No One Understands Charlie Kirk
When you listen to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk you are actually hearing the voices of religious extremist billionaires who pay him to push their agenda. It's propaganda in its purest form.
Brought To You By Billionaires™ is a series from Public Enlightenment exposing the people who create the culture war and inject outrage into our public conversation on behalf of billionaire sponsors. These propagandists trick Americans into voting for billionaire agendas—fewer rights, unsafe air and water, lower wages, one religion rule. Share this widely to save America from billionaire PR.
Every weekday I livestream to TikTok and discuss the information infrastructure created by activist billionaires to manipulate all of us. This cabal of business elites controls media companies, think tanks, pundits, and influencers and uses them to destroy trust amongst the working class and advance their extremist agenda.
I’m writing about one of their operatives, Charlie Kirk, in response to an open-minded young man who visits my livestream. He challenged my assertion that Kirk is a racist grifter working on behalf of racist billionaires. A huge Kirk fan, he told me that if he ever believed Kirk was racist he would move on from the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder in a heartbeat. I may not be able to “prove” to Charlie Kirk fans that he is a racist (racist public figures often refrain from outright saying “I’m a racist,” and this seems to be the only acceptable proof for some folks) but I can definitely prove that Kirk is nothing more than a Christian Nationalist billionaire megaphone.
Perhaps no clip better encapsulates Charlie’s use of the Bible to advance the agenda of the billionaires who pay him than this one where he explains that it’s a sin to raise taxes on the wealthy:
Kirk travels the country on tours with names like “Saving America,” “Culture War,” and “American Comeback.” Sitting in a TPUSA-branded tailgaiting tent, he invites students to debate him. He tells them that they are all victims of liberal indoctrination. He writes books with titles like “The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth,” “Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations,” and “Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West.” He represents the next iteration of the decades-long attempt by hyper-conservatives to infiltrate college campuses.
From Politico:
The central Turning Point USA strategy seems borrowed from the playbooks of older conservative campus groups, all of which drew energy as reactions to the campus left—the Horowitz Freedom Center, the Young America’s Foundation, and the Leadership Institute. Amy Binder, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego who is co-author of the 2014 book Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, says those older groups, and now Turning Point USA, have found that attacking the academic powers-that-be is a strategy that sells. “When you take on school administrations, it really wins you a lot of fans in the donor base,” Binder says.
Here is a picture of Charlie sitting next to a billionaire, scam-artist Vivek Ramaswamy, on the aptly named “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour.”
College kids are being indoctrinated—not by professors teaching Comparative Literature or Economics 101—but by 31 year-old Charlie Kirk on behalf of a billionaire agenda. As an information nutritionist it’s my job to educate the public about the heavily-processed, unnatural origins of the media we consume. And TPUSA is a media company created to influence public opinion, a billionaire psyop run by a charismatic propagandist whose job is to hone convincing arguments that trick kids into cheering for an American theocracy.
Unnatural Reach
Turning Point USA is a tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)3 that pushes its agenda on high school and college campuses and in large convention centers across America. It focuses on attracting young adults ages 15-25. It was created in 2012 after Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery heard Kirk give a speech at Benedictine University’s Youth Government Day.1 The pair formed TPUSA one month later.
After TPUSA’s formation, Kirk was showered with incredible amounts of cash by the Christian Nationalist network of free-enterprise billionaires. The money was a down payment on their hopes that he could advance their anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ, anti-regulation, anti-environment, anti-education, racist agenda.
It’s important to emphasize the connection between Kirk and Tea Party activism since the Tea Party was itself an astroturf funded by the Koch brothers. The Kochs and other wealthy families have long funded a vast network of think tanks that advance their anti-regulatory agenda. An additional component to all of this is the strategic partnership between fossil fuel billionaires and Christian Nationalist activists like Paul Weyrich, who founded the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation and the Council For National Policy (CNP). I’ll come back to these associations throughout this article.
