Political Glance
As Charlie Kirk’s family, friends and colleagues barreled through the sky to Utah, one staffer kept throwing up in her mouth. Each time she quietly swallowed. She did not want to add to the distress of the others sitting in deathly silence on the jet – especially Kirk’s 36-year-old wife, Erika. She was already a widow.
Those who work at Turning Point USA – the ultraconservative activist organization based in Phoenix, Arizona, that Charlie Kirk founded – believe deeply in a Christian God. Many also believe that Satan and his deputies vie for influence on Earth. Earlier that day, on 10 September 2025, those forces had seemingly persuaded an angry young man to hide on a roof at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was speaking to 3,000 people, with a loaded rifle.
Since Kirk started Turning Point as an 18-year-old high school graduate in 2012, the organization had become a big operation. It employed more than 400 staff, boasted an operating budget of greater than $100m and hundreds of chapters at colleges and high schools, and had launched a political arm, Turning Point Action, that endorsed candidates and mobilized Republican voters. Although Kirk, now 31, told confidants that he had no interest in office, some political observers thought he might one day be the Republican nominee for president.
As an attack dog for the Trump administration and an organization that has often framed political disagreements as civilizational struggles, Turning Point promoted the dangerous and destabilizing idea that Democrats stole the 2020 election; the organization has also often adopted stances that contradict Kirk’s own stated commitment to free speech.
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