young adults to lead a more meaningful life will actually result in them spending less time on social media. He has cautioned his young fans against becoming enamored by “deep-internet theories” taking the form of white supremacy, misogyny and antisemitism.
In recent Q&As Kirk has condemned those who “want to point and blame Jews for all their problems,” which he characterized as “hyper-online brain rot” that is becoming increasingly common, especially among “young white men.”
Kirk’s antidote is to channel young people’s frustration “toward the transcendent” instead of “tearing everything down.” More often than not transgressive conspiracies directly contradict scripture, according to Kirk.
In the face of “women-hating,” for example, Kirk reminds listeners that the New Testament teaches men to love their wife like Christ loved the church. Kirk is confident that much of the internet’s fringe rightwing commentary “can be easily debunked or dismissed.” But he feels a personal responsibility to provide a positive alternative.
“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”
Overturning the Copper State
The kind of revolution Kirk fears is a jump to radicalism — whether the white nationalism of Nick Fuentes or the antisemitic socialism of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — if the Republican Party fails to address the country’s biggest problems. But Kirk is not shy about his desire to inaugurate a political revolution in the state of Arizona.
The transition from college campuses to campaign contests started when Trump’s inner circle asked Turning Point to coordinate youth outreach for 2020, according to Bowyer. Operating amid COVID-19, Bowyer said he quickly realized the Republican Party apparatus had nowhere near enough boots on the ground.
After a disappointing election outcome — which Turning Point representatives claimed at the time was fraudulent — Bowyer launched into research only to learn the left’s sophisticated network of nonprofit groups directing fundraising and ballot-chasing had no parallel on the right.
Turning Point Action began building its ground-game in earnest, seeking to complement the Republican National Committee while criticizing its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel — Mitt Romney’s niece — who Turning Point pushed to remove for what they saw as a lack of investment in MAGA nominees.
When several of Turning Point’s endorsed candidates lost, including Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona, Kirk and Bowyer concluded they had not gone far enough to replace a GOP system that had proven inadequate to contend with its competition.
“We said, ‘OK, enough is enough, we’re gonna have to do this for 2024 ourselves,’” Bowyer recounted. “‘And in Arizona, we have enough influence where no one’s going to stop us or get in our way.’”
In 2024, Turning Point “threw the kitchen sink at Arizona,” Bowyer said, providing nearly 7,000 volunteers with training sessions on how to target disengaged voters, assigning two-to-three Turning Point representatives to each voting precinct in the state.
The effort bore fruit, according to Bowyer: Arizona handed Trump his biggest winning margin of any swing state. The takeaway for Turning Point was that to win elections they needed to increase turnout in favorable areas, not waste time battling over a slice of independent voters.
Now Bowyer hopes to apply this lesson to Arizona’s 2026 gubernatorial race. Turning Point has pulled out all the stops for U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, a BYU graduate and former House Freedom Caucus chair. His firmly conservative positions and loyalty to Trump make Biggs a clear choice for Turning Point.
Biggs’ background as Arizona Senate president makes him the best qualified for the job, Bowyer argues. But elsewhere Bowyer frames the race as part of Turning Point’s project of “routing out the garbage” across Arizona government.
Bowyer’s most immediate priority is to oust Mesa city council member Julie Spilsbury. Bowyer initiated the city’s first ever recall earlier this year after Spilsbury joined former Mesa Mayor John Giles as the face of Republicans for Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego.
Turning Point PAC paid for fliers criticizing Spilsbury for votes on taxes and homelessness while Turning Point Action organized the signature-gathering effort to force Spilsbury into an election this November.
Spilsbury, a lifelong Republican, does not believe the recall election is about the votes she took — two of which were unanimous. She believes Turning Point Action is making her an example of what happens to Arizona Republicans who cross Trump.
Bowyer confirmed this motivation in a statement to a local news outlet in July, saying the recall was a direct result of Spilsbury publicly endorsing Harris, contrary to the will of her constituents who overwhelmingly went for Trump.
“It just really bothers them that I’m standing up for what I believe is right, and … put principle over party,” Spilsbury said in an interview with the Deseret News. “They want everyone to agree with them.”
Turning Point has intervened in local races more frequently in recent years, including elections to control state agencies overseeing utility rates. As Turning Point has gotten more involved, there has been an undeniable shift in the tone of Arizona politics, Giles told the Deseret News.
In 2022, Giles’ friend Clint Smith — a Latter-day Saint like Giles, Spilsbury and Biggs — mounted an unsuccessful effort to unseat Biggs. Smith ran as an anti-MAGA independent, with more liberal views on immigration, abortion and other social issues. But under Bowyer’s direction, Turning Point took campaign messaging beyond policy disagreements to more personal attacks, Giles said.
That same year, Bowyer spearheaded a successful effort to primary former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, also a Latter-day Saint, for taking the wrong track on transgender policy and election security, Bowyer said.