Funding from billionaires, and cross-promotion with other nodes in their influence network, has been key to TPUSA’s success, allowing Kirk to spread his message and gain a foothold in the minds of millions of Americans. Kirk regularly appears as a guest at the Daily Wire, a PR front for the agenda of the Christian nationalist, fossil-fuel billionaire Wilks brothers. Kirk is a regular on Fox News (owned by billionaire propagandist Rupert Murdoch), and the podcasts of Piers Morgan, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson (all produced by Murdoch). Over the years TPUSA events have heavily featured other billionaire operatives like Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Fox personalities Brian Kilmeade, Greg Gutfield, Jeanine Pirro, Tomi Lahren, Jesse Waters, and Guy Benson.23
Early TPUSA event sponsors included influence operations like the Heritage Foundation, the Job Creators Network, the Leadership Institute, the NRA, and Alliance Defending Freedom.
Kirk’s deep-pocketed origins allowed him to achieve an amazing reach. Today he has over 3 million subscribers on YouTube. TPUSA claims to have over 400,000 student members and "a presence on over 3,500 campuses."4 In 2024 NBC News reported that Kirk's podcast is downloaded between 500,000 and 750,000 times each day.5 It is currently ranked No. 10 on Apple Podcasts for “news.”
Astroturf
Kirk is best understood as a public relations professional whose clients want to market the fossil fuel industry, bigotry, Christian Nationalism, and attacks on academia and government at a campus near you. Below is a small glimpse into reporting on TPUSA’s connections, strategy, and funding in its early years.
From Jane Mayer’s incredible 2017 New Yorker article:
Kirk’s ties to fossil-fuel magnates are controversial because Turning Point has helped organize opposition on campuses to students calling for schools to divest from fossil-fuel companies. Turning Point distributed a guide for college students with a foreword by Kirk, titled “10 Ways Fossil Fuels Improve Our Daily Lives.”…
Kirk told me that “We think targeting fossil fuels is rather unfair, and it is not really in the best interests of the universities to favor one type of political agenda over another.” It’s a message that “went great,” he said, when he delivered it at energy-industry meetings…
A copy of a Turning Point brochure prepared for potential donors that I obtained provides a glimpse into the group’s tactics…
Once in control of student governments, the brochure says, Turning Point expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda. Among its planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on campus, the implementation of “free speech” policies eliminating barriers to hate speech, and the blocking of all campus “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movements. Turning Point’s agenda also calls for…promoting “American Exceptionalism and Free Market ideals on campus.”
Most of the money comes from very rich conservative donors, people such as GOP megadonor Foster Freiss…and the in-laws of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Working to appeal to millennials, TPUSA is funded by a substantial number of older, wealthy individuals whose economic views the group promotes.
Much of [the] budget comes from individual and foundation donors tied to the Koch’s donor network, including the Bradley Foundation and DonorsTrust, which provided $2.3 million…
The donor money has continued to pour in, mostly from a small cadre of CNP billionaires. In 2022, NBC reported:
Turning Point USA, which received just $8 million in contributions in 2016, has raised $138 million over the last five years, according to the organization’s Form 990, a tax document filed by nonprofit groups. And while the organization’s reach continues to grow, its funding base remains relatively small. Roughly half of its 2020 income came from 10 anonymous donors.
TPUSA’s total revenue for 2023 was $82 million.6
TPUSA is not sustained by small dollar, grassroots donations or grant writing. Simply put, Charlie and TPUSA would be unable to do their work without the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve received from fossil-fuel and Christian nationalist billionaires. Charlie Kirk’s funding is an investment in the relgious fundamentalist, regulation-free future they desire.
Higher Grifting
It’s no secret that a contingent of the American business elite have a goal of reshaping academia because they loathe the negative impacts to their business ventures that arise from university research and an educated public. In a 2023 interview with Vox, Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors put it plainly: “For example, if there’s someone doing work on climate change, and a Board of Governors member who has made their wealth in the fossil fuel industry says, ‘Get rid of that guy. I don’t like where his research is going,’ he’s gone.”
Charlie Kirk sees it as his job to get regular Americans—who, unlike the business elite, do not have any reason to care—to also hate academia. TPUSA has been stunningly successful in this regard. Millions of Americans who didn’t used to think so now believe that college is an indoctrination factory.
While other factors may have played a role, TPUSA’s impact cannot be ignored when viewing charts like those below showing a massive shift in Republican thinking on higher education. As a reminder, TPUSA was formed in 2012. The main shift in Republican perception of college began in 2015 as Trump began his campaign. Kirk, who became Donald Trump Jr.’s personal assistant in 2016, was intimately involved in Trump’s rise.7 This national exposure helped to spread Charlie’s anti-college message.
