Just inside the Turning Point USA Freedom Center in Phoenix, Arizona, there is a gold-framed painting, about three feet tall, glowing in a warm spotlight mounted on the wall.
Captured mid-throw is Charlie Kirk, lobbing red and white MAGA caps into a mass of ecstatic students, cheering against the brilliant-blue backdrop of a September afternoon.
His outstretched arm pulls taut the word “FREEDOM” across his white T-shirt. Rendered in commemorative brushstrokes: the moment Kirk’s “American Comeback Tour” arrived in Orem, Utah.
The same wall previously featured the faces of 36 Turning Point USA staffers who had showcased Kirk’s signature “grassroots humility,” “warrior spirit” and “persistent innovation.”
Four of them were in attendance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, 2025, when their role model was ripped away in one of the most public acts of political violence in U.S. history.
Kirk’s shocking absence continues to fill all six buildings at Turning Point headquarters.
His leather seat on the set of “The Charlie Kirk Show” sits permanently empty. On the glass table by his microphone rests a plush hand puppet and plastic moose positioned there by Kirk less than a month before he died so his two toddler-aged children would know he was thinking of them as they watched with their mother, Erika.
Most days, the children still come by to play. Team members help with childcare while Erika works from the office her husband once used; his chair, again, intentionally left vacant.
For a while, Kirk’s kids, now ages 4 and 2, got a new toy during every visit, chosen from a collection of gifts sent by well-wishers, affectionately called “daddy’s friends,” that took up entire rooms.
When I returned to Turning Point’s campus in August the makeshift tribute had been moved for remodeling. A new eight-foot fence circled the perimeter of the nonprofit company’s campus.
It was a year to the day since my first visit to Turning Point. In some ways it felt like entering a place frozen in amber. Enshrined memories converted every shelf into a time capsule.
As I came around a corner, I saw where Kirk stood a year ago after our interview beside a pair of front-page newspaper stories announcing the failed assassination attempt against President Donald Trump.
Now each department displays news clippings of Trump delivering Kirk’s eulogy.
A museum-like reverence hung in the air. But around Kirk’s empty chairs, team members pulsed with a restless determination to do everything they could to keep their founder’s vision alive.
“You’ve got to prove that you can actually make an impact, that you can do things that we were working towards prior to his assassination,” Turning Point Action COO Tyler Bowyer told me.
At Erika’s insistence, Kirk’s producers Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff emerged from behind the scenes to take over his daily program, doing their best to opine on the issues as Kirk would if he were here.
Meanwhile, the political infrastructure Kirk told me was Turning Point’s “lifeblood” has expanded at a pace Bowyer and Turning Point USA COO Justin Streiff are struggling to match amid maximum turnout at chapter leadership summits, record-breaking renewals for school chapters and a landslide GOP primary win in Arizona’s gubernatorial election.
While Turning Point’s activist machine remains a vehicle for the conservative empire Kirk built, it also finds itself at the nexus of forces tearing the American right apart in the wake of his death.
Rampant conspiracism centered on Israel, coalition-breaking disagreements over White House policy and a callous fixation with Kirk’s widow have revealed undercurrents consuming parts of the rising generation that once looked to Kirk for direction as arguably the most visible conservative trendsetter in the country.
In interviews with the Deseret News, the leaders at Turning Point recognized Kirk as irreplaceable. His influence was unique, they said, because it ran so much deeper than the political fights that made him famous. They hope his legacy will be quieter; a movement of strong marriages, big families and full churches; something akin to a revival.
It is not lost on them that this effect might be impossible to replicate. The void Kirk left can only be filled one way, they agreed: young people putting down their phones, and picking up the mic.
The day everything changed
It was an unusually warm 90 degrees in Orem as Kirk sat down beneath his trademark “prove me wrong” tent at the bottom of an outdoor amphitheater overflowing with around 3,000 fans and curious onlookers.
