You may not like what comes after Charlie Kirk

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 sort of top dog right now; but there’s Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and there’s the classic College Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into groups. 

The radicalization of Gen Z is the through line of my piece, and what happens is that a young woman like Lesley Lachman, she’s got impeccable conservative bonafides, but actually there are many, many students even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate, [and that] JD Vance is suspect. 

Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a “moderate,” but they loved him anyway because of what he stood for. 

What does it mean for Trump and for MAGA that Charlie Kirk is gone and now there are lots of kids to the right, even the far right of Charlie Kirk?

It’s extremely troubling that two main figures in my piece that are just dominating the feeds of these students are Candace Owens — who’s a conspiracy theorist [who] has rocketed-up the Spotify podcast charts by spreading really out-there theories about his death — and Nick Fuentes, who’s an outright antisemite. 

But as an electoral consequence, it’s actually arguably more troubling to MAGA’s chances. If you are doing pure identitarian, hate-driven politics in the Fuentes vein, you probably instantly just doomed the multiracial coalition that brought Trump to office in November 2024. 

One of the things that was striking about your piece was the presence of so many young women.

I think the TPUSA’s appeal to young women is actually not quite about Erika Kirk, although Erika Kirk now being the figurehead is going to accelerate the female-dominated nature of TPUSA. 

A lot of these young Republican groups, especially the ones that are sort of interested in Nick Fuentes, are extremely male, to the point where I was hanging out with these kids and they were basically kind of complaining like, “Why can’t we get any girls to come to our meetings?” 

There’s also a handful of issues that TPUSA really hones in on that is activating for conservative women in Kirk Country, as I call it. 

TPUSA has an influencer called Alex Clark who hosts a podcast and she’s a big Make America Healthy Again influencer. MAHA is extremely popular right now with young conservative women. 

There’s also the issue of the two Rileys, Lakin and Riley and Riley Gaines. 

Lakin Riley was a nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan migrant in 2024 near the University of Georgia campus, a Venezuelan who entered illegally during the Biden administration. 

And then there’s Riley Gaines, who is a swimmer who was at the University of Kentucky who competed against the trans athlete, Leah Thomas, who swam at University of Pennsylvania. 

Trans sports issues and illegal immigration are issues that TPUSA focused on a lot. They feel like liberals have sold women like them out. 

And Lesley, who’s TPUSA president at Ole Miss, she was already kind of going to meetings last fall, last spring 2024 when Riley Gaines came and spoke. That’s when she threw herself into TPUSA and then became the president.

If you’re a Kirk acolyte, do you follow the “martyr,” the person who has passed on, or do you follow the person who’s still available, still on YouTube, still on Twitter? Where do you think they’re headed?

Based on everything I saw, they are headed where their feed is headed, and it cannot be overemphasized how dominant Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are in their feeds. 

In a culture that rewards conspiracism, the appetite on the American right, the young American right, for conspiracy is just bottomless. Absent clips of Charlie Kirk on his podcast every day or on the campus, his greatest enemy, Nick Fuentes, is there. 

By the end of December, the discourse around Nick Fuentes and his influence was inescapable. And I asked Leslie, well, how does he factor into your life? 

And she told me that, when she was sad, when she was feeling lonely, ordinarily she would’ve scrolled over and seen what Charlie Kirk was up to. [But since Kirk’s death,] she couldn’t help herself; she’d sometimes just watch Nick instead.