Understanding Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk in politics and faith

Understanding Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk in politics and faith

By Hunter CG

Turning Point USA is the most successful and well-funded political youth organization in the United States. It operates 900 chapters of various sizes at universities across the USA and Canada, and also has a UK based organization Turning Point UK. TPUSA focuses on major flagship universities or Division I schools referring to the top league in American College sports. For the international readers, college sports are a major American cultural force and have more viewers than major league sports by fans who have no connection to the colleges.

Coming from Louisiana, the love of Louisiana State University bordered religion. 

Turning Point College Chapters operate similarly to European political student organisations like Austria’s Ring Freiheitlicher Studenten (RFS) or Italy’s Azione Studentesca (AS). These are poltically committed groups trying to be the ideological vanguard of the Republican Party and Conservative future. 

Each of these 900+ Turning Point chapters has their own structure, chairperson, executive committee, membership, events, training, campaigns, etc. Even a very small chapter means there is a direct connection into that university, through those students' ability to affect other parts of the university governance including student government. 

Turning Point directly funds the election campaigns of their activists when they run for student government or other positions of university governance. Turning Point understands that by taking over parts of the university TPUSA can use the resources of the University to further their reactionary ideological goals. 

Every Student Government budget they control,( including )  Faculty Senate, Student Union, Club, Committee, Group and more is another sphere of society that can be turned towards their political goals. This process is slow, and sometimes doesn’t work or blows up in their faces, but each student brought into the TPUSA world is a political soldier and renewable resource in the wider ideological war against the left and liberalism. 

Making( Leading )  young people (to) vote for Trump is a side effect of the actual goal of Turning Point USA. The actual goal is recruitment, bringing young people into a spiritual war against the left. It is to build up a religiously and ideologically driven cadre of activists to run the Republican Party and Society at Large. TPUSA and TPUK exist to create political soldiers for their counterreformation against secular liberal democracy. ( The goal is to enlist ) Soldiers that can staff the offices of politicians.

Turning Point also operates High School Chapters as well, meaning young people can spend a significant amount of their lives in a Turning Point organisation unbroken( continuously ?) . Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk conservative politicians have proclaimed they want to start Turning Point USA chapters at every high school, including the Republican controlled government of Oklahoma. 

Turning Point also is a christian ( Christian capital C) nationalist revivalist movement. It operated Turning Point USA Faith, their christian recruitment arm. Charlie Kirk told Pastors at TPUSA Faith’s Pastor’s Summit that TPUSA Faith’s No. 1 Mission is to ‘Excommunicate Wokeism From the American Church as Quickly as Possible.’ 

Turning Point USA Faith works with major religious figures in the christian right to recruit conservative christians into their organisation which broadens their appeal beyond just college and high school students to a  ( wider Cristian community ) (all Christians)  ( take out -everywhere) . Turning Point USA Faith works with famous prosperity gospel preachers like Paula White and funds New Apostolic Reformation preacher Sean Feuchts who wishes  to bring about a fundamentalist christian theocracy while enriching himself through faith healing and grifting off his audience. 

To give you a clear idea on what kinds of operations TPUSA Faith runs this was their 2022 program:

• “TPUSA has hired a network of 32 fulltime Faith Representatives to launch Faith Groups across the country. Recruitment ads sought people with the traits of “grassroots humility” and a “warrior spirit.””

• “Freedom Night in America is a series of events “designed to equip Pastors, congregations, and empower the faith community to put their faith into action.””

• “The Saving America Tour with Charlie Kirk organizes events in churches.”

• “Biblical Citizenship classes developed with David Barton of the WallBuilders will teach America’s Christian roots.”

• “Freedom Life Church is a new network of TPUSA-aligned congregations.”

• “Freedom Square is a forum on a series of political and church-state issues.”

It also has to be mentioned that Turning Point USA and all the other entities of this group participated in the planning of January 6th and spreading election denial conspiracies. Kirk is on record saying he paid for buses to bring people to Washington DC to see Trump give his speech that began the attack on the capitol. Made possible by Publix grocery store heiress Julie Fancelli who gave Kirk's organizations $1.25 million to fund the buses to the January 6 event. Kirk also paid $60,000 for Kimberly Guilfoyle to speak at the January 6th rally. Turning Point’s purpose is to create political soldiers.

Turning Point has been around for a decade, it has since the beginning had a massive amount of funding that has only grown over time as it was seen as a successful operation for Right. Bill Montgomery the cofounder provided the initial multimillion dollar funding. Giving TPUSA far more budget than any of its party political or independent competitors. As of 2023 TPUSA has a revenue of 85 million dollars a year and 458 employees. Now it is much larger and has way more money. TPUSA is a nonprofit organisation and Kirk’s salary upon death was $407,000 a year.