Below is an excerpt from an Inside Higher Ed article on the impact of the 1971 Powell Memo on the thinking of America’s corporate class. The memo was written during an era of American history when the business elite grew determined to dominate campus culture they believed was hostile to their success. Powell’s tactics and strategy are very similar to those employed by Kirk today.
…The goal is to influence the institutions that educate future employees and, of course, those hired to teach them.
Cast in terms of a “culture war” or a “clash of values,” the attacks [on higher education] challenge academic freedom and institutional independence and undermine professional expertise while they advance the “corporate cause” that Powell espoused.
Powell’s 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asserted that “the American economic system is under broad attack” and envisioned a comprehensive, coordinated counteroffensive on the part of the American business community in response.
Powell singled out “The Campus” as “the single most dynamic source” of these attacks.
Powell saw “bright young men,” from campuses across the country,” who were seeking “opportunities to change a system which they have been taught to distrust … if not, indeed, despise.” They sought these opportunities to challenge free market ideology through employment in “the centers of the real power and influence in our country”—namely the news media; in government, as staff and consultants; in elective politics; as lecturers and writers; and on the faculties of educational institutions.
He saw these “bright young men” remaining in key positions of influence where they “mold public opinion and often shape governmental action … end[ing] up in regulatory agencies or governmental departments with large authority over the business system they do not believe in.”
Accordingly, Powell wanted to see the development of scholars and speakers to be strategically placed on campuses. He envisioned “attractive, articulate and well-informed speakers” exerting “whatever degree of pressure—publicly and privately—may be necessary to assure opportunities to speak.” He wrote, “The objective always must be to inform and enlighten, and not merely to propagandize.” (The italics are mine.)
Conservatives became successful in creating language to make their pitch while obscuring their intent. Terms such as “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity,” for example, provide cover for limiting free speech and academic freedom to promote free market orthodoxy. They have made the case that Western civilization itself is under attack in the universities and the job of the conservative foundations and their like-minded brethren is to save it—by, of course, changing higher education.
Attacks on colleges and universities and the professoriate go hand in hand with the mounting distrust of institutions and agencies of government, along with the independent press that keeps those bodies accountable.
Direct moves to diminish, indeed, to question the value of work that university-based scientists and other experts produce adds to the erosion of trust in institutions, spreading into antipathy toward regulatory and other public bodies that antiregulation conservatives, with rhetorical flourish, lump together as comprising “the administrative state.”
A young Charlie Kirk understood the incredible business opportunity before him.
From Politico, 2021:
Those who buy into Turning Point USA—literally buy into it; Kirk calls these donors his “investors”—tend mostly to be men middle-aged or older. Many run family businesses. Some are billionaires. Others are sons of billionaires. Most, of course, are Republicans, and almost all inhabit a conservative media universe that pumps them with anxiety about liberal kids. Kirk is not shy about saying he’s selling them a solution to those worries.
“You can’t watch Fox News without seeing five or six segments a day about the nuttiness on college campuses,” Kirk told me in one of several interviews we conducted starting in November of last year. “You pair that nuttiness up with people in their 60s and 70s who are beginning to map out where they want a significant portion of their wealth to go, and they’re saying, ‘I don’t want my money to go to my university. It’s not representing my values.’ Then we come along.”
In the above passage Kirk is referring to a technique he’d already been employing for years. Kirk would team up with a sister organization to drive coverage of campus liberalism run amok and then fundraise off of it.
Kirk makes himself out to be there hero of this grift story:
“It started with me hustling,” he says. “I was the one seeking out the billionaires to fund a student movement, not the other way around. We are the ones going to investors telling them our vision. It is our enterprise.”
Charlie makes a lot of money catering to the desires of the billionaire class to destory universities.