Back in 2018, when Kirk first decided that college debates would form the core of his youth outreach, he could barely turn out 300 students. By 2025, scenes of Kirk scoring viral clips on the quad were ubiquitous.
Kirk had just finished lowering his mic after clarifying a question from his interlocutor about gun violence when a “pop” rang out. The blood, and the chaos that followed, were immediately uploaded across the internet.
I can still hear the panic in my high school friend’s voice as he told me over the phone that Kirk had been shot. He was out of breath from running off campus. He knew I had published a profile on Kirk three days earlier.
Just that morning, my children, then 4 and 2, had picked up a physical copy of the article at the grocery store. Within five hours, I would be the first to publicly confirm that Kirk had been declared dead. It couldn’t be real.
The experience was far more traumatic for those at the event, including three of my coworkers. They called in the first story to my editors from underneath a desk at UVU’s mental health services building.
For Kirk’s chief of staff, Mikey McCoy, the experience of being there, just behind his boss when the bullet hit, and being on the phone with Erika providing updates from the hospital, left him deeply shaken.
The dark reality that somebody would go to such lengths over ideological differences was almost too much.
“I remember wanting to give up, like being done with politics,” McCoy told me.
In addition to the grief of losing one of his best friends, McCoy felt “jaded” by what followed. Some Americans on the progressive left celebrated Kirk’s death — including in response to my own post corroborating it.
While others, ostensibly on the opposite end of the political spectrum, found some sort of thrill in speculating about the hypothetical involvement of Kirk’s closest confidants, including McCoy, without any evidence.
But McCoy, like every other member of Turning Point leadership “handpicked” by Kirk, chose to stay. He continues to work as chief of staff under Erika, who was named CEO of Turning Point USA on Sept. 18.
“What kept me here ... is I do genuinely feel that we serve a bigger purpose,” McCoy said. “It sustains us through that cynicism.”
Despite the resilience, it will never be like it was. Turning Point’s leaders speak of events in a new chronology centered on “9/10″ — as the day Kirk was killed and the anniversary that will mark it in perpetuity.
McCoy’s hope is that this first anniversary can be “another glimpse of that unifying revival” he believes characterized Kirk’s memorial, attended by around 100,000 and viewed by many millions more by live broadcast.
There is anger on the anniversary, too.
Kolvet, Turning Point USA’s spokesperson, still struggles with the “public spectacle” that became of Kirk’s murder. It will stand as the first “social-media era assassination” of a major political figure, according to Kolvet.
It may also be the most dramatic example of a tragedy instantly commodified by a new breed of online vulture — vying for attention as a source of “hidden facts” while crafting their own self-styled true-crime soap opera.
The leading purveyor of such content is podcaster Candace Owens, the onetime communications director at Turning Point USA. Kolvet dismissed her endless accusations and insinuations against Turning Point USA as “an IQ test.”
Conspiracies get clicks. Lots of them. The truth is almost always more banal — and brutal.
“People don’t see the behind the scenes; they don’t see the quiet moments where you wake up and you can’t believe he’s gone,” Kolvet told me. “They see you on camera and they judge your reaction.”
Kolvet, like so many others at Turning Point, was thrown into the spotlight without time to process what happened. He has only broken down on air once — the day after Kirk’s death on the show of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
By Friday of that week, Erika had given Kolvet a mandate: to ensure the assassin never achieves his goals. Kolvet won’t ever forget the firm directive he received from Erika, talking to him as a brand-new widow who refused to let her husband be erased.
“She said, ‘They tried to silence my husband’s voice; we can’t let them,’” Kolvet recounted. “So I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
Turning to Erika Kirk
No one at Turning Point USA has been so thoroughly denigrated as its current CEO.
In the aftermath of her husband’s murder, some liberal critics were unable to restrain snarky commentaries on her clothes and traditional views, while some conservative commentators couldn’t resist ridiculing her for accepting an executive position with young children at home.
