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Brigham Tomco is a reporter for Deseret News, covering Utah politics and the conservative movement. For the past few months, he’d been digging into the political operation and personal ambitions of Charlie Kirk, the charismatic young activist and social media star who was murdered on Wednesday during an event on a college campus in Utah. The profile came out this week.
Kirk was one of the most influential figures among perennially online young conservatives, beloved for his viral videos where he debated—and often aggressively shut down—liberals on college campuses, and often espoused extreme views. His affability and political instincts helped land him in Donald Trump’s inner circle, and he was credited with playing a major part in the president’s political comeback.
He was not a reporter, but his social media presence, and the political operation he built, Turning Point USA, were a primary source of news for millions of young conservatives—content he created received more than fifteen billion views in 2024, according to Tomco. “He said during our interview explicitly, ‘We are not a journalistic outlet,’” Tomco said. “But he also said, ‘Our viewers come to us for truth, and we tell them the truth.’” This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JH: How are you holding up? You can’t possibly have imagined what this week would be like.
BT: Yeah, it’s been an extremely strange experience. The last twenty-four hours have been pretty surreal. I had reached out to Turning Point representatives back in June because I wanted to highlight the impact Turning Point USA had had on the country, but also get some unique insight into Charlie Kirk’s vision for the organization and his ambitions. And that eventually led to getting access at his Phoenix, Arizona, headquarters in August, and the story was published on Sunday. The print edition came out Wednesday morning.
Who was Charlie Kirk, for anyone reading this who might not know him?
Kirk is the most influential MAGA spokesperson for young Republican voters in the country. On TikTok, where he has over seven million followers, they did a survey among Trump voters on the platform, and he was the most trusted individual. And a poll by Signal, which is a GOP firm, said that two-thirds of Gen Z and millennial voters came across his content in 2024 and that one-third of those were more likely to vote for President Donald Trump in 2024 because of that encounter with his content. And so, if you are only looking at his online footprint, it’s safe to say that he was a political giant, especially among the rising generation in the US.
I was really struck by another poll you cited in your piece that said that Turning Point USA was the second-most-viewed conservative news source among GOP primary voters.
Yes, that was a Signal poll done in Alabama for the Alabama GOP primary, and Turning Point was second only to Fox News.
What about Kirk the person?
As I sat down with Kirk, it became apparent very quickly that he was passionate and very self-confident about the movement that he viewed himself as leading. But at the same time, there was what I thought was a surprising amount of introspection. And he left lots of room for altering his views and his tactics. He was very open to the possibility that he was maybe not living up to the standards that he believed in as a practicing Christian, and that he needed to develop a way of sharing his views and promulgating his message with more grace.
I’m sensing that right now, amid all the furor online, there is a debate brewing over whether Kirk should be remembered as someone who advocated harsh views—which he certainly did—or if he should be seen as someone who nonetheless remained interested in communicating with people he disagreed with. Do you have a feeling about which is a better encapsulation of his legacy?
I think that is a fundamental distinction. The way he viewed his role as an aspiring peacemaker was that speaking truth would inevitably cause division, but he hoped to always keep his arguments focused on issues. In the end, he saw himself as doing much more than provoking ideological opponents and instead seeking to persuade people of the younger generation to actually embody the conservative principles that he believed in. Most people will come in contact with him via a clip where he says something that seems edgy or offensive to some, you know, at first glance. But if you were to have a more in-depth conversation with him or, say, read his book or listen to his podcast or attend one of his events that he hosts for young people, his emphasis is always on Take faith seriously, get married, have children, contribute to your community. He believed in a bottom-up conservatism. That’s where he thought a revolution should take place.
At the same time, you cite from his book where he quotes Christ saying, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”
This is where the interview with Kirk became most interesting for me and where the conflicts and tensions came out. As I pressed him on how he resolved or reconciled those two things, of being a peacemaker and speaking truth and causing division, he narrowed that circle or that circumference of Americans that he thought he needed to negotiate with or collaborate with on this project to move the country forward. He said that it didn’t apply to those who disagreed with him on immigration and abortion and transgender treatment for minors. And so in that sense, I think he remains kind of a conflicted character with an aspirational legacy of building this positive infrastructure that he could leave behind for other generations of Republican activists, and at the same time, a reputation of someone that gained notoriety or built their career off of owning the libs, for lack of a better term.
What do you think happens to the youth conservative movement he helped inspire now?
I do think that this is a tipping point that could go two different ways. You’re seeing this among conservative media personalities and also just members of the grass roots online and also in phone calls and conversations I’ve had. This assassination of Charlie Kirk is such a blow, and it’s such a shock, that some people feel like, Okay, regardless of your political affiliation, we need to find a way to live together in the same country despite our opposing views. And so that could be one direction. And then the opposite direction that I’ve seen, which was echoed by Tyler Bowyer [the COO of Turning Point’s political arm, TPAction] in his statement on his account on X, is that this means war. That this means that the gloves are off, that the conservative movement has not been aggressive enough in defeating leftism as an ideology and then defeating Democratic candidates at the ballot box.
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