Charlie Kirk’s movement is growing in the wake of his assassination – as is the chasm in US politics | World News

It was an event organisers had hoped, perhaps optimistically, would be civil. Then comes a shout: “Shut the f**k up!”

In a busy room at Colorado State University, where Charlie Kirk had been scheduled to speak before his assassination, the crowd is riled, loudly heckling the speaker, Steven Bonnell, a left-wing streamer better known as Destiny.

It’s rowdy, gladiatorial and, in some ways, childish. A man in a Donald Trump shirt and a MAGA hat addresses Mr Bonnell: “You’re a fascist! You’re a degenerate!”

“I don’t want to get killed,” the streamer tells me after the debate.

“I’m out here at these events. And I wish that everybody could take a step back and realise that not every single issue that we fight over is the end of the f*****g world.”

This is where Kirk had been due to speak on the next stop on the tour that ended with his assassination in Utah.

A 21-year-old student has said she now carries a handgun because she’s a conservative. A young man says he came here from Florida because he didn’t feel safe.

Another man, clearly quite drunk, points out a transgender person in the crowd and says they shouldn’t be allowed firearms. He receives a loud chorus of boos and cheers.

Across the road, in the football stadium, there had been a vigil. Amid a heavy police presence, more than 7,000 gathered to pay their respects, most of them wearing MAGA hats.

It was as much a rally or a recruitment drive for Kirk’s organisation, Turning Point USA, with speakers promising to set up thousands of new chapters around Colorado. I’ve come here to understand the movement he created, how he built it – and what it looks like without him.

“His political ideology is abhorrent, but I think he’s a very effective organiser,” Bonnell says. “And yeah, I’ll give credit where credit is due. He built a very impressive movement in an area that was considered unwinnable by conservatives.”

‘The world of Charlie Kirk’

Kirk grew up in Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Here, another smaller-scale vigil has been set up, organised by Sofia Volpe. She is 18 years old and came across Kirk on social media.

She says: “My family is conservative. I hold those values myself, but it was really nice to hear somebody younger speaking on this.

“I went to Wheeling High School, where Charlie went, and I joined the Turning Point chapter there. So that also kind of brought me into the world of Charlie Kirk.”

I ask her if she gets any backlash for supporting Kirk.

“People say that I’m horrible, that I’m racist, that I’m homophobic, that I’m transphobic, just all the phobics and I don’t identify myself with any of that. I think that I am a very loving and open person to anybody because people are people.”

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At another vigil, in another Chicago suburb, Miguel Melgar acknowledges not everyone saw Kirk that way.

“I don’t personally think that Charlie had hatred in his heart. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t accept the fact that he did make what could be perceived as some insensitive statements,” he says.

“And I think that especially if you do take certain statements and really only look at them in a vacuum, it could very well be perceived as statements that might have proliferated some type of a culture of a lack of acceptance.”

‘Kirk has become a martyr’

Kirk used social media to spread his message, to win over young minds, but he also built a formidable political organisation, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), to advocate for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses: boots on the ground to mobilise the likes online.

Mr Melgar helped him create it. He says TPUSA started as a moderate, bipartisan organisation and only became explicitly conservative after a $100,000 donation from a Republican politician.

“I think that there are plenty of opportunists that will want to see this as a Franz Ferdinand assassination type of event in the culture war… who will want to take any and every opportunity to use this to continue to drive division and to see this as an opportunity to create World War III,” he said.

The vigil we meet at is outside TPUSA’s first office, and others have also come to pay their respects. For many, it was Kirk’s faith – and his evangelism – that was most important.

And that’s how to understand his critics, an attendee named Marlene says, when I ask if she sees where they are coming from.

“I certainly do, it’s from the dark side…they don’t understand it and they’re threatened. Satan is always threatened.”

I ask about Kirk’s well-documented views on gay marriage (he opposed it) and Islam (which he wrote was “not compatible with Western civilisation”).

“There is right and wrong,” she says. “And sometimes it’s hard for people to hear that.”

As I leave, Mr Melgar joins hands in prayer with Marlene and her friend Anna.

Mr Melgar told me he would be going to another vigil later, so we tag along. It’s organised by Matthew Monfore, a young volunteer with Turning Point USA. And for him, Kirk’s fusion of religion and politics is what made him such an inspiration.

“Charlie Kirk has become really a martyr not just for Americans but I think for these nationalist movements across the world,” he said.

“And so when you do take a Christian foundation of Western civilisation, and that’s shipped around the world, and Islam, which is basically antithetical to that in numerous ways, and then also besides Islam, the gay marriage aspect of it, we believe that, according to Christian values, marriage is between one man, one woman, and that’s natural and right and given to us by God.”

This is an explicit Christian nationalism, a term Mr Monfore is happy with – a faith that seeks not merely to inform politics, but to refashion it with Christianity at its centre, with other faiths and non-traditional beliefs relegated.

He is particularly incensed by the online reaction to Kirk’s murder, some of which certainly celebrated his death. I point out that Kirk himself called for President Joe Biden to be put on trial “and/or executed”.

