Today, Explained - They are Charlie Kirk

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Young conservatives are struggling with where to turn after Kirk's assassination. Some of the options are frightening. This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. A woman holding an American flag at Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference, in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images. Further Reading: Inside the Conservative Campus Revolution Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Turning Point USA's last big event, America Fest, was held in December without founder Charlie Kirk. Had Kirk been alive, it might have gone differently, but it was a mess. Ben Shapiro went ham on Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TPUSA. Or to mirror her bullshit lines of questioning because you love Candice personally. The same holds true of Megan Kelly. Kelly and Tucker hit back at Shapiro. To hear calls for like de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I'm like, what?

This is hilarious. I don't think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben. Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shapiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the Fox News channel. Erica Kirk tried to keep it light. The enemy has thrown a lot of curveballs at us today. My iPad won't even turn off. Nikki Minaj was there.

Why not? And those people are adult professionals. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college students. It was a campus organization first. So what are the students thinking? That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Indeed. If you're looking to hire top-tier talent with expertise in your field,

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business. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Che explains? Explain death. Explain duh. I'm Noel King with Simon Van Zylin Wood. He's a features writer for New York Magazine. All right. So Simon, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah in September, the question was, what would happen to Turning Point USA? You went looking for answers. What did you find. Yeah, I think the question was not only what is going to happen to TPSA, his campus and

sort of electoral apparatus. It's such a multi-pronged organization that's grown over the last decade, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism, as everybody probably remembers, from the post-Charlie Kirk assassination moment, there was a swelling of energy on the young right. There was the mass of a hundred thousand person memorial at the NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona. I would see his videos, and whether I agreed or disagreed, I knew that he was doing his best to serve the country, serve his family, and serve the Lord above. For me, he was the person that, like, showed me, like, it's okay to speak up, like, about your faith and your beliefs. And that's, like, something that I'm going to live by,

to this day, forward. There were reports of surging Bible sales. There was reports of booming TPSA chapters in high school and in colleges. We now have 37,000 applications to start chapters around the country. So I went to the memorial. started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie-Kirk moment was the campus. I started fanning out around the country, especially in bigger state schools and conservative-leading campuses where the TPSA presence was much stronger and prouder, although I also talked to students starting chapters at smaller liberal arts colleges or even Ivy League institutions in the Northeast. And I wanted to investigate this question of what was going to happen. And the short answer, which we'll get into, is that, The answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December, just three months later. If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, and I think people started writing this story,

I would have thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place. Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, he was personally a very pious individual. To our own detriment and to our own failure, we as Christians have decided to cast a way. resting on one of the seven days. That idea of marriage being a covenant is a big, big deal. In fact, only marriage in the Bible is compared to Christ's relationship with the church. He didn't drink. He observed this Sabbath on Saturdays.

He sort of had the persona of a family man. And in many ways, his most ardent followers on the young right saw him in that light. And the kind of evangelical feel of the memorial, where there was Christian rock for hours, where he was eulogized by the president in his cabinet. Charlie would have been so pleased to hear his friends and colleagues today giving testimony and giving glory to God. An explicit sort of martyrdom terms compared to a number of biblical figures. So it was about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem,

and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power, and they hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop. This guy's got to stop talking. And there's always one guy with the bright idea, I could just hear him say, I've got an idea. Why don't we just kill him? He was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone. He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more sort of malign forces that were creeping up on the young right.

And without Charlie Kirk there, they started to become much more prominent. And so you had students who were both radicalized against the left by his death. They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance. But they're also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who was actually keeping these. these darker forces at bay in a way that has only become more evident after his death. All right, so you talked to a lot of young people as you were reporting out this piece. Tell me who stood out to you. Who was illustrative of these themes?

There's two polls in the piece, and they're represented by two big state schools that I spend time at the University of Mississippi and Clemson University in South Carolina. And the University of Mississippi, basically the main character in my piece is the president of the TPSA chapter at Ole Miss. I am Leslie Lackman, president of your Ole Miss chapter of Turning Point USA. She's 20 years old. She's from Westchester County, New York. She represents a kind of micro trend in the piece, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big, quote-unquote, all-American schools in the south. And I met a lot of these kids, actually, Clemson and Ole Miss at other places.

She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom, the post-TPSA boom, where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status. grows. As I'm spending time with her on campus, I mean, she's a queen bee. Everybody knows who she is. Everybody wants to come to her table outside the Student Union and the big, outside the big campus grove, a famous gathering spot in Oxford, Mississippi on campus. There was a posthumous tour that Charlie Kirk was supposed to be on. The tour that he was killed on, they continued. TPSA continued after his death. And they brought VIPs to kind of speak and debate with students in his stead. So Erica Kirk, Charlie's widow, and J.D. Vance came to Ole Miss. The greatest contribution that you can make to Charlie Kirk's legacy is getting involved in saving this country. Love this country.

