“If you really do want to run for office,” Luna said, “I would say that you should probably get on the college campus and debate random college kids.”
After Trump’s election victory, Newsom was among the throng of Democrats seeking to reinvent themselves for the media era Kirk so readily embodied. In the postmortems, there emerged a sense that they had failed to not only capture a broad vein of influence, but also identify it in the first place.
“There are some really, really intelligent, well-speaking, well-intentioned creators on the left who have tremendous impact, tremendous reach as well, and they do a really good job,” the 22-year-old liberal influencer Harry Sisson told me. “But the difference between the left and the right is that the Republicans have groups like Turning Point USA who embrace their creators.”
“I have a philosophy that I take into content creation and just life,” Sisson added, “which is if you see your enemies doing something, don’t be afraid to use their tactics if it’s working.”
Before he reached his ultimate level of cultural saturation, Kirk, like most of his peers on the young online right, started from a place of virtual anonymity. The 28-year-old social media operative and political adviser Alex Bruesewitz, often credited for the Trump campaign’s facility with podcasters, mourned Kirk on X on Wednesday evening. They first connected on the same platform, he wrote, when he was 17 and Kirk was 19, “both of us with just a few thousand followers.” Just this month, they had both spoken at a conference held by Build Up Korea, a conservative youth movement in the image of Kirk’s.
“I’ve traveled all over the world,” Bruesewitz added later, “and in every country, people have approached me with the same question: ‘Alex, how can we find our own Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk?’”
In a February New York Times Magazine profile, Kirk grew nostalgic while discussing how he started listening to Rush Limbaugh in high school. “I was like, This guy is unbelievable!” he recalled. “Because you’re looking for someone in high school to affirm your beliefs. I would never forget: on my lunch break, from like 12:17 to 12:55, I’d listen. Just me. I went all in on Rush.” The network of conservative media personalities has grown far more scattered in the time since, but Kirk ultimately cultivated a similar degree of sway and personal connection.
“I think Charlie Kirk has the ability to be Billy Graham meets Rush Limbaugh,” the Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur and podcaster Patrick Bet-David said in a clip he resurfaced in the aftermath of the shooting, following up the comment with another bite-size claim about Kirk’s impact: “I have him as top five on getting Trump elected.”
When I reached Bet-David on Thursday to expand on the comparison, he noted that Kirk’s use of online levers wasn’t, on its own, the source of his power. “There’s a lot of guys that know that as well,” Bet-David said. “The second part is he actually believes in what he’s talking about.”
The full upshot of Kirk’s work, he figured, wouldn’t materialize until years into the future. Turning Point “just woke up a lot of kids who have been listening to his content for the last few years,” Bet-David said, “and there may be hundreds of Charlie Kirks that may be rising up the next 5, 10, 15 years.”
Dan Adler
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