Comment sections reacting to her appearances continue to be dominated by individuals who believe it is important for them to weigh in on whether she looks too happy, too angry, too performative, too strong, too weak, too feminine, too flashy — or all of the above.
Two days after her husband’s murder Erika insisted on giving a live video statement she had written, standing beside his empty chair. Directing her comments to heaven, she promised Kirk she would make Turning Point USA “the biggest thing that this nation has ever seen.”
The feedback — on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok — came flooding in before her speech had even finished. What commenters didn’t observe was the moment the video stopped recording. “She walked off camera and just collapsed,” Kolvet said. “The world didn’t see that.”
With every word scrutinized, the organization, and its leaders, can come across as “wooden and two-dimensional,” Kolvet acknowledged, but that’s simply because they are human. It doesn’t take long to see that finishing what Kirk started drives everything at Turning Point.
This includes Erika’s appointment as CEO. Kirk had informed Turning Point’s board, and others, that his wish was for Erika to take the reins if anything were to happen to him. For many employees, no one else could have succeeded in holding Turning Point together.
“I’m not sure that Turning Point wouldn’t have come apart at the seams,” Kolvet said. “She was really the only person that could have stepped into that role.”
The past year has been filled with lows, made lower by the “idiocy” of online attacks, Streiff told me. It has also been filled with heartening highs, including a student leadership summit attended at full capacity in Washington, D.C., and an alternate Super Bowl halftime show viewed by several million people.
There are clear signs of growth, according to Streiff, who formerly led Turning Point’s fundraising efforts. Under Kirk, Turning Point USA’s revenue exploded a thousand-fold from less than $80,000 in 2013 to nearly $80 million in 2024. Last year was their biggest year ever for donations, exceeding $115 million.
In the days following Kirk’s death, some of Turning Point’s biggest donors pledged millions more as the number of requests for new school chapters soared to around 50,000. Ticketing for Turning Point’s most recent donor ball over the July 4 weekend had to be shut off after they quickly sold out, Streiff said.
Other donors have taken a wait-and-see approach, predicting that the initial surge would be followed by a drop off.
But Streiff believes Turning Point has proved them wrong.
By the spring 2026 semester, Turning Point USA reported that the total number of college chapters had nearly doubled from around 900 to 1,500, and the number of Club America high school chapters had almost tripled from around 1,250 to 3,500.
Every summer Turning Point USA resets the number back to zero. Each chapter nationwide is required to renew its registration. As of August, the share of chapters that had already renewed was up year-over-year by 257% for high school and 107% for college.
“This whole ‘momentum cliff’ is not real,” Streiff said. The secret? Not giving social media naysayers a second thought. “We don’t spend time, honestly, following this stuff on X or wherever,” he continued. “Like, we’re really not. We’re building around here.”
There is a simple explanation for the sustained growth following Kirk’s death, according to Streiff. Whereas young conservatives may have once been content to watch Kirk engage in verbal combat on their behalf, now they realize the onus is on them.
Around two-thirds of Turning Point USA chapter leaders got involved after the assassination, Streiff said. And now students will be tasked with carrying on Kirk’s campus presence through “Pick Up the Mic” events, complete with their own tent, sound system and queue of questioners.
Turning Point USA organized around 100 of these in the spring. Andrew Sypher, Turning Point USA’s chief field officer, had planned to push for another 150-200 in the fall. Then he was approached by Streiff and Erika: they wanted the number to be closer to 400.
When Kirk got his start at age 18, the establishment consensus was that young voters “were lost,” Sypher said. Kirk’s groundbreaking appeal was that he met them where they were. He loved student outreach so much he asked Sypher to schedule impromptu tour stops on his free days.
“Charlie, as his name and influence grew, he desired more and more to be among the students,” Sypher told me. “That was his way of touching grass and making sure that he was being a voice and an advocate for them.”
The only way that campus presence can continue, according to Sypher, is through Erika’s leadership.
