LOGAN, Utah (AP) — Turning Point USA’s college tour is set to return to Utah this Tuesday, marking its first visit to the state since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was tragically assassinated on a college campus earlier this month.
The upcoming event will be held at Utah State University in Logan, approximately two hours away from Utah Valley University, where the incident occurred on September 10. Kirk was shot by a lone gunman while addressing the audience, resulting in his death.
The assassination of such a prominent figure in President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement has stirred conservatives, who are determined to perpetuate Kirk’s vision of steering young voters towards conservatism and pushing American politics further to the right. Many on the right celebrate Kirk as a “martyr,” and Turning Point USA, the youth organization he founded, is experiencing a dramatic increase in interest. This interest is evidenced by tens of thousands of new chapter requests in both high schools and colleges nationwide.
Tuesday’s event, planned prior to Kirk’s assassination, will demonstrate how Turning Point intends to navigate forward without its influential leader, who was vital in attracting audiences and generating interest at their events.
The college tour lineup now includes some of the top conservative figures, such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Glenn Beck. The event on Tuesday will feature conservative podcast host Alex Clark and include a panel with Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Andy Biggs, former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and Gov. Spencer Cox.
This event will honor a commitment made by Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, to continue the campus tour and uphold the work initiated by her late husband. She is now managing Turning Point alongside a dedicated team of her husband’s former colleagues and allies.
‘Nothing is changing’
Erika Kirk has sought to assure her husband’s followers that she intends to continue to run the operation as her late husband intended, closely following plans he laid out to her and to staff.
“We’re not going anywhere. We have the blueprints. We have our marching orders,” she said during an appearance on his podcast last week.
That will include, she said, continuing to tape the daily podcast.
“My husband’s voice will live on. The show will go on,” she said, announcing plans for a rotating cast of hosts. She said they intended to lean heavily on old clips of her husband, including answering callers’ questions.
“We have decades’ worth of my husband’s voice. We have unused material from speeches that he’s had that no one has heard yet,” she said.
Erika Kirk, however, made clear that she does not intend to appear on the podcast often, and so far seems to be assuming a more behind-the-scenes role than her husband.
Mikey McCoy, Kirk’s former chief of staff, said Erika Kirk is in daily contact with members of the Trump administration, and has described her as “very strategic” and different from her husband.
The events have served as tributes to Kirk
The events so far have served as tributes to the late Kirk, with a focus on prayer, as well as the question-and-answer sessions that he was known for.
At Virginia Tech last week, the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, urged the crowd to carry Kirk’s legacy forward.
“The question that has been asked over and over again is: Who will be the next Charlie? And as I look out in this room and I see thousands of you, I want to repeat the best answer that I have heard: You will be the next Charlie,” he said. “All of you.”
He also praised Erika Kirk as an “extraordinary” leader.
“Over the course of the last two weeks, Erika Kirk has demonstrated that she not only has the courage of a lion, but she has the heart of a saint. We have grieved with her and her family. We have prayed for her and her family,” he said. “Is there anyone better to lead Turning Point going forward than Erika Kirk?”
He then turned the stage over to Kelly, who said Charlie Kirk had asked her to join the tour several months ago. She said she knew appearing onstage carried risk, but felt it was important to be there “to send a message that we will not be silenced by an assassin’s bullet, by a heckler’s veto, by a left-wing, woke professor or anyone who tries to silence us from saying what we really believe,” she said to loud cheers.
At another event at the University of Minnesota last week, conservative commentator Michael Knowles gave a solo speech in lieu of the two-man conversation with Kirk that was originally planned. Then he continued Kirk’s tradition of responding to questions from the audience, which ranged from one man quibbling about Catholic doctrine to another arguing that the root of societal problems stems from letting women vote. (To the latter, he responded that women aren’t to blame because “men need to lead women.”)
As Knowles spoke, a spotlight shined on a chair left empty for Kirk.
Knowles said Kirk was instrumental in keeping together disparate conservative factions, and he worries about the MAGA movement fracturing without Kirk doing the day-to-day work to build bridges between warring groups.
“Charlie was the unifying figure for the movement. It’s simply a fact,” he said. “There is no replacing him in that regard.”
“The biggest threat right now is that without that single figure that we were all friends with, who could really hold it together, things could spin off in different directions,” Knowles said. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
