Ten Years of Turning Point USA

Kirk’s “Freedom Night in America,”^[3] also known as “Freedom Square,” began as a monthly event last summer at Phoenix’s Dream City, a multi-site Assemblies of God megachurch that ranks in the top five of all AOG churches in the nation for attendance.^[4] The gathering, where attendees sing worship songs and hear from Kirk and other TPUSA speakers about the church’s impact on the culture, was one of the first public events hosted by Turning Point Faith, a TPUSA offshoot founded in 2021 to “restore traditional American values.”^[5]

Those values are at the heart of TPUSA’s shift to serving as “ambassadors”^[6] of Christian nationalism—the mainly White Christian movement that, as sociologist Andrew Whitehead describes it, holds “either that the U.S. was or still is a Christian nation” and that history needs to be reestablished “in order for the United States to flourish.” For TPUSA that new focus has also involved a shift in the demographic they focus on—no longer just college students, but the world of K-12 education as well. And that expansion aligns TPUSA with a long-term Christian nationalist goal: to implant in local public schools the sort of “patriotic” curriculum suggested by Trump’s 1776 Commission, on which Kirk served.

While the group has had high school chapters for several years, this August, TPUSA launched a “school board watchlist”^[7] that is “dedicated to protecting our children by exposing radical and false ideologies endorsed by school boards and pushed in the classroom.” The new watchlist features individual profiles of school board members, with names and pictures, along with links to news articles expressing outrage at board actions.^[8] For example, in late October the website linked to a Fox News piece on the “ideology war” at Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meetings,^[9] shortly before conservative attacks on public education helped lead to a Republican victory in the race for governor of that state.

TPUSA’s K-12 list closely mirrors its Professor Watchlist, begun in 2016 to target college instructors accused in right-wing media outlets of offenses such as tweeting about their pro-choice views^[10] or publishing journal articles about mathematics as a “white and heteronormatively masculinized space”^[11] and fighting “unjust language structures.”^[12] Being on the list often leads to harassment from online trolls and anonymous emails.^[13] (Full disclosure: I was one of the original names listed on the Professor Watchlist for publicly writing against a now-passed law in my state of Georgia allowing concealed firearms in college classrooms and buildings.) While the genre of a blacklist drew immediate and widespread condemnation for its similarity to the McCarthyism era, it also put TPUSA on the map, building its reputation in conservative echo chambers and helping launch a massive fundraising streak that took the organization from a shoestring operation to a revenue of $40 million.^[14]

On one hand, the TPUSA shift to target K-12 schools has the clear goal of harassing and threatening schools that teach honestly about U.S. racial history, and it also taps into popular ire around mask mandates that were re-imposed in schools across the country during the start of the fall 2021 semester, as the Delta variant caused another wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic. (Linked to that, over the summer TPUSA started a vaccine-related campaign to “Educate. Don’t mandate,” providing misleading information, and in September 2021, Kirk threatened to sue the Biden administration over its mandate that large private businesses require vaccinations.^[15]) More broadly, it asserts more forcefully TPUSA’s move toward the kind of right-wing combative populism seen in the Trump base.

The school board list is another in a long line of attacks on education that began with Kirk’s own complaints about his high school in 2012—claims that led to TPUSA’s creation and won its first Republican supporters. But the nature of those attacks have changed as Kirk has, and as TPUSA has become more of a center for right-wing content creation with many shows^[16] for its many platforms^[17] in a bid to stay relevant among its young demographic. But while TPUSA was built around millennial attention and social media virality, in order to maintain that attention, it has adopted increasingly aggressive stances, turning the organization into a sustained culture war machine.

One such stance is immigration. In 2019, Kirk and TPUSA came under attack at their events by the far-right, White nationalist group known as America First or the groypers.^[18] The groypers specifically criticized Kirk for his off-the-cuff remark that October that highly-educated immigrants should get “a green card” stapled to their U.S. college diplomas.^[19] A month later, after a series of confrontations by America First supporters at TPUSA events, Kirk wrote an apology op-ed for the far-right website American Greatness, which had earlier published criticisms of his suggestion.^[20]

In the months that followed, Kirk tracked further and further right on immigration, decrying “open borders” and undocumented immigrants changing the “White demographics in America.”^[21] Whatever level of angry White victimhood was present in Kirk and TPUSA at large in their youth, it had now become a central focus for both.

