Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk repeatedly advocated for America’s youth months before he was assassinated at the University of Utah on Wednesday while speaking at an event.
Kirk founded TPUSA, a 501(c)(3) group, in 2012, with the focus of mobilizing students to support conservative values on campus and beyond. During media appearances leading up to his death, he defended masculinity, promoted religion and pushed to protect students from becoming transgender without their parents’ knowledge. (RELATED: ‘I Did See Him Fall’: Jason Chaffetz Provides Eyewitness Account Of Charlie Kirk Shooting)
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On Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show,” Kirk explained the rising trend of young men in the Western world who were not educating themselves, working or seeking a job, as reported by the Financial Times in September 2024. The FT’s analysis showed that the portion of American women ages 20 to 24 outside school or the workforce had sharply declined since 1980, while the share of men in that category has steadily risen.
“[T]hey’re checking out largely because the entire society has become hostile to them,” Kirk said. “They’ve been told that they were toxically masculine.”
“Marriage rates are down. Fertility rates are down … It’s the young men that are voluntarily checking out of society. This means that their psychology is broken … We have economics problems, but it’s something more than that,” he added. “It is soul-crushing, which is why one of the things that has given me hope … is that young men are starting to go back to church … As they start to give more of their lives to Jesus Christ and put God first, they will have more purpose and more why rather than checking out.”
Axios published a May 10 piece titled, “Young men are leading a religious resurgence.” The outlet cited Eastern Illinois University political scientist Ryan Burge’s analysis that Gen Z men in particular were outpacing both millennials and some people in Gen X when it comes to weekly attendance of religious services.
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On Fox News “Jesse Watters Primetime” May 13, Kirk criticized former Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg’s suggestion that young men could be wooed back to his party if it enabled them to prioritize having sex and “fun.”
“How nihilistic and also how dismissive of all the concerns that young people are feeling right now … When I go to these college campuses, though, they don’t just want to have more degeneracy or debauchery, they’re looking for something greater, something higher,” Kirk said. “They’re in the pursuit of something good and true and beautiful.”
“Remember, if you’re on a college campus right now, the very young people that we at Turning Point USA are winning over, large in part thanks to President [Donald] Trump, you suffered under the lies and the deception of COVID … and they want something greater than that.”
Kirk further argued America’s youth “increasingly want to do good” rather than simply seeking “what makes them feel good,” citing the Axios report.
“David Hogg is selling a very dark worldview and we are gonna embrace one that lifts people up and one that is rooted in eternal principle,” he said.
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Moreover, Kirk confronted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on “This Is Gavin Newsom” in March over his state’s “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act (SAFETY) Act” that he signed in July 2024, enabling school administrators to withhold any changes to a child’s gender identity or sexual orientation from their families.
“A teacher should of course be fired if you don’t notify a parent of what’s happening to their kid,” Kirk told Newsom. “Of course they should be terminated for that … Whose kid is it?”
Furthermore, Kirk told Deseret News reporter Brigham Tomco in July that his daily mission was to strive to prevent “a revolution.”
“This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children,” he told Tomco. “That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”
Trump wrote in his Truth Social statement announcing Kirk’s death on Wednesday that nobody “understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”
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