Months earlier, Bowers had received blowback for his congressional testimony explaining why he refused Trump’s request to appoint an alternate slate of electors after the 2020 election.
Latter-day Saints find themselves on all sides of the Arizona political spectrum. The church is neutral on matters of politics and “does not seek to elect government officials, support or oppose political parties.”
The Turning Point treatment received by Bowers, Spilsbury and others suggest the group wants to become “the godfather of Arizona politics,” according to Giles, and they are willing to cast aside common decency to do so.
“Civility is nowhere on their agenda,” Giles said. “Showing respect for people in your own party, let alone people in other parties, totally absent from their agenda; having a good faith discussion of the pros and cons of the other side’s point of view, totally not on their agenda. It’s just salute the great leader and anyone who disagrees is an enemy.”
One Republican state lawmaker, speaking with the Deseret News on the condition of anonymity, said Turning Point unsuccessfully tried to oust them in 2024.
“Driving wedges” within the party is essential to the group’s ethos, according to the lawmaker. The lawmaker said they may not run for reelection next year because they don’t know if it’s worth facing a daily influence campaign from Turning Point.
Since Kirk’s migration to Arizona in 2018, the Republican Party in the state has grown, Giles acknowledged. And Turning Point has proven its popularity by dominating GOP primary races. But he argued the cost of the group’s “mean-spirited approach” has outweighed any benefit by degrading the political discourse and dooming general election outcomes.
“To Charlie Kirk’s credit, he’s a gifted communicator,” Giles said. “But it just seems like it has not had a positive impact on our state or our country.”
Did Turning Point turn Arizona blue?
Turning Point entered Arizona politics just as the passing of former Sen. John McCain opened a power vacuum in the state GOP, according to longtime Arizona consultant Kevin DeMenna. This “serendipity” allowed Turning Point to rapidly gain “enormous influence” in the state.
But Turning Point’s takeover has not been all smooth sailing. The group is currently embroiled in a verbal battle with GOP chairwoman Gina Swoboda, who accused Bowyer last week of demonstrating “clear intent to weaken our Republican party.”
Since Turning Point planted its flag in Arizona, all five major statewide offices — governor, attorney general, secretary of state and two U.S. Senate seats — have flipped from red to blue for the first time in decades. In 2022, Turning Point’s slate of candidates for these positions lost across the board.
In 2024, Kari Lake’s bid for Senate — which followed a refusal to concede her prior gubernatorial loss — also failed, underperforming Trump by 4.5 percentage points.
While Turning Point has been able to control the mechanism of Arizona GOP primaries by steering Trump’s endorsement, they are unable to win statewide races because “they don’t know how to speak to swing voters,” said Tyler Montague, another Arizona-based GOP operative.
In addition to hurting the Republican Party electorally, Montague contends that Turning Point has worked against the GOP by withholding voter data and scaring away the business community.
All of this has come as welcome news to Copper State Democrats. Eric Chalmers, a Democratic strategist who helped direct Gallego’s 2024 victory over Lake, said there is no question Turning Point has transformed the Republican Party in Arizona.
But by overstepping the limits of traditional mudslinging and doubling down on claims of election fraud, Chalmers said Turning Point appears to be creating “the largest, most well-funded minority party they can.”
In April 2024, Bowyer, and 17 others, were indicted by a grand jury after the Democratic Arizona attorney general brought a case against the Republican officials for their involvement in trying to put forward alternate electors to challenge the 2020 election.
At the time, Bowyer claimed to be a “duly elected” presidential elector and said Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to recognize competing electoral votes. The case has returned to square one after defense attorneys pointed out problems with the instructions to the grand jury.
Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who was also indicted for his role in the plan, said criticisms of Turning Point reveal more about the critics than anything else.
Republican naysayers are just angry the group is finally holding both sides to account for abandoning conservative principles, Hoffman said. As the head of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Turning Point’s go-to PR agency, Hoffman said the group has given the Arizona grassroots “the strongest reinforcement” in the country to act as a check on members of their own party.
And despite what detractors say, it is working, Hoffman said. In addition to Trump’s 2024 victory, Turning Point has helped replace Maricopa County’s Republican recorder, Stephen Richer, who opposed attempts to question the election process in the nation’s second largest voting jurisdiction.
Hoffman rejects the notion that Turning Point has made Arizona politics more vitriolic, saying that he and Bowyer have simply brought Kirk’s “honest, raw” approach to commentary into the political sphere, which has highlighted conservative faultlines.
“The two fundamental differences are those who compromise to gain power and those who refuse to compromise to return power to the people,” Hoffman told the Deseret News. “And I see that as being the fundamental divide within the Republican Party.”
In an interview with the Deseret News, Utah Sen. Mike Lee — who Kirk said he texts with “every day” — echoed Bowyer and Hoffman’s political philosophy. A candidate increases their impact if they resist pressures to “water down” their beliefs to win statewide, Lee said.