The DNA of TPUSA

Back in 2015, at the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley,^[22] Kirk delivered the original version of his, and TPUSA’s, origin story.

Wearing a yellow and gray tie and black suit, a baby-faced Kirk started by reminding his audience, in a weak Midwestern accent, of his Chicago roots. Chicago, noted Kirk, was a hub for many Democrats, including President Obama, Obama’s top political advisor Daniel Axelrod, and of course, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—who’d grown up 15 minutes from Kirk’s hometown.

The intended picture was clear: Kirk heroically maintaining his conservative values in the heart of Democratic power, while he cherished a “dream” of attending the United States Military Academy at West Point. But when he applied during his senior year, he was rejected.^[23] The reason, Kirk told the audience, was that he’d “lost my spot out to what I felt was a far less-qualified applicant in my district that was of a different gender and a different… you know… persuasion.”^[24]

That claim drew ample attention in later national profiles of Kirk. But it wasn’t initially framed as the moment that spurred his political activism. Rather it was Kirk’s description of his high school as an “indoctrination factory,” where he claimed his teachers were “openly” Marxists and socialists^[25] and the progressive policy group Moveon.org appeared in his lunchroom consistently to recruit students. (Kirk offered few details about either allegation.)

Kirk said he was distressed that he didn’t know of any student groups presenting opposing views to such progressive voices.^[26] So in April 2012, as a senior in high school, he started one, which became the forerunner to TPUSA. That initial effort, called SOS Liberty^[27]—a name intended to invoke the international distress call for help—focused on the national debt and garnered not only^[28] a sizable Facebook group but support from Republican leaders like then-Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, who introduced Kirk to Tea Party organizations the same month he launched his group. (While Walsh later joined TPUSA’s board,^[29] in recent years he has disavowed the group and publicly regretted his involvement with Kirk, calling him a “grifter’s grifter.”^[30])

At the same time Kirk was benefiting from Walsh’s connections, he had a breakout moment with the Tea Party-linked Breitbart News, writing an article for the website condemning an Advanced Placement textbook used at his school that drew from the writing of New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman.^[31] Kirk disliked that the book critiqued the economic record of Ronald Reagan—Kirk’s then-favorite president^[32]—and gave little credence or space to Reagan’s supply-side economics.^[33] Although Kirk’s post distorted the textbook,^[34] it served as a foundation to argue that public education was engaged in an indoctrination agenda that “demonizes free enterprise while advocating top-down government, deficit spending, and class warfare,” and forces students to “turn to the government. And that is exactly what the liberals want.” That post garnered him a new status in the conservative world and by May 2012 Kirk was on Fox News talking about the national debt.^[35]

Walsh was not Kirk’s only benefactor. That May Kirk met the other while speaking^[36] at a youth government day event at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. There he was heard by William Montgomery, a retired local restaurant owner and business consultant who’d become involved in Tea Party activism. As Montgomery recalled in a profile of Kirk in 2015, Kirk woke up his sleeping peers with his commanding words. Montgomery told Kirk he needed to start “an organization to reach out to young people with your message.”^[37]

And so they did, eventually ditching SOS Liberty as a name and forming Turning Point USA. In June 2012, Kirk wrote an op-ed for Fox News^[38] claiming to have “reached over four million people” through SOS Liberty with his “message of fiscal responsibility and living within your means.” (It’s unclear how Kirk reached that figure.) Turning Point USA was officially registered as a non-profit with the state of Illinois on July 23, 2012.

In his eulogy^[39] for Montgomery, who died from COVID-19 complications in July 2020,^[40] Kirk recalled how during that summer of 2012 the pair started attending Tea Party rallies where Montgomery would convince the organizers to let Kirk speak.^[41] In July Kirk appeared on Fox and Friends to talk about the youth vote,^[42] and on Neil Cavuto’s show^[43] to discuss how his young organization was using memes to criticize Obama. Then, Kirk said, Montgomery called him with a “crazy idea” for the pair to go to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, where they “cornered” Cavuto and convinced him to host Kirk on the show live from the convention floor.

That lark paid off in another, longer-term way, when Kirk met his first donor, Foster Friess, in a stairwell at the RNC. A few weeks later the Wyoming philanthropist gave Kirk $10,000.^[44] Still, by December 2012, TPUSA was struggling, with less than $1,000 in its account, and he was looking to quit. But Montgomery again convinced Kirk to keep at it. They took another trip, this time to New York City, and again convinced Cavuto to feature Kirk on his show. And, as Kirk said, it “snowballed” from there.

