(RNS) — Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and social media personality who rallied young Americans to Donald Trump’s MAGA cause, has died at age 31.
The founder of Turning Point USA and host of the streaming Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk was shot while speaking to a crowd of students at an outdoor stadium at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday (Sept. 10).
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” President Trump announced on Truth Social, his social media platform. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”
A native of Arlington Heights, Illinois, near Chicago, Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA as an 18-year-old in 2012 with a Tea Party conservative, William Montgomery, who died in 2020. The conservative nonprofit sought to educate students about “the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets and capitalism.”
With the help of Montgomery, a retired businessman who encouraged Kirk to get involved in politics after hearing him speak at a high school event, the organization grew into a conservative powerhouse. Within three years it had 800 chapters on college and high school campuses around the country.
“There are young conservatives out there, and there have been for decades. But I just feel they haven’t been plugged in correctly,” Kirk told the Atlantic in 2015, as the organization was gaining national attention. They haven’t been cultivated, they haven’t been properly equipped or trained.”
Trump’s election in 2016 cemented Kirk as a major power in conservative circles, and his influence continued to grow after Trump’s 2020 defeat through his 2024 comeback.
In recent years, he started Turning Point Faith to rally pastors and other Christian leaders to Trump’s cause and began speaking openly about his faith, especially during monthly Freedom Night in America rallies at Dream City Church in Phoenix.
Not long before the Utah Valley event, Kirk’s wife, Ericka Lane Frantzve, posted a Bible verse online, according to Fox News, quoting from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
He is survived by his wife and two children.
