WASHINGTON — It was the height of the Obama era when Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old college student, founded an organization designed to push back against the overwhelming liberal bent of college campuses. The instinct of the untested political activist would change the nation, spurring a young movement that would shatter conventional conservatism and fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

Between Kirk’s founding of Turning Point USA in 2012 and his death on Wednesday by an assassin’s bullet, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 experienced a shift in support viewed in political circles as an earthquake. When Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee that year, 37% of voters in this age category supported the GOP ticket. Last year, 46% supported Trump.

Kirk’s legacy helped activate a young evangelical community once relegated to the sidelines of political discourse — and created a permission structure for a movement centered on Christianity and family values to support a brusque, divorced businessman for president as a model of traditional manhood.

Those themes were staples in his podcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which he often used to talk about the importance of leading more conservative men toward Christianity and used the Bible as means to promote conservative causes.

In an episode posted on Sunday, he featured a conversation with conservative media personality Steve Deace at a church in Arizona, the headquarters of his organization. Their conversation was emblematic of the type of ideas Kirk was known for promoting over the years, such as the importance of conservatives leading more men toward Christianity.

“I told Charlie at dinner recently I believed he was going to become the most influential figure not holding elected office of my lifetime,” Deace said on social media on Wednesday. “The devil cannot win. We cannot fear. We have to fight. But first we have to cry.”

Kirk’s speaking style, coupled with his intensity for remaking the conservative movement, spoke to young Republicans and helped bring them into the fold of the party.

“You felt like he spoke to you and he had this skill of making you feel like he was close to you,” said Jon Fleischman, a longtime conservative activist and former chairman of California’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. “He is irreplaceable. Nobody could beat Charlie Kirk.”

Over time, Kirk became instrumental in building GOP voter rolls, making himself an indispensable part of Republican campaigns down ballot across the country and helping to drive the party’s victories last year, allowing the GOP to retake the House, Senate and the presidency. Turning Point USA generated revenue of $85 million in 2024, according to tax filings reviewed by ProPublica.

“Charlie Kirk will tell you TikTok helped,” Trump said earlier this year from the Oval Office, discussing the youth vote, “but Charlie Kirk helped, also.”

He died after being shot in the neck during a speaking engagement at a Utah university at the age of 31, a father of two.

The nature of his mission made his slaying on a college campus all the more poignant to his friends and allies, who reacted with dismay at videos of the shooting circulating online.

It was a moment of political violence reminiscent of the repeated attempts on Trump’s life during the 2024 presidential campaign, one official told The Times — and reflective of a concerning uptick in threats against public figures across the political aisle.

Over a decade of work, Kirk kept an aggressive schedule of public speaking, rallies and campus events, such as the one at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, that draw large crowds and cover topics that range from immigration to race. In recent years, Kirk extended his operation beyond college campuses with the creation of high school political chapters.

Through Turning Point’s conferences, Kirk has also created annual gatherings that in recent years have become regular stops for Trump-aligned politicians and activists. At these events, he would sometimes disparage the old guard of Republican politics, while promoting a vision of the new conservative movement he wanted to rebuild.

Ultimately, the organization he helmed was influential in helping Trump win the 2024 election. His loss was felt so deeply in the White House that on Wednesday Trump ordered all American flags throughout the country to be lowered to half staff until Sunday in honor of Kirk.

Kirk started his media career as a radio host, the traditional route for the emergence of conservative media voices.

Starting in 2020, he hosted a daily program for Salem Radio, which supplies conservative talk programs to stations throughout the country, including AM 870 The Answer in Los Angeles.

Salem’s website described his role as “speaking the language of our nation’s young people.”

Talkers, a publication that tracks the talk radio industry, included Kirk in its ranking of the “100 Most Important Radio Hosts in America.” By 2024, his programs ranked No. 13 on Apple’s rankings for news podcasts with as many as 750,000 downloads daily.

“Charlie’s syndicated daily program was one of the crown jewels in the Salem Radio Network lineup of politically impactful talent,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers. “He regularly took his controversial commentary out onto the campuses of America’s mostly liberal-leading universities and bravely faced hostile audiences in open debate cementing his credibility as an ideological warrior.”

His last podcast dealt with “Phillies Karen,” the woman who bullied a dad into handing a home run ball he picked up for his son at a Major League Baseball game. He discussed the incident in terms of what it said about the “state of American manhood.”

In recent months, Kirk appeared on more outlets outside of the hard-right media ecosystem. In April he appeared on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast. He recently appeared for the first time as a fill-in host on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”

Kirk’s profile had grown to the point where he was satirized in the second episode of the current season of the Comedy Central series “South Park.” Cartman becomes a right-wing podcaster in the episode in which he sports a haircut resembling Kirk. The episode was still streaming on Paramount+ as of Wednesday evening.

Kirk was wildly popular on the social media platform X, where he had 5 million followers. His account was once shut down when the platform was still called Twitter because of misinformation he spread about mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election.

Kirk often used his platform to amplify controversial viewpoints on issues such as immigration and America’s culture wars. He advocated to slow the intake of immigrants into the country, arguing that “there should be zero illegal aliens” in the country because many undocumented immigrants have committed crimes.

In 2022, Kirk advocated for the release of the man who was charged with the attempted murder of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

“If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out,” Kirk said. “Go bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”

At times, his political stances drew the ire of Democrats and at public events, heated conversations were common. But in political circles, his influence was recognized by Republicans and Democrats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosted him on his podcast earlier this year in an appeal to young, predominantly male voters lost by the Democrats in recent years.

“I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate,” Newsom said Wednesday. “His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.”

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(Wilner reported from Washington, Ceballos from Tallahassee, Fla., Battaglio from New York and Mehta from Los Angeles.)

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