AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Charlie Kirk will be honored this Thursday at Utah Valley University, a year after he was assassinated in front of students at a campus event there. Kirk co-founded the conservative youth nonprofit Turning Point USA. We wanted to check in on how Turning Point USA has weathered the past year, so joining us now is Ali Breland. He's written about the organization for The Atlantic. Welcome to the program.
ALI BRELAND: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
RASCOE: Can you remind us of how influential Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA have been in Republican politics in recent years?
BRELAND: I don't think that one can understate how important and influential Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA were, especially up towards the end of his life. Charlie Kirk managed to take and create this organization that had all of these different tentacles. He also had this get-out-the-vote effort that was targeting low-propensity voters - youth, often male, college voters - that had traditionally been overlooked by the right. And some people credit this, at least partially, with Trump's victory in 2024.
Charlie Kirk was able to connect all of these different influential people across parts of the right that normally weren't connected - faith leaders with far-right internet figures, with establishment figures - who later became high up in the White House and the administration.
RASCOE: Well, now Charlie Kirk's widow, Erika Kirk, is leading the organization. How effective has she been at taking the reins of Turning Point USA?
BRELAND: Erika Kirk has been fairly effective and a useful face. I say this completely noncynically, but a sort of grieving widow is a good person to garner sympathy with. But at the same time, Charlie was such a unique and singular figure that no one can really fill in the space that he left.
You can kind of see the impacts and the proof that these things aren't working in the same way in how fractured the right has become since he died. The rise of these conspiracy theories about Charlie's death, the rise of someone like Nick Fuentes, who Charlie Kirk arguably did a really good job of kind of stiff-arming. And as a white nationalist who uses the N-word and is very openly racist, Nick Fuentes has prompted a lot of division within the party that didn't exist there prior.
RASCOE: How effective was Turning Point USA in influencing the primaries?
BRELAND: I think that if you ask them this, their answer would be that it's still early, and they want to see what happens in the general and that their primary objective is just getting Republicans elected. I personally have skepticism about how that's going to work in that they put a lot of their effort into getting, again, young, low-propensity, college - often male, but college-age voters out to vote. Traditionally, this age demographic gets excited during presidential elections, but during off-year midterms, it's a little bit harder.
RASCOE: There's been infighting, some of it over ideas, you know, support for Israel, the war with Iran, but also these conspiracy theories. How does that fit into these dynamics?
BRELAND: Prior to Kirk dying, Republicans everywhere who were paying attention to Kirk were more in lockstep with the establishment and the elite wings of the party. And when he died, there was this dissent over Israel policy and these other things that crept to the fore that he was no longer there to stop.
And the conspiracy theories - there is no one with enough power to check Candace Owens. And now her conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk being killed by Israel, possibly with the involvement of Charlie Kirk's own wife - again, Candace Owens' conspiracy theory, I am not giving any credence to this at all, I want to be very clear - that has become this weirdly salient conspiracy that a lot of people kind of buy into.
And that kind of stuff was kind of pushed to the margins. A lot of conservative conspiracy theories had relaxed a little bit, and then Kirk's assassination kind of opened them up and created space for them.
RASCOE: With the midterms coming up, where do you think the young conservatives will be, and will they be listening to Turning Point USA without Kirk?
BRELAND: I think that the Republican Party and younger voters will only go right in the way that Turning Point has to respond to. And a really clear example of this is James Fishback, a gubernatorial candidate in Florida. James Fishback, to be clear, lost his bid to be governor. He only won 10% of the vote.
But what I found to be interesting in that race is that he was winning specifically with people under the age of 34 in Florida. That's really important to understand because James Fishback was aggressively far right, very openly racist. A lot of people called him an antisemite.
When he was being pressed by a Black person about his politics, James Fishback got frustrated and said that that person should be lynched. And that's the No. 1 candidate for young people in the Florida gubernatorial race. That's, like, a sort of window into the future of young right-wing politics and what Turning Point is going to have to contend with and manage if it still wants to be a power player amongst, like, the youth vote.
RASCOE: That's Ali Breland, writer with The Atlantic. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
BRELAND: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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