Propaganda For Christ’s Sake
A direct line can be drawn from the origins of the so-called Moral Majority to the current thriving of TPUSA. Charlie Kirk is a member of the Council For National Policy. Since it’s creation in 1981 by Tim LaHaye and Paul Weyrich, the CNP has been on a mission to destroy secular America and replace it with a Christian nation of their own design. They have been successful beyond their wildest dreams, purifying the Republican party to reflect an anti-democratic vision steeped in religious extremism and the politics of segregation. Many members of Trump’s first cabinet were CNP members. Non-MAGA folks scratch their heads at MAGA folks claiming Trump is a man of God. This phenomenon is directly the result of the national network of evangelical pastors established by the CNP who sell their flocks on this outrageous idea in the name of political expediency.8
The film Bad Faith is a great starting point to better understand this actual conspiracy to destroy American democracy (as opposed to the firehose of faux conspiracies generated by the right’s propaganda complex). It chronicles Paul Weyrich’s masterminding of the Moral Majority–ridding the Southern Baptists of progressive pastors and injecting political activism into every church that he could.
Religious conservative Weyrich was an unparalleled propagandist. He admitted to workshopping as many angles as he possibly could to motivate the largely apolitical Evangelical community to become politically engaged.
A Randall Balmer article about the racist orgins of today’s anti-abortion movement features Weyrich outlining his propaganda strategy:
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
Charlie Kirk is yet another foot soldier in the Christian Nationalist mold, relying on the successful techniques of propagandists past while breathing new life into tactics of the past. He carries on Weyrich’s legacy of harnessing religous communities for political gain, turning church’s into voting blocs.
In 2021 Charlie Kirk founded TPUSA Faith to "recruit pastors and other church leaders to be active in local and national political issues."9 It’s more a get out the vote operation trafficking in culture war outrage politics than a religious pursuit.10 TPUSA Faith organizes voter drives and aims to “‘address America's crumbling religious foundation by engaging thousands of pastors nationwide' in order to 'breathe renewed civic engagement into our churches.’” TPUSA’s twisted version of this playbook is all about guns, glory, and owning the libs.
From Politico:
Turning Point USA is extremely adept at pumping out counterprogramming. It pokes liberals constantly on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It produces ebooks that sound like liberal-trolling blog posts: The Case Against Gun Control; 10 Ways Fossil Fuels Improve Our Daily Lives; 10 Ways America Is the Best Country in the History of the World. From its headquarters in Lemont, Illinois it annually distributes more than a million pieces of literature that go into the “activism kits” mailed to campus chapters. Those kits might include leftism-resistance manuals like “How to Debate Your Teacher (and Win),” or any number of small posters with slogans like “You are entitled to nothing” and “Coexist,” the latter riffing on a liberal bumper sticker by building the word “Coexist” out of illustrated guns and bullets. (The “o” looks like a target site, the “t” like an Uzi.)
The same fossil fuel and religious extremist billionaires and family foundations that fund TPUSA have spent decades supporting similar indoctrination efforts such as the Leadership Institute. From the Leadership Institute website:
…the Leadership Institute is the first and best organization focused on creating conservative leaders who make a difference today and for years to come.
Founded in 1979…the Leadership Institute increases the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in the public policy process. More than 300,000 conservatives have become leaders through Leadership Institute training.
The Institute’s track record of helping conservatives become successful leaders…from college students to journalists and heads of organizations – is unparalleled.
With love, MAGA friends and neighbors, this is the real conspiracy. Kirk and others like him make money by serving the interests of massively funded organizations hell-bent on indoctrinating kids while regularly griping that the “real indoctrinators” are everyone else.
Who really has the brainwashing agenda? A history professor or a guy traveling the country and setting up a tent and a microphone so he can attack minorities, lie about elections, push Great Replacement Theory, and lobby for fossil fuels using exactly the same playbook as other billionaire-funded influence efforts?
Lies, Disrespect, Lionizing Killers
Kirk’s willingness to lie in order to advance his agenda is strong enough that fact check sites like Politifact, FactCheck.org have their own sections on him.
Kirk lied to his audience about the results of the 2020 election and even sent buses of Trump supporters to the Capitol on January 6th. He is willing to mislead, demean, and promote people famous for nothing other than having killed other human beings in order to advance the Christian Nationalist goal of replacing American democracy with a theocracy.
Here’s a small sampling of what happens at Kirk’s propaganda tours.
