Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college-aged kids he believed were being indoctrinated by liberal universities. His efforts were thoroughly embraced by conservative luminaries, all the way up to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
But since Kirk was assassinated in September, TPUSA’s popularity has exploded on college campuses with membership increasing by the thousands in some places; and Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, has nominally taken over the organization in her late husband’s stead.
But as New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood told Noel King for the latest episode of Today, Explained, there are other right-wing superstars who are jockeying for position in the organization, and many young conservatives are embracing a worldview that is darker and more conspiratorial than Kirk ever was.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah, in September, the question was: What would happen to Turning Point USA?
The question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and electoral apparatus, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism?
I went to the [Kirk] memorial [at the NFL stadium in Arizona] and started talking to college kids, and it became evident that the place to go investigate the post-Charlie Kirk moment was the campus.
The answer in mid-September looked really different from the answer in mid-December. If I had written my story three weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, I would’ve thought that there was a sort of nationwide religious revival taking place.
Charlie Kirk, whatever people thought of his right-wing politics, was playing a role that only became more evident to me after he was gone. He was serving as a sort of stopgap against even more malign forces that were creeping up on the young right.
And without Charlie Kirk there, they started to become much more prominent. They see the murder of Charlie Kirk as evidence of left-wing intolerance, but they also no longer have Kirk as this kind of role model who is actually keeping these darker forces at bay.
You talked to a lot of young people as you were reporting this piece. Who stood out to you?
The main character of my piece is the president of the TPUSA chapter at Ole Miss, Lesley Lachman.
She’s 20 years old. She’s from Westchester County, New York. She represents a kind of micro-trend, which is kids from the Northeast who want to go to college at these big “All-American” schools in the South.
She represents what appeared to be kind of the boom where not only does the campus organization grow, but her social status grows. She’s a queen bee, everybody knows who she is.
What’s the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now?
There are a bunch of different groups, [with] TPUSA being the