Turning Point runs several major conferences that happen annually or more often bringing together several thousand young people with right wing political and media elites. TPUSA runs Student Action Summit, TPUSA Faith Forward Pastors Summit, Young Women's Leadership Summit, Young Black Leadership Summit, and AmericaFest. Along with these major conferences it also hosts a ton of other events, seminars, training, talks, etc. These national activities are just one part of the total Turning Point activities which are also being organised on the chapter level too. Additionally it partners with other Right wing organizations to host conferences like Dream City and provides activist grants for people to pursue their own projects. There is also a think tank Kirk set up with Jerry Falwell Jr. called the Falkirk Centre for Faith and Liberty and a SuperPAC Turning Point Action to target Democrats and Moderate Republicans.

All of these activities are possible because there is a lot of money and powerful Republicans backing Turning Point. Including early Republican Megadonor Foster Friess, Barry Russell the president and CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, Richard Uihlein, and the Donors Trust. Now in late 2025 Turning Point has effectively unlimited donor funding to endlessly expand and scale their operations along with capacity and the trust to experiment and fail in the process of their operations. 

Turning Point also operates as a major media platform elevating conservative content creators and providing “wingnut welfare” salaries for right wing creators to continue producing content without the pressure of not knowing if they will make enough each month to keep going. Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA are why people like antisemite and Harvey Weinstein Truther, Candace Owens and Racist Conspiracy Theorist Benny Johnson are household names. TPUSA provided a major platform and stable work so they could continue doing what they were already doing, growing the right wing movement and fighting the left. Likewise TPUSA provided work for constant Conspiracy Theorist and literal neo nazi creator Jack Posobiec. Making Jack the host of the TPUSA show Human Events Daily. These are just a few of the big names you might know of, but there is a horde of TPUSA creators who have worked for them over the years. Likewise each of the TPUSA events acts as paid opportunities for creators to meet political and media elites and their audiences.

TPUSA through their conferences and their participation with other conferences like CPAC and National Conservative Conference creates a massive calendar of cheap and accessible Right wing community events that people of all Right wing backgrounds can attend regularly. This ever expanding community space keeps people inside the movement, keeps more people coming in, and deepens people’s involvement. TPUSA offers multiple avenues to enter, engage, take up leadership and grow in the party political right. TPUSA also is core in connecting the American right youth to the broader international right. As both TPUSA and its partners like NatCon and CPAC have built up international bodies and events. Engaging with their sister parties and movements abroad, building the great transnational right. 

This is also why the death of Charlie Kirk was a much bigger event, he wasn’t just an American influencer, he was a major youth leader of the nationalist international. He created and ran perhaps the most influential political youth organisation in American history, he built up a cadre of organised activists and soldiers that is measured in the hundreds of thousands. An organisation that has hundreds of well paid employees, entire departments of people working to organise the right youth of the United States. An organisation that provided the staffers for Trump’s civil service. An organisation that is funding a political religious revival to create an American Theocracy. An organisation that bussed people to Trump’s attempted insurrection against the American Republic on January 6th. 

Charlie Kirk wasn’t just a podcaster, that was frankly the least of all the things he did. Charlie Kirk planted a forest, he built a political machine. It was achievable and scalable because of immense funding and support by rich Republican donors. This is the simple secret sauce to replicate such success. If Democrats want their own Turning Point USA, then Democratic Donors and Democratic Politicians need to put their money and reputation behind it. This will require tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of paid staffers, and years of work and effort across the country to achieve what TPUSA has already achieved. Post Assassination with the full backing and support of the White House and the mass expansion to High Schools it will require double that. 

This is not impossible, and is a necessity. In the immediate term the Democratic Party on the Local, State and National Level need to direct substantial funding towards their youth and student wings. This means that organisations like Young Democrats and College Democrats need to each have a TPUSA level of funding, resources and staff. This funding needs to be at each level of these organizations as well. This is why TPUSA focuses on T1 universities. They have a lot of people, dense audiences, easy opportunities to be seen and have successful events. Even better, there are enough people to have counterprotestors which brings more attention to TPUSA. 

The Democratic Party though cannot afford to fund such an operation itself. In short it can’t because instead of having membership dues like a normal 21st century political party, it depends on donations and donors. This is obviously a terrible model and this is why modern political parties have membership dues to make them not as dependent on wealthy donor generosity. The Republican Party also doesn’t have membership dues, but has a much more active, fanatical and bigger donor base of billionaires and industry. 

This could be changed, and would fundamentally change how Democratic politics would operate and where power lies, but that would require a lot. With about 44 million registered Democrats in 2025, even $1 a month membership due would yield $528,000,000 a year. For comparison TPUSA’s annual revenue is 85m a year. But delving into this big change isn’t immediately relevant to this piece. 

