Charlie Kirk’s Group Held Its First Post-Assassination Campus Tour Event. It Was Extreme—and Revealing.

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When Turning Point USA’s college tour resumed on Monday night at the University of Minnesota, in its first event since its founder’s assassination, there was a big unspoken question: What would this movement be without Charlie Kirk?

The organization has a lineup^[2] of speaker events for what was Charlie Kirk’s “Comeback Tour”—now styled “The Turning Point Tour”—that includes sitting governors, U.S. senators, and famous media personalities. It promised to carry on Kirk’s legacy. But it remained to be seen if the substitutes, all prominent figures with their own personal ambitions, political incentives, and ideological subcultures, would appeal in the same way as Kirk, a man with more basic right-wing sensibilities who wanted to speak across different conservative factions.

Monday night’s event revealed much about what’s to come: The event’s main speaker promised a unified attack on the “left,” from both the group and the broader conservative movement. That means a muscular, militant Christian nationalism—the likes of which we’ve already seen since Kirk’s murder—with major conservative voices and government officials invoking scripture to call for retribution. But in the longer term, it’s not clear that unity will hold: The sudden vacuum at the top of the largest conservative youth movement has set the entire right up for a power struggle, with different factions trying to claim Kirk’s mantle for their own.

The first event, in Minneapolis, for example, started with a very particular character in Michael Knowles, a conservative radio and podcast host associated with the Daily Wire. Knowles, who exudes a kind of smug Ivy League energy, seemed a particularly odd person to inaugurate the post-Kirk era of Turning Point’s campus activities. He is a traditionalist Roman Catholic who crusades for the traditional Latin Mass and enjoys discussing medieval philosopher-theologians and ancient texts. He owns a cigar company and wears suits. His demeanor, in other words, was that of a slick cosmopolitan, far from Kirk’s enthusiasm. But the conservative college students, fired up by Kirk’s martyrdom, seemed enthusiastic to see him: The venue was sold out^[3], according to Knowles, and some students reported lining up for it starting that morning.

It took a while for Knowles to address the future of the post-Kirk movement. Perhaps because Kirk had already been eulogized in the massive political rally the previous evening, Knowles spent little time in his speech dwelling on Kirk’s legacy, other than to mourn the loss of a man who “we knew … would be president one day.” Instead, Knowles urged the young people there to honor Kirk by attending church and living out their Christian faith. But when Knowles began speaking of his particular theological understanding of how conservatives are called to bring their Christianity into the public sphere, his speech turned darker.

“Christian forgiveness does not demand we allow the cruel to ravage the whole earth; it demands we love our enemies,” he said. “In politics, love usually means punishing the guilty, both for the protection of the innocent as well as for the good of the criminals.”

It was a statement that would set the tone for the rest of his speech. In this moment, which many politicians and activists have described as a turning point for the conservative movement, Knowles wants the right to act decisively and drastically, to use the groundswell of public support to crack down hard on opponents. In particular, Knowles was concerned with the idea of “free speech”—something that Kirk has been celebrated as a champion of, but something that has also divided the right in the aftermath of the killing, as the administration has moved to label those who criticized Kirk as supporting left-wing violence. Knowles, it seems, sides with the administration:

In the wake of Charlie’s assassination, many are inclined to redouble our devotion to the marketplace of ideas. This instinct, I think, misses a crucial step. We had a marketplace of ideas. The left shot it up. If we wish to restore the healthy exchange of ideas, we need to refortify the marketplace. Marketplaces of all kinds require rules, confidence, and common medium of exchange. They require, in other words, order. 

This speech, which somewhat ominously suggested that Kirk’s shooting marked the end of what we previously knew as “the marketplace of ideas” that underpinned our democracy, leaned heavily on authoritarian language: “Liberty requires order; you cannot be undisciplined and free.”

That his end goal of these bolder actions was a kind of traditionalist Christian nation was undeniable. “Our government was established by people who declared we are endowed by our creator with rights,” he said. “Seeing our national leaders proclaim the gospel should not be surprising.”

Women’s Voting Rights Get a Chilly Reception

When students lined up to ask Knowles questions, he began to more heavily emphasize the vision of a traditional society, taken to an extreme. The first student, who opened his question by urging Knowles to become the next vice president, grouched that “every aspect of the American lifestyle” had worsened since women secured the right to vote. What did Knowles think of repealing the 19^th Amendment?

Knowles did not respond with any kind of alarm or consternation at the premise. Instead, he responded with joking faux magnanimity: “I try not to blame women on their own,” he said. “Men need to lead women in their homes.”

He continued with jokes in an apparent attempt to deflect attention from the student’s misogyny. “I have a solution,” he said. “To the people who want to repeal the 19^th Amendment, we can take the vote away from the single women who vote for Democrats, and then we can give two votes to the married women who vote for Republicans. Is that a deal?”

When the student continued to insist that women’s suffrage had ruined the country, Knowles didn’t back down from his lighthearted “compromise” position, instead attempting to move the student along with the concession that his point was “fair” and an affectionate joke about how other “progressive” amendments, including Prohibition, were a problem. He was not, in the end, endorsing a radical anti-suffrage position, but he wasn’t rejecting it either.

These weren’t his only hints at extreme positions on gender roles. He told one student, when asked for his advice for young men, that men needed to be emotionally steady because “I find few things as nauseating as an overly emotional man.” He told one 18-year-old student who was set to marry her boyfriend on their first anniversary of dating that “if my wife and I had one regret, it would be not getting married earlier and spitting out 150 kids.” His top advice for their marriage: “Throw out feminism.”

“Various Factions Fighting for Power”

So this was one man’s vision of what TPUSA could be after Kirk’s death: a vehicle for spreading reactionary Christian values within the youngest generations. But Knowles himself acknowledged the hurdles of trying to find focus within a fractured alliance. “Charlie was the unifying figure for the movement,” he said when one student asked him what was next for the conservative movement. He did more than President Donald Trump, he said. And when Trump can no longer lead the movement, there will be no clear unifying force.

“The immediate future is going to be a unity for Charlie,” he said. “For Erika. To keep TPUSA going. To make sure this mission does not die. In the longer run, there will be various factions fighting for power.”

Knowles has reason to hope: Vice President J.D. Vance, another traditionalist Catholic with a similar kind of scholarly, post-liberal, nationalist mindset, looks to be the heir apparent of the movement. Vance, a former friend of Kirk’s who hosted Kirk’s podcast after his death, shares Knowles’ ambitions to use the assassination to make inroads with the youth and to punish the left. Knowles, in his particular traditionalist Catholic flavor of right-wing politics, may not represent the entire movement, but in his appearance as the first post-Kirk TPUSA college tour event, he did seem to point to an answer for the movement’s identity questions. It was going to take as much advantage of public anger as it possibly could to push societal and democratic norms.

“There must be consequences to heal this national trauma and to reestablish a healthy politics,” Knowles said in his speech. “Those consequences require clarity of vision, courage of our convictions, and an extraordinary amount of God’s grace.”

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