Building an Empire

Over the next three years, Kirk garnered more donors and spoke at more political gatherings like the 2015 Conservative Forum in Silicon Valley. Gradually, finances grew. According to tax filings, Turning Point doubled its revenue each year from 2015 to 2017, growing from $2 million to $8 million.^[45] Kirk signed lucrative book deals, bought a Florida condo in 2019, and built an Arizona headquarters for TPUSA. By 2021, the group had generated nearly $40 million in revenue. Those same records show the rise in Kirk’s salary from about $50,000 in 2017, to $80,000 the next year, then nearly $300,000 in 2019. The money also spurred growth in staff. By 2015, Kirk claimed that TPUSA had a presence on 1,000 college and high school campuses nationwide^[46] and more than 40 full time “field staff.”^[47]

Throughout the early years, Turning Point’s messages remained consistently secular. Its first viral social media campaign, in fall 2014, was “Big Government Sucks,” which combined Turning Point’s push for limited government with catchy college student lingo.^[48] Its chapter guide from 2017^[49] presented the group as a conservative organization interested in “free market values” and “economic issues.” The guide explicitly ruled out social issues: “no talk about abortion, gay marriage, etc.” It also suggested a range of “activism” ideas for chapter leaders to build students’ focus on the national debt, affirmative action, and free speech. The last issue usually meant the local TPUSA campus chapter parading a large beach ball onto a highly visible part of college campuses for students to write on. TPUSA publications also praised fossil fuels and attacked gun control.^[50] In a “thank you” video to donors and staff on Turning Point’s five-year anniversary in 2017, Kirk urged more action on “conservative, libertarian, smaller government ideas, values.”^[51] The organization sold itself by its success. Student testimonials in a 2016 video^[52] praised the group’s emphasis on leadership skills and networking.

Kirk’s consistent call to fight back against campus biases led to Turning Point’s “Professor Watchlist,” which began in November 2016 as an initial list of about 200 professors nationwide who allegedly promoted “a radical agenda” in one way or another.^[53] As that combative message spread, Kirk’s rhetoric became more violent. In the group’s 2017 anniversary video, Kirk describes his staff and students participating in “hand-to-hand combat” on college campuses. Later that year, Kirk told an audience at one of his many campus tours, “we are not afraid to fight back… because enough is enough.”^[54]

A Secular Kirk, A Religious Kirk

During those early years, Kirk avoided evangelizing his faith. While he nodded to the Bible in his 2016 manifesto, Time for a Turning Point,^[55] he also publicly argued that a “line was crossed” by Christianity in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s by trying “to impose those beliefs through government policy where people then inherently” reject it.^[56] Rather than replicating what he saw as these failings of the Moral Majority, Kirk said he advocated for his political positions “through a secular worldview,” because most Americans are secular, and the government established by the founders was also secular. Responding to an interviewer’s observation that Kirk doesn’t proselytize, the young activist said he talked about his faith when asked, but that he saw his job as the face of TPUSA as “no different than” being a plumber or electrician, who likely don’t tell everyone they met about their religion.

Despite this claim to secularity, Kirk began to show flashes of his religion, such as tweeting Bible verses. In Illinois, he attended Harvest Bible Chapel, an evangelical megachurch in the Chicago suburbs.^[57] In 2018, Kirk’s conversion story, or “faith testimony,” was promoted as part of events related to the church’s 30th anniversary.^[58]

In a college appearance that same year, where Kirk answered questions about atheism,^[59] he said that as a Christian he was “very, very” worried that the U.S. was moving away from “our Judeo-Christian beliefs” that “really created Western civilization.” Kirk has since often tied his faith to Western civilization, increasingly arguing that Christianity and the ideals of Western civilization helped found America. In his 2018 book, Campus Battlefield, Kirk argued that “the greatest threat to Western Civilization” is the liberal indoctrination and anti-American teachings on college campuses. He made similar claims at the 2018 Western Conservative summit.^[60]