January 6th wasn’t a big deal:
Gotcha content with kids who know Kirk spreads trans hate but have better things to do than show up with examples:
“Leftists” don’t have girlfriends:
What does the below Fox screenshot have to do with TPUSA’s stated mission “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom?” Is Elon Musk not free? Or is this culture war indoctrination?
TPUSA used its “Amerifest” event to deify Kyle Rittenhouse, a young man who killed two people. This is part of a pattern of propaganda on the MAGA right—including the honoring of Daniel Penny—that encourages violence against whomever the party deems unfavored in society. As far as I am aware, no other Christian movement in the country celebrates people who kill other people. This video shows Kirk and others chanting Kyle’s name as Rittenhouse is brought on stage as his own theme song is played and pyrotechnics go off.
Racism and Bigotry
From its origins TPUSA has been a racist organization. Charlie got the seed money for TPUSA from Islamaphobic billionaire Foster Friess who promoted the idea of “productive intolerance” towards Muslims. Friess was the biggest backer of Rick Santorum in his 2012 presidential campaign. Below is a screenshot from a CBS News interview with Santorum about remarks he made on the campaign trail that singled out Black people as being dependent on welfare and implied that they don’t want to work. That’s Foster Friess with the white hair standing behind him.
Media Matters For America has an exhaustive list of racist remarks by TPUSA members and leadership and the groups ties to white nationalism. The list alone should give people the understanding that Kirk is a bigot who is incapable of living up to the Christian values he claims to hold dear. This abject racism does not appear to have had any impact on TPUSA’s funding.
A sampling from MMFA:
Former TPUSA national field director Crystal Clanton sent text messages to another TPUSA employee that said, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” Kirk had previously said about Clanton: “Turning Point needs more Crystals; so does America.”
After reportedly firing Clanton when her racist text message became public, Kirk hired Shialee Grooman and Troy Meeker to replace her. HuffPost reported that Grooman had written several anti-gay and racist tweets that included the N-word, and that Meeker had also tweeted an anti-Black slur. HuffPost also reported that former TPUSA Midwest regional manager Timon Prax was pushed out because of his record of using “bigoted language in tweets and texts,” including racist jokes and messages that “made fun of black people and referred to them as slaves.”
Riley Grisar, former president of TPUSA’s Las Vegas chapter, praised white supremacy, saying, “We’re gonna rule the country! White power!” and using the N-word in a video uncovered by the antifascist website It’s Going Down.
According to Talking Points Memo and The Informant, TPUSA advisory council member Rip McIntosh sent an email newsletter that “said Black people have ‘become socially incompatible with other races’ and ‘American Black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.’” The essay in the newsletter copied and pasted much of its text from the white nationalist website American Renaissance. The newsletter “included Turning Point’s logo and a fundraising appeal for the group.”
The president of Turning Point USA’s University of Missouri chapter made a racist social media post mocking the death of Black students at the University of Virginia. The post included use of the N-word.
TPUSA originally listed Gab, a white supremacist-friendly social media platform, as a sponsor for its 2018 Student Action Summit but “quietly dropped the company” shortly before the event.
Kirk also called George Floyd “a scumbag” during a speech in Minnesota where he derided urban spaces and claimed that the state “built by wonderful Scandinavians” is “being destroyed now, rather intentionally.”
After Tucker Carlson asserted his support of the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory on Fox News, Kirk defended him, saying, “Nothing he said there is controversial. It's factual and it's true.” Later on in the show, Kirk said that Carlson made him “so proud” for doubling down on the racist conspiracy.
Kirk suggested the U.S. should “deputize a citizen force, put them on the border” in order to protect “white demographics in America.”
After her nomination to the Supreme Court, Kirk said that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “is what your country looks like on critical race theory.”
Kirk said that Vice President “Kamala Harris has now become the jive speaking spokesperson of equity.”
After his removal from Fox News, Kirk passionately defended Carlson’s racist text messages. He said, “Tucker Carlson did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.”
After he resigned as Tucker Carlson’s head writer following resurfaced racist and sexist posts in an online forum, Kirk hired Blake Neff as his show’s producer. According to CNN, Neff, responding to a 2018 thread with the subject line, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” He replied, “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no.”
The above is just a small portion of MMFA’s research.
