Logan, Utah
AP
—
Turning Point USA’s faculty tour will return to Utah on Tuesday for its first occasion within the state since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated on a school campus earlier this month.
The cease, at Utah State University in Logan, is about two hours north of Utah Valley University, the place Kirk was killed September 10 by a gunman who fired a single shot by the group whereas Kirk was talking. The suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, briefly attended Utah State.
The assassination of a high ally of President Donald Trump and one of the crucial important figures in his Make America Great Again motion has galvanized conservatives, who’ve vowed to keep it up Kirk’s mission of encouraging young voters to embrace conservatism and moving American politics additional proper.
Kirk himself has been celebrated as a “martyr” by many on the correct, and Turning Point USA, the youth group he based, has seen a surge of curiosity throughout the nation, with tens of thousands of requests to launch new chapters in excessive faculties and on faculty campuses.
Tuesday’s occasion, which was scheduled earlier than Kirk’s dying, will showcase how Turning Point is discovering its path forward without its charismatic chief, who headlined lots of its occasions and was instrumental in drawing crowds and a spotlight.
The faculty tour is now being headlined by a few of the greatest conservative names, together with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck. Tuesday’s occasion will characteristic 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 can additional a pledge his widow, Erika Kirk, made to proceed the campus tour and the work of the group he based. She now oversees Turning Point together with a steady of her late husband’s former aides and associates.
Erika Kirk has sought to guarantee her husband’s followers that she intends to proceed to run the operation as her late husband supposed, intently following plans he laid out to her and to employees.
“We’re not going anywhere. We have the blueprints. We have our marching orders,” she mentioned throughout an look on his podcast final week.
That will embrace, she mentioned, persevering with to tape the every day podcast.
“My husband’s voice will live on. The show will go on,” she mentioned, asserting plans for a rotating forged of hosts. She mentioned they supposed to lean closely on outdated clips of her husband, together with answering callers’ questions.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 mentioned.
Erika Kirk, nevertheless, made clear that she doesn’t intend to seem on the podcast typically, and to this point appears to be assuming a extra behind-the-scenes function than her husband.
Mikey McCoy, Kirk’s former chief of employees, mentioned Erika Kirk is in every day contact with members of the Trump administration, and has described her as “very strategic” and completely different from her husband.
The occasions to this point have served as tributes to the late Kirk, with a deal with prayer, in addition to the question-and-answer classes for which he was identified.
At Virginia Tech final week, the state’s Republican Gov., Glenn Youngkin, urged the group 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 mentioned. “All of you.”
He additionally praised Erika Kirk as an “extraordinary” chief.
“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 mentioned. “Is there anyone better to lead Turning Point going forward than Erika Kirk?”
He then turned the stage over to Kelly, who mentioned Charlie Kirk had requested her to be part of the tour a number of months in the past. She mentioned she knew showing onstage carried threat, however felt it was vital 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 mentioned to loud cheers.
At one other occasion on the University of Minnesota final week, conservative commentator Michael Knowles gave a solo speech in lieu of the two-man dialog with Kirk that was initially deliberate. Then he continued Kirk’s custom of responding to questions from the viewers, which ranged from one man quibbling about Catholic doctrine to one other arguing that the foundation of societal issues stems from letting girls vote. (To the latter, he responded that ladies aren’t to blame as a result of “men need to lead women.”)
As Knowles spoke, a highlight shined on a chair left empty for Kirk.
Knowles mentioned Kirk was instrumental in conserving collectively disparate conservative factions, and he worries in regards to the MAGA motion fracturing without Kirk doing the day-to-day work to construct bridges between warring teams.
“Charlie was the unifying figure for the movement. It’s simply a fact,” he mentioned. “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 mentioned. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”