Defend her and serve our God. Do it for Charlie. So not only was Leslie Lachman, the TPSA president, sort of presiding over this newly ascended campus organization, she was also kind of helping run this, you know, this massive confab on campus, and I was there for all of it. What are Leslie Lachman and other students who are joining TPSA? What are they looking for? Some of them, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, are finding a way to kind of achieve some sort of catharsis, I think, some way to honor his legacy or some way to get further involved in campus politics. A lot of them are, even before his death, we're trying to fulfill Kirk's legacy of kind of retaking the campus from the left. I mean, it's not an accident that Charlie Kirk started his organization on campus. These universities have become complete opponents to Western civilization.

This has been a goal since William Buckley on for the last 15th. these 60, 70 years, which is to do kind of, to do counter-revolution, basically, on campus. And Charlie Kirk arguably was the most successful of it of all time. But it really isn't until his death that TPSA becomes something that feels like hegemonic in its own right. I mean, TPSA existed. My character, Leslie, was running this chapter before his death, but it doesn't boom until afterwards. It doesn't become a kind of social signifier that you are the top dog on campus, that you are not

just sort of running a club for engaged students, but you're doing something possibly godlike. I mean, the University of Mississippi is the kind of place where, like, all the pressure runs in not just a kind of baseline conservative direction, but also Christian. Like, it's the kind of place where if somebody asked you, do you believe in God? You'd feel kind of awkward saying no if you didn't. Whereas in a lot of liberal campuses, the pressures run in the total opposite direction. And so the implicit Christian element of a group like TPSA, the, just like the baseline pro-Trump conservatism, and it's very aligned with Donald Trump, TPSA, in a way that some of the other campus conservative groups are not, actually, because of Charlie Kirk's close relationship

with Trump and the administration, makes it sort of a natural place, not just for political junkies, but for all kinds of students who aren't even that plugged into politics. How are they changing the organization as they process Charlie Kirk's death? I don't know who they. It's a great question because it's, there's no, Erica Kirk nominally is the leader, but she's also a widow who is dealing with the murder of her husband, And she is not the sort of ideologue or sort of polemicists, pugilist that Charlie Kirk was. And so what I saw was a organization that was kind of running on autopilot up to the whims of its campus leaders. Like it is ostensibly answerable to the national organization, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona.

But there's this paradox which informs everything I started learning, which is that TPSA is more powerful than ever, but functionally leaderless. and that leads to this question of sort of like what's going to creep in and come next. New York Magazine's Simon Van Zyland Wood in the second half of the show he's going to come back to tell us what is coming next. Support for the show comes from Quince. New Year, New You, sounds unrealistic.

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free online visit. Hems.com slash explained. This is today explained. Simon Van Zyland Wood of New York Magazine is back. All right. So there is Turning Point USA. That's Charlie Kirk's group. And then there is conservatism on college campuses. And you discovered that these two things are not one and the same. What does the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now? There's a bunch of different groups. TPSA being the sort of top dog right now, but there's young Americans for Liberty, which is kind of the Ron Paul-style libertarian group, Young Americans for Freedom, an outgrowth of an old William Buckley group. Then there's the classic college Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into all these various,

they're sort of like situated in all these umbrella groups. What's really important, and I found out, is that TPSA, I kind of assumed that because of Charlie Kirk's identity and the way that he would debate liberal students as, you know, this is his calling card, basically, was going to be the group on these campuses engaging in kind of bare-knuckle culture war, especially after the radicalization that followed. followed Charlie Kirk's death. It turns out it doesn't really work that way. The group was very loyal to Trump, and it actually kind of serves as sort of a pep squad for Team MAGA. That might sound really right wing to a lot of listeners, but they end up looking like the moderates

in this arch-right conservative ecosystem. The radicalization of Gen Z is sort of the through line of my piece. And what happens is that a young woman like Leslie Lachman, who's running TPSA, she's got impeccable conservative bona fides, but actually there are many, many students. even to her right who feel like Trump is too moderate. JD Vance is suspect. Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a moderate. And they loved them anyways because of what he stood for and the power that he had and also that devout persona I talked about.

But he was barely acceptable to them on any number of issues, from immigration to Israel especially, which is a major flashpoint for Gen Z conservatives right now. I think we should question any foreign country's relationship with our government. That's totally fine. And I'm just wondering why you can't serve American interests. And so as you start to get into camp college Republicans groups, which I assumed would be kind of the bow tied milk toast type conservatives, in fact, a lot of them are much more radical than TPSA. And they're not really hemmed into by this loyalty to the administration that TPSA is.

