Charlie Kirk and the Free Speech Hoax

Turning Point USA was founded in 2012 as a 501c3 nonprofit, and it immediately plugged into the Tea Party movement. In 2019, it expanded into Turning Point Action, a 501c4 that funneled students into electoral organizing and voter drives (and it was fined for violating donor disclosure rules). Its 2024 ​“Chase the Vote” campaign brought field organizers into purple states to push for Trump and right-wing candidates. At the end of the fiscal year that concluded in June 2024, Turning Point had a revenue of around $85 million dollars, largely from confidential donors. All the while, Kirk was receiving an extravagant salary and leading Turning Point as a sophisticated propaganda machine to shift public opinion more militantly rightward.

The notion that Kirk was simply a person with a conservative viewpoint misunderstands both why Kirk was involved in public debates and why they were successful as political theater. Liberal America holds debate in high regard, and it is exactly this high regard that Kirk was able to exploit. Through Kirk’s ​“debate”-and-switch tactics, GOP leaders, Donald Trump in particular, were able to penetrate the wall most people erect against political propaganda. Those messages then offered a patina of legitimacy through the format’s use of liberal college students as strawmen. These were political events designed to push the agenda of right-wing power, and they got results.

When Kirk debated a 20-year-old undergrad, he did so with a team training him on how to package disingenuous arguments in pithy talking points to humiliate his opponent in front of millions of people. Kirk formulated his messaging alongside Republican pollsters and lobbyists, negotiating how his characterization can help those in power to push through their agenda and repackage it to the American public to decommission dissent and manufacture consent: Kirk demanded an investigation into Epstein, until Trump changed his mind. As the Republican Party shifted against LGBTQ issues, so did Kirk, particularly when it came to demonizing trans people. Kirk openly spoke against pro-Palestine events and called for Muslim speakers, such as broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, to be deplatformed.

The connections between the official organs of government and Turning Point’s campus outreach are a lot deeper than their presentation indicates. For example, in a 2019 incident, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott supported state legislation to undo a student senate resolution that attempted to bar Turning Point on the Texas State University campus. (The resolution was merely symbolic, since the senate didn’t actually possess that authority.) When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put massive constraints on college curricula and what professors could say in the classroom, with SB 266 and the ​“Stop WOKE Act,” Turning Point’s support did not wane, and it often gave positive reviews of DeSantis’ policies. 

Kirk also developed a Campus Watch program to train student activists in how to bait professors. One formerly tenured professor I interviewed out of Texas was beset by neo-Nazis and militia members after Turning Point publicized some posts on his personal Facebook page. That campaign eventually lost him his career and sent him to the hospital multiple times for PTSD symptoms.

One graduate student I spoke with in Illinois had Turning Point activists home in on him, which escalated into what he understood as veiled threats against his children. 

These were not isolated cases. This shift into what has been called ​“right-wing cancel culture” was pioneered by Turning Point to silence anyone whose speech it deemed unfit. What’s more, Kirk backed Republican crackdowns on protests against genocide, and he supported police use of force against students critical of Israel. Despite this background of right-wing violence, Kirk once claimed ​“radical left organizations in this country” are the ones ​“fomenting violence,” according to Trump deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. 

The Right has long sustained working-class support by playing the victim. From fascist Europe to Cold War America, reactionary movements have framed their aggression as self-defense. Today, this persists in appeals to cultural grievance and racial anxiety, obscuring the immense financial and institutional power behind them. 

Free expression is a talking point the Right uses when it wants to indict the Left for criticizing bigoted speech, but it has never taken the implications of free speech seriously. To do so means creating a society in which rights are uniform and accessible, where access to the media infrastructure is not only accorded to the wealthy, and where people feel fundamentally safe to be their own unique self. This was never a reality Kirk even had the pretext of supporting, and in his name, Republicans seem bent on destroying any remaining artifact of the quest for a free society. Meanwhile, Trump has capitalized on Kirk’s death in a way that shields the Right from criticism by projecting suspicion on dissent. 

If anything proves that Kirk — and the entire Republican Party — are not genuine free speech advocates, it’s their reaction over the past couple of months.