Picking up the pieces
Equally undeniable as the energy surrounding Turning Point USA is the loss Kirk’s death inflicted on the pro-Trump alliance he was instrumental in assembling. Last August, he told me his job was to “keep coalitions together.” In the year since, they have begun to crumble.
At the time we spoke, cracks were already starting to show. His Student Action Summit in July featured pointed criticism of Trump from media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly over attacks on Iran, obfuscation on Jeffrey Epstein and delays with mass deportations.
In the aftermath of Kirk’s death, these fault lines have widened into yawning chasms.
Disagreement burst into the open during Turning Point USA’s premier gathering in December, AmericaFest, with Carlson and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro trading barbs from the podium over the former’s decision to elevate white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his podcast.
In June, Carlson renounced the Republican Party as part of his broader pivot to decrying Israeli influence in American politics. This came a few months after Trump said Carlson, Kelly and Owens are “not MAGA” because they oppose his war in Iran, among other foreign policy issues.
Before his death, Kirk had transitioned more and more into a go-to GOP mediator, operating discreetly to communicate Gen Z dissatisfaction to the administration, and working overtly to reconcile conservative divides, like when he moderated a debate on Israel last July.
“He was a genuine bridge builder within the conservative movement,” Neff told me. “The stuff of the last year has been difficult. ... It almost feels like maybe Charlie’s presence was keeping a lid on it or something, and the absence of him caused it all to explode.”
Turning Point USA plans to lean more into its function as a forum for resolving arguments on the right side of the aisle. But it has become increasingly difficult for the organization to know where Kirk’s big tent ends and where he would have drawn the line to exclude bad actors peddling anti-American talking points.
The dilemma has become all the more dire because beneath the surface a seismic shift is carrying young voters to the extremes.
Gen Z, those born between 1997-2012, are significantly more likely to consider Israel a top issue; to align with antisemitic beliefs, including statements from Fuentes; to distrust the federal government; to dislike capitalism; and to justify political violence.
Kirk foresaw this. In our interview he was definitive: he considered his mission to prevent a revolution. He aimed to do this, he said, by redirecting Gen Z away from grievance-based “free stuff” populism and toward the “ultimate purposes” of faith, family and tradition.
Kirk had his fair share of uncompromising stances, ranging from an absolute commitment to removing all immigrants in the country illegally, to ending all diversity, equity and inclusion programs that he claimed had the potential to promote unqualified individuals.
He also could have a blunt, if not abrasive way of getting his point across, like when he said DEI programs might make him skeptical of the abilities of a black pilot, or when he said that legal immigrants are not real Americans if they speak a different language or have Muslim names.
But he was just as explicit in his condemnation of “Jew hate,” “hyper-online brain rot” and “deep-internet theories” taking the form of white supremacy, misogyny and antisemitism. Kirk distinguished himself as the “America First” spokesman who went out of his way to shun bigotry.
Many saw him as polarizing, but few can dispute that his assassination has torn open a vacuum in youth Republican outreach that could easily be filled by malevolent actors.
“It’s a huge gaping hole in the conservative movement, exactly the size and shape of Charlie Kirk,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee told me. “And there’s nobody else who has been able to do the things that he has done.”
Utah’s senior senator and Kirk texted on an almost daily basis before the assassination. In the days that followed, Lee said he told Bowyer it was imperative that Turning Point USA survive. The alternative would be to cede ground to the radicalism that had killed Kirk.
The sad reality of political assassinations, Bowyer said, is they often have a permanent and profound impact.
The deaths of President John Kennedy; his brother, New York Sen. Robert Kennedy; and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; in the 1960s slowed or derailed parts of their agenda.
But this time will be different, according to Bowyer, because Kirk didn’t just leave behind a memory, he left an institution that Bowyer called the “center of the conservative universe.”
What’s next for Turning Point
The first obstacle obscuring Turning Point’s future is a drawn-out trial seeking the death penalty for Kirk’s alleged killer. As it inches along, court proceedings will provide more fodder for outrage profiteers, even as they slowly illuminate answers about how and why Kirk was assassinated.
