Who was Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist shot and killed in Utah?

Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative influencer and activist who cofounded Turning Point USA when he was 18 and served as its executive director, was shot and killed Wednesday during an open-air event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”

Kirk is survived by his wife, Erika, and their two young children.

Kirk and his organization, which advocates for conservative causes on high school and university campuses, had emerged as key Trump allies in recent years. Kirk told the New York Times Magazine in February that he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times during the president’s first term and, starting last November, he joined a small group of advisers vetting prospective second-term appointees for “unflagging loyalty to Trump,” as the magazine put it.

For the most part, however, Kirk’s campaign to advance the MAGA movement was conducted on campuses like the one where he was killed Wednesday.

When he was shot, Kirk was seated beneath a canopy featuring the slogan “Prove Me Wrong” — a reference to his penchant for debating campus progressives.

Born on Oct. 14, 1993, Kirk grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and briefly attended Harper College before dropping out to pursue political activism. During his junior year of high school, Kirk started listening to conservative talk-radio personality Rush Limbaugh; during his senior year, he appeared on Fox Business to discuss an essay he wrote for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in school textbooks. Kirk founded Turning Point USA with tea party activist Bill Montgomery in 2012 and quickly convinced Wyoming investor Foster Freiss, a prominent GOP donor, to fund its activities after they met at that summer’s Republican National Convention.

Four years later, Kirk, then 23, was the youngest speaker at the 2016 RNC.

Between 2012 and 2020, Kirk transformed Turning Point USA into the nation’s preeminent conservative youth organization, launching chapters at more than 850 colleges. The group registers students to vote, brings conservative speakers to campus, maintains a national network of right-wing student government leaders and hosts its own conferences across the country several times a year.

In 2019, Kirk launched a PAC called Turning Point Action; in 2020, he started hosting a daily three-hour radio talk show called “The Charlie Kirk Show.” NBC News recently reported that Kirk’s show is downloaded between 500,000 and 750,000 times per day. It ranks in the top 100 on Apple’s podcast chart.

Kirk saw his influence increase further after Trump’s first term. He visited Mar-a-Lago in February 2021, at the nadir of Trump’s popularity and political power; Kirk was photographed smiling next to the ex-president. He befriended Donald Trump Jr. and pushed for the elder Trump to choose JD Vance as his 2024 running mate. Total revenue at Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action grew from $4.3 million in 2016 to $92.4 million in 2023; Kirk became a millionaire.

After Trump was reelected last November, Turning Point hosted a black-tie inauguration gala at which “some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some VIPs paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the FBI, Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “‘one of the true rock stars of this movement,’” according to the New York Times Magazine.

“Charlie Kirk, what he’s done with the young people,” Trump said at the time, crediting Kirk with the campaign’s strong performance among voters under 30 — especially men. “Actually, other than Hispanic, that was probably our biggest swing. So, Charlie, I appreciate what you did.”

“High school boys are the most conservative that they have been in the last 50 years,” Kirk claimed in his post-election presentations. “The youth vote won Trump the White House.”

And it was Turning Point’s work, he went on to imply, that won the youth vote for Trump.