How Charlie Kirk Pioneered the Conservative Wave on College Campuses

With a suspect in custody in the murder of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, it’s clear Kirk’s legacy is bound to be as polarised as the campus culture wars trenches where he dwelled.On 10 September, a shooter killed Kirk at Utah Valley University while he was speaking to a large audience.At age 18, Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative non-profit organisation focused on education that would eventually become a force in American politics and culture. As a public speaker, his events attracted thousands of attendees all over the country. Online, he amassed huge numbers of followers across several different mediums and platforms.Most importantly, he earned the admiration of United States President Donald Trump, who appreciated Kirk’s ability to galvanise young conservative voters and therefore contributed to Trump’s return to the White House in 2024. Kirk is now slated to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously.Kirk’s legacy, however, needs to include his controversial and sometimes discriminatory ideas. He was emblematic of a polarised public discourse and how mainstream conservatism has shifted towards more extreme positions.Charlie Kirk Assassination Marks Escalation of America’s Political ViolenceBut his impact cannot be reduced simply to the ways he represented that shift towards extremism, including flirtations with Christian nationalist and white supremacist ideas. His death is also sadly emblematic of the frightening rise in political violence in the United States since 2016. As a scholar focused on the law and politics of free expression on university campuses, I’m struck by how Kirk also symbolises how campuses have become central to contemporary politics and culture.No longer just the site of occasional culture war battles, university campuses are the dividing line between different political persuasions, a training centre for new generations of political activists and the target of public policy and executive power like never before.Put another way, if a political movement is going to sustain itself, it will need to anchor itself in campus politics. That’s where it can draw intellectual legitimacy, reproduce itself with the young and ambitious and generate ample fodder for social media virality.Like the culture warriors that came before him, Kirk was motivated by a simple but profound insight that’s often credited to the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the alt-right news platform that bears his name: politics is downstream from culture.In other words, focusing political energy on changing a society’s culture will affect electoral politics, and a narrow focus on electing representatives in legislatures misses the importance of culture.Yet, this insight far precedes Breitbart. Current culture wars crusades — like the campaign to remove traces of critical race theory from higher education — are drawing inspiration from an unlikely source: Antonio Gramsci, the once-imprisoned Italian communist activist known for the theory of “cultural hegemony.”Overawed by Trump? No, India’s Got Its Own Success to Build OnWhen the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s waned and the political pendulum began swinging in the opposite direction, some progressives thought they could embed themselves and their ideas in public institutions because electoral politics seemed like a dead end. Increasingly, conservatives are using some of those same political tactics.While most people think of civil rights, the Vietnam War or feminism in the context of social movements, conservatives recently gave us the Tea Party movement. Similarly, for a long time, progressives boasted a lively independent media presence, along with potent critiques of mainstream media bias.Now conservatives are becoming dominant in the alternative media sphere too, with the Democratic Party realising it needs to catch up after after the 2024 election that saw influencers and podcasters play an important political role.If you’re interested in changing the culture, you simply cannot ignore youth. What’s the most effective way of capturing the hearts of minds of youth? It’s education.Founded in 2012, Kirk’s TPUSA initially reflected a traditional form of conservative campus activism, sticking with familiar themes like limited government and individual liberties.But when he and others adopted a more edgy and confrontational style of engagement, people started paying attention, including deep-pocketed donors and political strategists. Kirk had found a way to address a long-running problem for conservatives: speaking persuasively to young and educated people. The problem was particularly acute on campus, arguably the beating heart of American liberalism.Rather than cultivating bookish disciples of Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand, Kirk instead downplayed some of the traditional themes of American conservatism and created a more aggressive and unapologetic image, one bound by grievance and a populist desire to restore the “glory days.”The approach, suited to the social media age, helped popularise Trump’s populist MAGA doctrine. Suddenly, conservatives started to organise more effectively on campus. They found additional wind at their backs amid a wave of public attention paid to an alleged free speech crisis that was stifling conservatives, but also the partial product of a concerted network of conservative political figures.Kirk’s experimentation would cement TPUSA as a major conduit between campuses and the Republican Party.The momentum Kirk and others created on campus and online has since been carried by lawmakers, who’ve unleashed a wave of bills at the state level that impose restrictions on what can be taught and threaten institutional autonomy and academic freedom.In Florida, for example, tenured professors are reviewed for “productivity” every five years and content restrictions (like “non-western” ideas) are resulting in censorship. In Ohio and Kentucky, state legislatures embarked upon similar moves and banned diversity, equity and inclusion officers and programs on their campuses.So while Kirk wasn’t necessarily revolutionising conservative thought, he will surely be remembered as a pioneering political organiser and a major support for the MAGA movement.Kirk wasn’t exactly a household name in Canada, but some of his campus campaign strategies have trickled into Canada in the past decade or so.For example, at the height of the Jordan Peterson affair at the University of Toronto in 2017, the now psychology professor emeritus announced and then abandoned an idea with similarities to one launched by TPUSA the previous year.The TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist” has a mission “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Critics rightfully point out that such lists have led to harassment and threaten academic freedom.At least since the escalation of Trump’s “51st state” rhetoric, Canadians have seemingly grown wary of the shock-and-awe style of punditry that’s common south of the border. But Canada has been gripped by some of the same campus controversies and debates.A University of Toronto professor is on leave following an “apparent tweet reacting to” Kirk’s fatal shooting. This suggests Kirk’s murder will have reverberations on Canadian campuses.The American campus culture wars have largely been a metaphor until now. That is despite campuses occasionally resembling battlegrounds, especially in the wake of Trump’s first victory in 2016, like at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Florida.Sadly, Kirk’s murder has shown a frighteningly literal face of this, and the stakes are high for both political and university life.(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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How Charlie Kirk Transformed Campus Activism into a MAGA Movement

Kirk was emblematic of a polarised public discourse and how mainstream conservatism has shifted towards extremes.

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