On Sept. 1, a judge ruled with the prosecution that there is sufficient evidence for a full trial. A date will be selected at the end of October for what could ultimately take years. In attending the hearings, Erika has had to relive her worst hours, even as defense attorneys have accused her late husband of “speaking hatefully.”
As Kolvet and Neff wage daily online messaging battles to protect Kirk’s family and legacy, Turning Point Action is hoping to highlight the group’s power in the real world.
Turning Point’s political advocacy arm is pouring resources into the Arizona gubernatorial race, and other key swing states, to demonstrate its ballot-chasing philosophy can make up at least some of the difference in a midterm year with an unpopular Republican in the Oval Office.
In 2024, Turning Point Action claimed to have “engineered” Trump’s victory by targeting low-propensity voters in several battleground states. Bowyer is already laying the groundwork for 2028, expanding permanent operations in places like New Hampshire and Nevada.
These early efforts have one candidate in mind.
Vice President JD Vance was, in Kirk’s view, the perfect “chapter two to the MAGA story.” When asked whether he wanted to run for office, Kirk would tell friends he didn’t need to because Vance, with his working-class background and populist-nationalist appeal, already embodied the direction he hoped to take America.
In December, Erika re-upped Turning Point’s support of Vance as heir to “Make America Great Again.” But Vance will have to win over the country without Kirk, who pushed Trump to pick Vance as running mate, brokered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA endorsement and recommended Trump’s early rush of executive orders.
The question is, according to Bowyer: “How do you build a legacy-defining movement that makes a person like Charlie proud while keeping everyone hanging together and being able to attract new people?”
So much of Turning Point’s success appeared downstream from its champion. Kirk’s charisma, courage and quick wit made him the most trusted influencer among young Trump voters, according to a TikTok survey. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, his content garnered more than 15 billion views across social media platforms.
But Kirk would say this is just “10%” of what Turning Point did. Social media was a necessary evil to reach young people, he told me. He dreamed of an organization that touched all aspects of culture, from K-12 classrooms, to faith congregations, to higher education, all geared toward a religious awakening among America’s youth.
There was a moment when it appeared his vision had come to an end.
On the day of the assassination, Caleb Chilcutt was convinced he had failed. As UVU’s chapter chair, it was his event. He had announced his name to the world as it was getting started. And he was sure, after what he had just seen, that he was next.
“I feared for my life, to be completely honest,” Chilcutt told me.
Then Chilcutt came to a realization. Failure looked like Turning Point USA going quiet. It looked like leaving the mic in the grass. He rallied fellow students to return to “tabling,” setting up in the commons to talk with students, whether they agreed with them or not. The interaction was the point.
In July, after graduating and receiving the first-ever Charlie Kirk Courage Award from Erika, Chilcutt joined Turning Point USA full-time as the Beehive field representative, overseeing chapter recruitment at more than 20 colleges in Utah and southern Idaho.
However, the shadow of political violence still haunts him; Chilcutt refuses to table alone. On a recent visit to Idaho State University, he and his partner were approached by two students with gauges, green hair and septum piercings. “Hey, fascists,” one said. Chilcutt tensed. Then he chose connection over confrontation.
“We talked about the psychology of dehumanizing people, and just how we really just need to put down our phones and find a sense of community in person,” Chilcutt said. “I’m not saying I changed anyone’s mind, but we all walked away like, ‘OK, so I get where you’re coming from.’”
Kirk is gone. But the experience showed Chilcutt that Kirk’s voice is not.
On Thursday, Sept. 10, Turning Point USA will host an anniversary memorial at UVU, about a five-minute walk from where Kirk was killed. The “Freedom Built to Last” gathering will fill a stadium with one objective, to call on students, some of whom attended Kirk’s final tour stop, to continue his life’s work.
Standing on the stage, below a glowing spotlight, will be Chilcutt, microphone in hand.