He continued: “That is a good observation. And so I would actually defend that as free speech, because we do believe that Biden is a traitor to our country. And I know that people on the left think that Trump’s Hitler. So I really think that both you and I are in a conundrum here, that both people view each other as evil.”

Does Mr Monfore think the other side is evil?

He replies: “The left embraces ideology that’s antithetical to morality… So I think that the left embraces evil.”

‘I’m not going to send thoughts and prayers’

If the left has a spiritual home, it may be the University of California, Berkley. Two young Republicans, Martin Bertao and Miguel Muniz, are ploughing a relatively lonely furrow, pitching a tent with a sign that says “Change My Mind” – a tactic popularised by Kirk.

On their desk is a cap emblazoned with the logo of ICE, the US immigration authority that has been carrying out a crackdown, and another with Trump 2028, a reference to a third presidential term currently forbidden by the US Constitution.

Mr Bertao says it’s “rage bait” but also admits: “If they somehow repealed the Constitution and he won the primary, sure I’ll vote for him.

“We just try to spread the good word of conservatism, spread the amazing job that Donald Trump’s doing for our country.”

How does that tend to go down, I ask.

“Yeah, so, I don’t want to say unsafe, but sometimes people spit at us, sometimes people will yell at us,” Mr Muniz says.

A student called James passes by. He tells me: “I’m not excited about (Kirk’s death), but you know I’m not going to mourn someone who was actively rooting for my death as a trans person.

“So it’s not like I’m going to feel bad about it or send thoughts and prayers because if it were me, he’d be so happy.”

Kirk said in 2023 that “the transgender thing happening in America” is a “throbbing middle finger to God” and called trans athlete Lea Thomas “an abomination to God”.

“Speakers like him had, and like how, you know, his talks about transgender ideology, that changed a lot of how people treated me at my own high school,” James says.

Kirk also started a database called Professor Watchlist, dedicated to “unmasking” radical professors.

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Grace Lavery, an associate professor of English at Berkeley, was put on that list. She says she has changed her public office hours as a result.

“The part that feels more dangerous to me is that the conspicuousness and the sharing of that kind of information is then drawn on by people who are far more dangerous,” she says.

“There’s a significant population of far-right militants in the broader northern Californian scene. And those people are dangerous.”

But although she describes Kirk as “an absolutely loathsome figure”, she doesn’t condemn him alone.

“We find ourselves in this polarity whereby we are so disgusted at the conduct of the people we understand as our enemy that we point out every time they do something vulgar,” she says.

“And then the moment that it falls to us to do something equally vulgar and disgusting, we do so anyway, and then blame the other side because they started it.

“And it is that form of split thinking which makes hypocrites of all of us, including me.”

‘I hope there’s a chance we can meet in the middle’

In Glendale, Arizona, people have spent the night camping outside the State Farm Stadium, “a bit of a party” according to one of them, to make sure they get a seat for the official memorial for Charlie Kirk.

The 63,000 stadium is quickly filled, and the overflow is directed towards another 20,000 seater not far away. Christian rock blares loudly, and when the speakers take to the stage, the entire crowd holds up the Turning Point USA signs placed on their seats.

Kirk’s movement isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s growing.

Callie, 18, Shaye, 27, and Britney, 32 and carrying her one-year-old son, drove 10 hours from California to be here.

“But it was worth it, and I’m so glad to be here,” Callie says. “It’s just powerful to be in the midst of all these people and be gathered together.”

“I wouldn’t have realised how much of an impact that Charlie Kirk’s organisation has had on the country and on the world until he was gone,” Shaye says.

What she says next brings her to tears: “And it’s so sad that that had to happen. But I know that God really does give beauty for ashes. I’m so grateful to Jesus Christ because I know Charlie Kirk’s gone on Earth, but he lives in heaven with Jesus Christ. And I’m so happy to be here to honour his legacy and his life.”

I ask whether they feel the US can come together with this memorial – or whether it will remain ever more divided.

“We have to be hopeful that there’s a chance that we can come in the middle. I think we felt hurt by how they treated the situation because we all lost somebody,” Britney says.

“We’re definitely praying that we can get together and meet.”

‘Fight, fight fight!’

If Kirk built his power on the smartphone screen, this memorial is the jumbotron version of his politics: a mix of entertainment, religion and politics on a bombastic scale.

And on display are two interpretations, two visions, of his Christian nationalism, vengeance and forgiveness, Old Testament and New.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and one of the speakers, labels the left “wicked”.

“You are nothing. You produce nothing,” he says.

The President of the United States says: “I hate my enemies and I do not wish them well.”

But Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, is responsible for the most arresting moment of the memorial. Citing Jesus’s example on the cross, she addresses her husband’s murderer: “I forgive you.”

Afterwards, I catch up with Matthew Monfore, the Christian nationalist I met at the vigil in Illinois. He’d driven 26 hours to make it to Arizona, and he preferred the less tolerant message.

“We view the left as very irrational. The term was used by Stephen Miller and people on the cabinet. The term wicked came about that to deny these basic truths and being taught that you should be ashamed for standing otherwise came out today.

“The President of the United States spoke. He, along with people in his cabinet, essentially spoke to using the ‘fight’ word.

“Fight, fight, fight!”