When called out for his grift in 2017, Kirk’s organization responded with anti-semitism:
From Jane Mayer:
Gabrielle Fequiere, a former Turning Point employee, told me that she was the only African-American hired as a field director when she worked with the group, three years ago. “In looking back, I think it was racist,” she said. “At the time, I was blaming myself, and I thought I did something wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a model, recalled that the young black recruits that she brought into the organization suddenly found themselves disinvited from the group’s annual student summit, and that when she herself attended, she watched speakers there who “spoke badly about black women having all these babies out of wedlock. It was really offensive.”
Despite structural racism’s well-documented existence and reams of scholarship on the realities of its impact on society, Charlie Kirk obsessively denies racism exists in America in any impactful way. Here he is “debating” Brianna Joy Gray, asking her how it’s possible for her to have gotten into Harvard if racism exists:
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Kirk has made the obviously racist claim that when he sees a Black pilot, he is worried they might be unqualified. Here a college kid confronts him on it. When Kirk starts lying the kid backs down:
Here’s another video of Kirk lying about the facts to spread a racist message.
Kirk’s anti-DEI propaganda is based on misreprenting reality. His claim that standards are lowered to increase hiring of unqualified black people and women are easily refuted in just a few minutes of Google searching. From an NBC article:
One statement in particular from United CEO Scott Kirby is being misquoted on social media. Kirby told Axios in a 2021 interview that the company wants 50% of its flight academy “classes” to be women or people of color. Flight academy students are at the start of their careers, years away from being hired as pilots for any major airline, but some critics of diversity are saying incorrectly that Kirby made a pledge about 50% of “hires.”
Here’s Kirk saying prominent Black women don’t have the “brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” There are other videos in this post where Kirk displays more of his racist agenda.
Here’s Charlie lying about the death of George Floyd to push the racist agenda that he was an irredeemable drug addict and deny the results of the medical examiner’s investigation and the Floyd family’s independent autopsy. Both found that Floyd was murdered.
Guys, Charlie Kirk is proven to lie in order to advance a racist agenda. Charlie Kirk is racist.
Conclusion
Charlie Kirk is a grifter who tours the country on behalf of Christian Nationalists to destroy support for higher education and indoctrinate America’s youth into cheering for an anti-democratic, bigoted ideology. He is a billionaire employee manipulating kids and he’s making millions of dollars doing it.
Appendix
The public does not sufficiently grasp the awesome power of the right wing propaganda ecosystem and its ability to manipulate American minds and shape our national outcomes. There is a wealth of scholarship on this topic. Here’s some recommended further reading:
Nicole Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right
Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network
Nancy MacLean’s Democracy In Chains
Jeff Nesbitt’s Poison Tea
Jen Senko’s The Brainwashing of My Dad.
More incredible work is done on a regular basis by Media Matters for America.
In case this somehow wasn’t enough information about Charlie Kirk and Christian Nationalism, here are some articles for further reading:
The Imminent Threat Of Christian Nationalism
Trump has put Christian nationalists in key roles – say a prayer for free speech
Charlie Kirk: Young US Hero of MAGA
How a right-wing provocateur is using race to reach Gen Z
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Here’s to healthier information,
Brian
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https://web.archive.org/web/20170808135151/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-21-year-old-becoming-a-major-player-in-conservative-politics/451110/
https://www.tpusa.com/
https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/who-funds-conservative-campus-group-turning-point-usa-donors-revealed-2620325
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/charlie-kirk-ronna-mcdaniel-rnc-trump-rcna139288
https://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/who-funds-conservative-campus-group-turning-point-usa-donors-revealed-2620325
https://paddockpost.com/2024/10/19/how-revenue-is-spent-at-turning-point-usa-2023/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/charlie-kirk-young-us-hero-of-maga/ar-AA1sSPeZ
https://barnraisingmedia.com/christian-nationalism-donald-trump-lance-wallnau/
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/5tayi
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/23/turning-point-rightwing-youth-group-critics-tactics
Charlie Kirk is a child abuser. He poisons the minds of young people.
I weep for the future...and the present (sometimes literally). The propaganda is so strong that it is horrifying. We are in trouble due to an amazingly long structured organization of filthy rich, horrible people. And this was a great piece about a name that I keep hearing but no very little about.