How Charlie Kirk Challenged and Inspired a Generation of Rising Political Influencers
Kirk centered his conservative movement around engaging young minds in political debate and raising up new voices.
by Ryan Morgan, The Epoch Times (excerpt)
By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.
A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.
Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.
He continued this mission until the very end.
“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.
Thorderson rose from president of the Turning Point USA chapter at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now …
image: Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, speaks at the High School Leadership Summit, a Turning Point USA event, at George Washington University in Washington on July 26, 2018. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times