In May 2019, Kirk premiered his podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, and dedicated an early episode^[61] in part to his religious beliefs, describing the experience of being born again. While he again denied any overlap between his religion and politics—saying, “I’m very careful not to have my religious views and my faith inform my political decisions.”—he also stressed that humans should have the “moral capacity to flourish,” and their “moral decisions” should be free from government intrusion or coercion.^[62] A sense of accountability to a morality, Kirk continued, is what prevents people from harming others and compels them to do good, perhaps by giving to the poor. It also grounds economic and political freedoms, he added, since we get our rights from God, not any government.^[63]

Kirk also began to reframe the origin story of Turning Point. In an August 2019 interview with the conservative Daily Caller, Kirk described his rejection from West Point as “a gift that God has given me.”^[64]

The Discipling of Charlie Kirk

Kirk certainly had the Christian element of Christian nationalism. What fostered in him the second element was a personal relationship with a California megachurch pastor named Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel of Thousand Oaks and a member of his local city council.^[65] McCoy ran for that seat in 2015^[66] after a losing campaign in 2014 for the California State Assembly.^[67] McCoy’s campaigns have blended electoral politics and religion and became an example used by the American Renewal Project, a group which holds free conferences for ministers and their spouses to encourage them to run for office.^[68] The founder of American Renewal, long-time California conservative activist David Lane, has attended McCoy’s church.^[69] Running ministers as candidates for elected office is not new or unique to White evangelicalism. But this conservative version of pastors as politicians is a specific application of Christian nationalism in that these elected pastors could push the nation toward a more official Christian culture.

Kirk would say later that the first time he heard McCoy—perhaps at the 2019 CPAC event at Liberty University, where both men spoke—he was blown away by hearing directly political speech from a pastor. In that speech McCoy charged that “50 years” of Christians merely preaching the gospel in California—without engaging in the political and policy process—had left the state ridden with debt, no-fault divorce, and a nation-leading abortion rate.^[70] By contrast, McCoy said the only way to return America to its rightful place as a Christian nation would be to elect religious leaders as political representatives.

After their initial meeting, Kirk said that over a series of conversations the pastor began to “challenge” him to rethink his position separating politics and religion.^[71] By April 2019—about a month after Kirk heard McCoy for the first time—the pair again shared a stage^[72] at the Unite Inland Empire Conservative Conference in Ontario, California, which shares ideological goals with Turning Point.^[73] In his speech there,^[74] Kirk parroted McCoy.^[75] No longer merely attacking the Left, Kirk used biblical stories as cultural template to oppose its version of America. Such scriptural tales, he said, were the way “moral people” long ago had instilled values in their children and built their culture.

One important story Kirk mentions is the story of Moses, “being under slavery, obeying God, listening, and then fleeing that bondage into freedom.” Kirk then adds his political frame: “That’s the story, isn’t it, of the original religious pilgrims? …. Came from Europe to America. It’s a variation of an exodus.” Kirk even revised his own “exodus” story, reframing what he’d once described as merely his anemic church history as instead a “cultural” attack from the “left.” He said he’d “had to leave” a church that he attended in his youth because “when I went to church, it was more about” trying to justify “political doctrine,” not theology.^[76]

The seeming contradiction of refusing politics in one church but pushing it in another was presumably resolved by a McCoy logic that Kirk had absorbed: Bad government is filled with bad politics, but a good government is built by good people.

In a speech later in 2019, Kirk invited his fellow Christians into a version of culture war tinged with antisemitism. Speaking in October^[77] at a religious liberty conference at a Lutheran church in Michigan,^[78] Kirk downplayed his organization’s long-standing economic messages to build a case for “structural” issues in American culture that the “left” is winning on. He claimed that liberal philanthropist George Soros, not merely content with “winning at the ballot box,” was funding a program to put liberal pastors in churches across the country.^[79]

Two months later, Kirk spoke to the Chino Hills, California, megachurch^[80] pastored by Jack Hibbs, another Christian nationalist pastor, now perhaps best known for defending the January 6 insurrection as the result of ejecting “God from the courts and from the schools.”^[81] (Several days prior to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Hibbs told his church that there was no “president-elect” and “the Constitution will live or die this week. The Constitution could be struck with a mortal wound this week and start hemorrhaging if God allows the Constitution to perish with a lying, cheating, stealing election.”^[82]) In his December 2019 conversation with Hibbs, Kirk cemented his new Christian nationalist credentials—declaring himself a “proud” and “vocal” Christian and claiming that as people come to Turning Point and find “truth,” they often end up “finding Christ”—and pushed the church to take “declarative stands” on cultural issues such as transgender athletes in sports.^[83]