Voters want a firm commitment that the person they see on the campaign trail will act predictably once in office, according to Lee, and Turning Point’s fusion of turnout initiatives and media dominance appears “made for this moment” to push candidates in that direction.
Biggs, as one of the most conservative members of Congress, is counting on Turning Point’s claim that by expanding the voter base he will not need to moderate his message to win.
Politics has always been “rough and tumble,” Biggs told the Deseret News. And he takes umbrage with people who complain about Kirk and Bowyer playing hardball when they are really just telling the truth. Tactics aside, “the final measure” of Turning Point is whether it is able to get the most conservative leaders elected, the lawmaker said.
Kirk bristled at the suggestion his organization had turned Arizona blue. Turning Point Action was “barely operational” in 2022 and only “involved peripherally,” Kirk said.
Republican candidates in the state lagged behind Trump not because of their extreme views, according to Kirk, but because of problems created by the “McCain Mafia” after the McCain-aligned Martha McSally lost to Kyrsten Sinema in 2018 and to Mark Kelly in 2020 despite being appointed by the governor.
“But I’m not that interested in the finger pointing,” Kirk said. “Time will tell. As election cycles go on, we’re going to find out if the Turning Point influence is good, or not so good.”
What Kirk thinks it means to be a ‘peacemaker’
In the meantime, Kirk plans to continue his “American Comeback Tour.” Kirk will visit college campuses around the country this fall, with his first and last stops for September in Utah.
On Wednesday, Kirk is scheduled to bring his Prove Me Wrong table to Utah Valley University. And his future appearance at Utah State University on Sep. 30 has already caused a stir.
USU students created a petition on Aug. 29 asking administrators to “reconsider allowing Charlie Kirk’s event to proceed” because he did “not align with the core values” of the university. The petition has since received more than 3,900 signatures, and counting, with dozens of comments calling on USU to cancel the event.
On his podcast last week, Kirk said this was “a greater response” than he typically receives, even at liberal schools like University of California, Berkeley.
The most common complaint of petition-signers was their perception that Kirk propagates “hate,” “misinformation” and “fascism.” Kirk believes his message does the opposite and that universities should be a place to debate hot-button issues.
However, Kirk has given his opponents plenty to react to, from calling Martin Luther King Jr. an awful person, to arguing that while ending segregation was good the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, to telling young women to prioritize starting a family over their careers and questioning whether certain Muslim elected officials are real Americans.
In his 2024 book, Kirk wrote, “To quote Christ, I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”
Kirk told me this statement does not conflict with Christ’s command to be a peacemaker because the division Kirk causes comes from speaking truth. And while he admitted he does not always pair that truth with sufficient grace, he said both are necessary to establish “peace in the city.”
Where things got less clear is who should be included in this community, and who should receive different treatment as a foreigner.
Christ’s injunction to love our enemy applies to “neighborly” feuds, Kirk said, but not to “invaders.” This selective bridge-building requires prudence in its application, according to Kirk.
He told me he did not think his “city,” with higher moral expectations for dialogue and diplomacy, encompassed those who support “the medieval butchery of children,” “late-term abortion” and “the continuous stream of third-world immigrants that hate the country and don’t share our values and don’t assimilate.”
“Nowhere in Christ’s teaching would He want you to accept or tolerate disorder, chaos, or a system of laws that are an affront to his teachings or to the natural law which he created as God,” Kirk said. “And so the means of how we establish that kind of peace in a city is very important.”
Bowyer shared Kirk’s certainty; he has never felt “ethically divided” about his work as an activist because it reflects his most deeply held beliefs, he said. Like Kirk, Bowyer sees politics as downstream from culture. But if a community is not vigilant in protecting what makes it unique, then its culture will dissipate, he said.
Increasingly Kirk, who identifies as an evangelical Christian, has described his project in spiritual terms — using technology and talking-points to trigger a cultural Great Awakening. But the next American revival won’t happen on TikTok, and it won’t be spurred by political triumphs alone, Kirk says. It will show up in rising church attendance, marriage rates and childbirths.
An activist lifestyle, according to Kirk, is most effective when it translates into a virtuous next generation. Latter-day Saints do this well, Kirk said. “I love Mormons,” he told me. “They’re some of the sweetest people on the planet.”
Kirk knows the spiritual and political are not always complementary. To stay grounded in the tumultuous world of grassroots engagement, Kirk tells his Gen Z and millennial acolytes to follow his example: Kirk got married in 2021, has had two children with his wife and puts family time first.
On his desk sat a recently played-with stuffed animal and action figure beside his white and gold Trump “47” hat. Kirk has also made a phone-free Sabbath and scripture study core parts of his routine in an effort to pull back from the internet “warfare” he lives, breathes and magnifies.
“But politics is a blood sport, man,” Kirk said. “I mean, it’s tough. And so you have to have those kind of anchoring tools to keep you steady.”
