LOGAN, Utah (AP) — Turning Point USA’s college tour returns to Utah Tuesday for its first event in the state since its founder. Charlie KirkHe was assassinated on a university 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 on September 10th. The gunman fires a single shot in the crowd while Kirk was talking.
The assassination of the top alley President Donald Trump And one of his Make America Great Movement’s most important figures won a conservative who zinced the conservatives who vowed to take over Kirk’s encouragement mission. Young voters embracing conservatism And move American politics even more correctly. Kirk himself has been praised as a “martist” by many on the right, and Turning Point USA, the youth organization he founded, has seen a surge in interest across the country. There are tens of thousands of requests Launching new chapters on high school and university campuses.
Tuesday’s event, scheduled for prior to Kirk’s death, headlines many of the events and shows how Turning Point is heading that path without the charismatic leader who worked hard to attract crowds and attention.
The College Tour is currently headlined by some of the biggest conservative names, including Tucker Carlson, Megging Kelly and Glenbeck. At Tuesday’s event, conservative podcast host Alex Clark, Sen. Mike Lee, Andy Biggs, former Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Gov. Spencer Cox.
And it pledges further the pledges that his widow, Erica Kirk, was made to continue his work at the campus tour and the organization he founded. She’s currently overseeing Turning Point and the stables of my late husband’s former aide and friends.
“Nothing has changed.”
Erica Kirk tried to assure her husband’s followers that her late husband was trying to continue the surgery as intended.
“We’re not going anywhere. We have blueprints. We have orders to march,” she appeared on last week’s podcast.
That includes continuing to record tapes of your daily podcasts.
“My husband’s voice lives on. The show continues,” she said, announcing plans for the host’s spinning cast. She said they intended to lean heavily towards her husband’s old clips, including answering the caller’s questions.
“We have decades worth of my husband’s voice. We have material that hasn’t been used from speeches he hasn’t heard yet,” she said.
However, Erica Kirk has made it clear that she is not going to appear on podcasts frequently, and so far it appears to assume a more behind-the-scenes role than her husband.
Mikey McCoy, Kirk’s former chief of staff, said Erica Kirk is in contact with members of the Trump administration every day, calling her “very strategic” and different from her husband.
The event serves as a tribute to Kirk
Previous events have served as a session of respect for the late Kirk, focusing on prayer, and questions and answers he is known to be.
At Virginia Tech last week, state Republican governor Glenn Youngkin urged the crowd to advance Kirk’s legacy.
“The question that has been asked over and over is who will become the next Charlie? And I want to look at this room, see thousands of you, repeat the best answer I’ve heard: you will become the next Charlie,” he said. “everyone.”
He also praised Erica Kirk as the “extraordinary” leader.
“Over the past two weeks, Erica Kirk has demonstrated that she not only has the courage of a lion, but also the heart of a saint. We were saddened to her and her family. We prayed for her and her family,” he said. “Is there anyone better to lead the turning point in the future than Erica Kirk?”
He then handed over the stage to Kelly. Kelly said a few months ago that Charlie Kirk asked him to join the tour. She said she knew she was taking risks to the stage, but she felt it was important to send a message that “by assassin bullets, Heckler’s veto will not be silenced by the left wing, the awakened professor, or anyone who tries to silence us from what we really believe in.”
At another event at the University of Minnesota last week, conservative commentator Michael Knowles gave a solo speech in place of the originally planned conversation between the two of them with Kirk. He then continued his Kirk tradition of answering questions from the audience. It ranged from one man to another who quipped about Catholic doctrine and claimed that the root of the social issue stems from having women vote. (To the latter he replied that women are not responsible because “men need to guide women.”
As Knowles said, the spotlight glowed in the chairs that had been left empty for Kirk.
Knowles said Kirk has helped bring together different conservative factions and is worried that Kirk will destroy the Maga movement, where he doesn’t do his day-to-day work to build bridges between war groups.
“Charlie was a unified person in the movement. That’s just a fact,” he said. “It won’t replace him in that respect.”
“The biggest threat right now is if we don’t have a single figure where we are all friends and we can really hold it together and things can be spin-off in different directions,” Knowles said. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
