Turning Point, moving forward without Charlie Kirk, makes first return to Utah since his killing

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LOGAN, Utah (AP) — Turning Point USA's college tour will return to Utah on Tuesday for its first event in the state since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated on a college campus earlier this month.

The stop, at Utah State University in Logan, is about two hours north of Utah Valley University, where Kirk was killed Sept. 10 by a gunman who fired a single shot through the crowd while Kirk was speaking.

The assassination of a top ally of President Donald Trump and one of the most significant figures in his Make America Great Again movement has galvanized conservatives, who have vowed to carry on Kirk’s mission of encouraging young voters to embrace conservatism and moving American politics further right. Kirk himself has been celebrated as a “martyr" by many on the right, and Turning Point USA, the youth organization he founded, has seen a surge of interest across the nation, with tens of thousands of requests to launch new chapters in high schools and on college campuses.

Tuesday’s event, which was scheduled before Kirk’s death, will showcase how Turning Point is finding its path forward without its charismatic leader, who headlined many of its events and was instrumental in drawing crowds and attention.

The college tour is now being headlined by some of the biggest conservative names, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck. Tuesday’s event will feature conservative podcast host Alex Clark and a panel with Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Andy Biggs, former Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Gov. Spencer Cox.

And it will further a pledge his widow, Erika Kirk, made to continue the campus tour and the work of the organization he founded. She now oversees Turning Point along with a stable of her late husband’s former aides and friends.

Erika Kirk has sought to assure her husband's followers that she intends to continue to run the operation as her late husband intended, closely following plans he laid out to her and to staff.

“We’re not going anywhere. We have the blueprints. We have our marching orders,” she said during an appearance on his podcast last week.

That will include, she said, continuing to tape the daily podcast.

“My husband’s voice will live on. The show will go on," she said, announcing plans for a rotating cast of hosts. She said they intended to lean heavily on old clips of her husband, including answering callers' questions.

“We have decades' worth of my husband’s voice. We have unused material from speeches that he’s had that no one has heard yet,” she said.

Erika Kirk, however, made clear that she does not intend to appear on the podcast often, and so far seems to be assuming a more behind-the-scenes role than her husband.

Mikey McCoy, Kirk's former chief of staff, said Erika Kirk is in daily contact with members of the Trump administration, and has described her as “very strategic" and different from her husband.

The events so far have served as tributes to the late Kirk, with a focus on prayer, as well as the question-and-answer sessions that he was known for.

At Virginia Tech last week, the state's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, urged the crowd to carry Kirk's legacy forward.

“The question that has been asked over and over again is: Who will be the next Charlie? And as I look out in this room and I see thousands of you, I want to repeat the best answer that I have heard: You will be the next Charlie," he said. "All of you.”

He also praised Erika Kirk as an “extraordinary” leader.

“Over the course of the last two weeks, Erika Kirk has demonstrated that she not only has the courage of a lion, but she has the heart of a saint. We have grieved with her and her family. We have prayed for her and her family," he said. “Is there anyone better to lead Turning Point going forward than Erika Kirk?”

He then turned the stage over to Kelly, who said Charlie Kirk had asked her to join the tour several months ago. She said she knew appearing onstage carried risk, but felt it was important to be there "to send a message that we will not be silenced by an assassin’s bullet, by a heckler’s veto, by a left-wing, woke professor or anyone who tries to silence us from saying what we really believe,” she said to loud cheers.

At another event at the University of Minnesota last week, conservative commentator Michael Knowles gave a solo speech in lieu of the two-man conversation with Kirk that was originally planned. Then he continued Kirk’s tradition of responding to questions from the audience, which ranged from one man quibbling about Catholic doctrine to another arguing that the root of societal problems stems from letting women vote. (To the latter, he responded that women aren’t to blame because “men need to lead women.”)

As Knowles spoke, a spotlight shined on a chair left empty for Kirk.

Knowles said Kirk was instrumental in keeping together disparate conservative factions, and he worries about the MAGA movement fracturing without Kirk doing the day-to-day work to build bridges between warring groups.

“Charlie was the unifying figure for the movement. It’s simply a fact," he said. “There is no replacing him in that regard.”

“The biggest threat right now is that without that single figure that we were all friends with, who could really hold it together, things could spin off in different directions,” Knowles said. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”