Describe what the more radical thing looks like. There's a couple moments in your piece where you talk about these events where people stand up and they speak and they're collaborating with each other. Tell me about that. This is like a really interesting trope that seems. exist on the right in a way that it doesn't on the left. And Kirk had a lot to do with it. You know, Charlie Kirk used to go to colleges and initially he'd do these, they're called tabling or tenting events where he would basically sit at a table under a tent and just have anyone come up to him for one, two, three hours. We know deep down, it's wrong to murder a baby.

You're not murdering a baby. Yeah, yeah. All right, so without looking at the phone, look at me. What should the penalty be for breaking into America? I think there should be a system where it's more merit-based. Do you feel proud of yourself for debating college, kids who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself. Are you a voter? I am a voter. Oh, so I vote and you vote. So I'm talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of Western civilization.

What's happened is that there's a whole microculture where kind of Kirk-type imitators will do the same thing. And so they'll show up on campus. You know, these are 19, 20-year-old students, and they'll just organize their own tours. They'll bring their videographers. They'll connect with TPSA or College Republicans Group. And then they'll get grilled. What happens at the conservative leaning colleges is that they end up getting grilled by other Republicans, not leftists.

Because there's not really that many leftists around anyways. And they're getting grilled from the right. So that right after Charlie died, there was this guy called Brylin Holleyhand, who's an evangelical Christian who goes to Auburn University. I remember one of the last things that Charlie and I talked about was that the day that civil discourse dies, America goes to civil war. And he immediately started, it looked like he was kind of trying to take up Charlie Kirk's mantle or even replace him. So I went to Clemson University, one of the 10 schools that he'd visited. And he got absolutely ambushed. He was seen as too moderate on Israel because he was too, he was too Zionist, he was two pro-Israel.

He was two in favor of the U.S. Israel relationship and U.S. support for Israel's war on Gaza. He was seen as too pro-immigration. And mind you, this is somebody who wants to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country. He was too in favor of legal immigration. The big flashpoints on the young Gen Z right now is the question of legal immigration and H-1B tech-oriented visas, especially at STEM schools. A lot of these kids basically just think, well, we can't compete with foreign labor. It's too good. It's too cheap.

It's too whatever. And there's these litmus tests. So they'll just go over and over again. It's like you sit in these rooms and it's like the only two policies in the entire world involved Israel and H-1B visas. Like you cannot say those words enough on conservative campuses right now. And so Charlie Kirk used to get grilled the exact same way. And he would get grilled by the so-called Groypers. Is that the troll that keeps tweeting about the internet?

He's not a troll. He's a very intelligent guy who has a lot to say. He's somewhat of a troll. He seems to be getting a lot of you guys to say stuff for him tonight. So this happened for years. Groyper's are followers of the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who's a podcaster who broadcasts every night alone. And he's sort of a darkly transgressive figure who says stuff that, you know,

would have been beyond the pale before him. Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. And we would live in paradise. It's that simple. And a lot of these Groyper's would, were exhorted by Nick Fuentes, would go and do this to Charlie Kirk.

And I think what happened over the years is it moved Charlie Kirk to the right because he was constantly protecting his right flank. In Trump's first term, Charlie Kirk was talking about, quote, stapling green cards to every college diploma. He was talking about increasing immigration to help stem urban population laws. Before his death, he was talking about banning all, quote, third world immigration. America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever.

we should be unafraid to do that. I mean, he'd gone completely far right on immigration. And I think part of the reason is this pressure. And so what happens after his death is the same dynamic just keeps repeating, but with new imitators and new antagonists. At the time Charlie Kirk was killed, I think people who are not familiar with Charlie Kirk were surprised to hear statements like Charlie Kirk got Trump elected in 2024, right? What does it mean for Trump and for MAGA that Charlie Kirk is gone and now there are lots of kids. to the right, even the far right of Charlie Kirk. There's two ways to look at it.

One is that it's extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens, who's a conspiracy theorist, and is, you know, rocketed up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out there theories about his death. Does all of this mean that this somehow proves that Israel was involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

No, we have no evidence of that. but I don't like little lies. And Nick Fuentes, who's an outright anti-Semite, this is the biggest part of his brand. It is extremely troubling, how mainstream that it's become on the right. But as an electoral consequence, it's actually arguably more troubling to MAGA's chances. If you are doing pure,

identity and hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the emerging multiracial coalition that brought Trump to the office in November 20th, So there are already these, quote, anti-Grooper politicians on the right who are trying to sound the alarm. One of the things that was striking about your piece was the presence of so many young women, right? Young women deciding which side of the right, where on the right-wing spectrum they're going to fall. And it did make me wonder where you find Erica Kirk in all of this. I think there's two things to separate.