Instead we must try to attract donors towards directly donating to the party institutions instead of solely candidates or SuperPACs. Without direct funding of the Democratic Party and the structures of the Democratic Party it is a hollow skeleton we are trying to wield against a well oiled mechanical giant. It is trying to play politics on the cheap, while absurdly wasting tons of money on fruitless efforts. The near double the spending of Democrats in 2024 over Republicans shows how poorly resources are being allocated in Democratic politics. Though this also presents the reality that resources are available to be used, but are not being used wisely. 

Overcoming this will require someone or a group convincing donors of the material benefits of investing Party Institutions in a massive and sustained way, likewise massively funding other groups in the Democratic Party orbit who already are achieving successes. Including groups like the wildly successful NYC-DSA or Indivisible. Organisations whose only limitations are their limited budgets. There are individual rich Democrats that can drop a million or more onto organisations and dramatically change their capacity. Even smaller regular donations of a few thousand can provide a student or youth organisation the ability to dramatically expand their activities. So many political organizations on the Left operate on tiny budgets and simply what their members can pool together or fundraise. This could be changed by a few rich people putting their money where their politics is. 

For example, I want to put together a Liberal-Left CPAC or NatCon style conference series, let’s call it Democracy Conference or DemCon. To put this on I need to fundraise minimally $600,000 to $1 Million dollars. This funding would go primarily to the cost of the event itself. With the idea to bring together around 4,000 people from across the Liberal-Left world both politicians, cultural figures and regular activists. With the goal of having a very low cost ticket like CPAC which costs $42 for four days of events. 

A million dollars is a lot of money, and more than I will ever personally have. Yet for rich donors this is not much, and for Billionaire politicians like JB Pritzker it wouldn’t even be noticed. The willingness for Right wing donors to fund these sorts of events is why they exist and how organizations like CPAC can have a major event on nearly every continent every year for tens of thousands of right wing people to attend. Likewise with TPUSA, which just through their conferences brings in thousands of people every year, nonstop. Kirk himself met his early funders and backers attending Republican conferences and connecting with politicians and donors. 

Further we need to understand that TPUSA operates as a political youth organization, a multimedia company, news agency, religious organization, and event planner simultaneously. In addition to many more things. Meaning that just funding groups like Young Democrats or College Democrats isn’t enough, it also requires expanding the scope of what their organizations do and providing the staff and funding to do it. It isn’t enough to have a person or small team doing communications, you need to build an internal media company. 

This would also require donors being comfortable in supporting Democratic creators of all sorts and having no direct oversight over their output. This is what makes TPUSA so successful and how it has incubated dozens of major voices for the Right. This means paying to send Hasan Piker or someone equally as large an influencer on a similar campus tour to Kirk’s. Hasan was set to debate Kirk before his death. 

One of the bigger problems is how to develop a religious section for the Democratic Party that can operate as a counter to Turning Point USA Faith. The American Christian Right has many incredibly powerful and well funded groups pushing all Christians towards ever more reactionary positions. This will be a much harder task to accomplish, but it is not optional. If we want to have the faith community believe in democracy and democratic values then we need to engage with faith as a fundamental part of political life. It cannot be ignored or left to the Right to devour. Not only due to the political cost, but the personal cost charlatans and false prophets inflict upon their followers. When people like Sean Fuechts promise faith healing and anti vax views people forgo medicine. This causes suffering and often death. This sphere overlaps the Make America Healthy Again movement which is based on intertwining conspirituality. 

Democracy and democratic ideals need to reach every community, and every faith. When it only operates in the secular world antidemocratic views proliferate in the spiritual world. The fusion of politics and faith, the collapse of the belief in a separation of church and state act as a powerful catalyst for democratic backsliding. When people believe there is no compromise, there is only the word of god, then democratic politics becomes impossible. This is the world Charlie Kirk pushed, that any opponents to his views were fundamentally illegitimate. That these opponents should not be compromised with or allowed to ever rule. That God wills this.

Democracy depends upon minority rights for the opposition. The belief that the opposition has no rights is anti-democratic. Kirk pushed. and TPUSA will continue to push for the end of democracy, the end of opposition. Kirk was and TPUSA is now set up to be highly effective in pushing this position, and organising for its end. Changing this will require immense effort, resources, and lots of money. Donors need to directly fund the Democratic Party, Young Democrats, College Democrats and other Party institutions with tens of millions of dollars in annual funding. Only funding campaigns is not enough as campaigns don’t last past an election. Long term stable funding of party structures, party media, independent creators, and building up parallel institutions to CPAC, TPUSA, Turning Point USA Faith, etc is required and not optional. This is the game, we can either play and win or continue losing. It’s time for donors to open their wallets and give activists the resources to save Democracy.