The next year, at the February 2020 CPAC convention, Kirk offered his most public endorsement of Christian nationalism yet when he praised Trump as a president who understands the “seven mountains of cultural influence”: a term frequently used by Christian nationalists to refer to various areas of society that adherents believe Christians are entitled to control as they take “Dominion” over culture and laws on behalf of God.^[84]

The Kirk Education Agenda

Kirk’s first attempt to fuse education and Christian nationalism was the short-lived Falkirk Center at the evangelical Liberty University. Kirk and then-Liberty president Jerry Falwell Jr. started the center in November 2019 with the mission to reinvigorate American ideals and “Judeo-Christian values in all aspects of life,” explicitly rejecting Christian “peace” rhetoric to urge supporters to see themselves at war. In its mission statement, the center charged, “Bemoaning the rise of leftism is no longer enough, and turning the other cheek in our personal relationships with our neighbors as Jesus taught while abdicating our responsibilities on the cultural battlefield is no longer sufficient.” Liberty student leaders said the center was hurting the school’s reputation,^[85] and even the widely read evangelical magazine Relevant called it an “extremely concerning” mission statement since the call to no longer “turn the cheek” contradicts Liberty University’s own mission statement.^[86]

Kirk was granted an honorary diploma from Liberty in 2019. But once Liberty and Falwell parted ways in fall 2020, following the university president’s sex scandal, the Falkirk Center was on the chopping block. That fall, Liberty quietly ended its contract with Kirk and renamed the center the following spring.^[87]

But by then Kirk was already organizing an expansion of Turning Point’s own education agenda. That March, TPUSA announced^[88] the launch of Turning Point Academy, which would “develop and distribute K-12 curricula focused on American history, our founding principles, the Constitution, and economics.”^[89] This material would contrast with what the group called the “false narrative about America” promoted by teachers and administrators in schools across the country, which they called an “anti-American ideology” that “threatens to destroy our country’s institutions and freedom.”

That work led directly into the summer of 2021, when Kirk, Turning Point, and their followers joined other right-wing activists in barnstorming school board meetings around the nation, attacking members for mask mandates and curricula about race. Kirk made his first school board appearance in June where he spoke to the Chandler, Arizona, school board, claiming without evidence that the school district’s use of “equity” in leadership training equated to critical race theory and that those two concepts were part of a “racist, vile, and evil” ideology which was “stomping on the legacy” of Martin Luther King, Jr.^[90]

Kirk followed up with an angry tirade at the Scottsdale school board in late August,^[91] where he charged that board members were abusing children by implementing mask mandates. He presented misleading statistics on childhood deaths from Covid and threatened the members with their electoral eviction through a recall: “Your time is soon up. The people of this state and this school district are rising up…You have awoke a sleeping giant.”

A key move by TPUSA for this effort is hiring staff. Beyond the watchlist, it is looking to hire a manager for Turning Point Academy to build “a program centered around Constitutional education”; form partnerships with like-minded advocacy groups; and plan “the first-ever Educators Summit” to “launch Constitution events and celebrations targeting school-aged children.”^[92]

What is to come from Kirk and his organization might best be seen in another “Freedom Night in America” event he held in October 2021 at Cornerstone Chapel, a Calvary Chapel megachurch in Leesburg, Virginia—the state that became the center of the national conflagration over school politics through its recent gubernatorial election. Showcasing his new Christian nationalist rhetoric, Kirk declared, to great applause, that “if there is any hope” for the U.S. and its ideals of consent of the governed, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, individual liberty, and natural rights, “that hope is the church.” The Christian church, he continued, must take its rightful place in American culture as “counselor to the king, as it tells us in the scriptures.” ^[93]  

Those applauding might charitably see the changes in Kirk’s rhetoric as the natural progression of a political boy wonder gaining wisdom as he becomes an adult leader within the conservative movement. A more skeptical eye would likely view the last two years as Kirk and TPUSA opportunistically seizing upon a new battleground that had drawn substantial attention.

Either way, this transformation of Kirk and Turning Point is gaining momentum, specifically from donors eager to latch onto its energy.^[94] Whatever TPUSA’s impact on 2022 and any future election, its empire building will continue—with all such efforts, Kirk would claim, in service of a greater kingdom to come. But also in service of growing his brand, and situating Kirk as the new evangelical whisperer and a well-funded counselor for whichever candidate asks his blessing.