I think the TPSA's appeal to young woman is actually a little – it's not quite. quite about Erica Kirk, although Erica Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female-dominated nature of TPSA. This was a really interesting thing, is that a lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes, are extremely male, to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining, like, why can't we get any girls to come to our meetings? Like TPSA, there's all these girls. There was this male president of a TPSA chapter that was saying that, you know, his dating life has never been better since he became president of TPSA. Like, it's that sort of dynamic.

Even pre-Erika Kirk, part of it is this more kind of ecumenical populist look at politics. They're not obsessed with immigration in Israel to this kind of debilitating extent. There's a kind of bigger tent. And there's also a handful of issues that TPSA really homes in on that is activating for conservative women in the heartland or the south or Kirk country, as I call it, all over the country. TPSA has an influencer called Alex Clark, who hosts a podcast, and she's a big Maha influencer. What if 2026 was the year of Vibankan? Sounds wild, right? Maha extremely popular right now with young conservative women.

There are other kind of, quote, trad, unquote, influencers who are affiliated with TPSA. There's also two really, really interesting issues that are activated in the Deep South and in kind of athlete-focused state schools in particular. And I call it the issues of the two Rilies, Lake and Riley and Rylee Gaines. Lake and Riley was a nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in 2024 near the University of Georgia campus. a Venezuelan who entered illegally during the Biden administration. And then there's Riley Gaines, who is a swimmer, who is at the University of Kentucky,

who competed against the trans athlete, Leah Thomas, who swam at University of Pennsylvania. Trans sports issues and illegal immigration are issues that TPSA focused on a lot, and especially the trans sports issue. And you go to these big state schools, and TPSA conservative women, especially on the Riley Gaines issue, the swimming issue, are extremely radicalized against liberals. They feel like liberals have sold women like them out. A lot of them are athletes or they know athletes or in general embody more conservative values where, you know, they were already coming in extremely skeptical of something like trans rights.

But on the athlete issue in particular, they just, they would not most of them call themselves feminists, but they basically think, oh, this is now a Republican slash conservative issue. Like, oh, who's going to stand up for my female only swimming team? We don't want to compete against people like that. That comes up all the time. And the Leslie, who's TPSA president at Ole Miss, she was already going to. kind of going to meetings last fall, last spring, 2024, when Riley Gaines, the swimmer, came and spoke. That's when she threw herself into TPSA and then became the president. Simon, there's something that occurred to me while I was reading your really excellent reporting.

When you are young, as these college kids are, and you're looking for leadership, you're looking for someone to follow. The question emerges, do you follow the martyr, the person who has passed on, or do you follow who is still a person? available, the person who's still on YouTube, on Twitter. And these young people are making that decision in real time. Where do you think they're headed? Based on everything I saw, they are headed where their feed is headed. And it cannot be overemphasized how dominant Candice Owens and Nick Fuentes are in their feeds. It is not like these kids are born out of the womb, bigoted, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, but in a culture that rewards

conspiracism and the appetite on the American right, the young American right for conspiracy is just bottomless. All of a sudden, absent clips of Charlie Kirk on his podcast every day or on the campus, his greatest enemy, Nick Fuentes, is there instead. And Fuentes to some of these kids has a dark charisma that they can't stay away from

in some cases. And although the energy of the so-called Groyper-Right is very male, it comes for some of the women in my piece too. And they're in their radicalization, in their grief, in their search for someone else, almost like touching wet pain or almost like spiraling further down into whatever dark place they're in, they find themselves watching Fuentes.

And they find themselves watching the person that their leader, their old leader, never, he wouldn't even say his name. He wouldn't platform. He's the one person Charlie Kirk wouldn't debate. That's how extreme Charlie Kirk found him. And yet he's just there. the algorithm is giving him to them, and I started to hear it in the rhetoric of the kids I was talking to.

Eventually, they basically just came out and said, yeah, we, you know, everyone we know is watching him. We're watching him. You know, well, he's funny. You know, don't take him too seriously. He's a provocateur. He's an entertainer. You know, he's not a role model like Charlie. Don't worry.

We know that. But they're watching. By the middle end of December, the discourse around Nick Point's influence was inescapable. And I started asking Leslie, well, you know, how does he factor? into your life. And she told me that when she was sad, when she was feeling lonely, when ordinarily she would have scrolled over and seen what Charlie Kirk was up to, she couldn't help herself. She would, she'd sometimes just watch Nick instead. Simon Van Zyland Wood. There was so much more in his piece. You can find that at New York

magazine. Consider subscribing, perhaps. Their long-form stuff is really second to none. Kelly Wessinger produced today show, Go Tigers. Amina El Sadi edited. Go Seahawks. Bridger Dunnigan and David Tadishore engineered and Andrea Lopez-Crisado checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.