Turning Point USA, an organization that seeks to bring conservative principles to college campuses, is reporting a sharp surge in interest for new university chapters as the group pushes to carry forward founder Charlie Kirk’s vision after his assassination last week.
Andrew Kolvet, executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said Sunday that in just 48 hours TPUSA has received more than 32,000 inquiries from people seeking to launch campus chapters.
“To put that in perspective, TPUSA currently has 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters, with a presence of 3,500 total,” Kolvet, who is also a TPUSA spokesman, noted on the X platform.
“Charlie’s vision to have a Club America chapter (our high school brand) in every high school in America (around 23,000) will come true much, much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined,” Kolvet added, describing the response to expand Kirk’s mission “truly incredible.”
“This is the Turning Point,” he noted in a separate post.
Kirk was assassinated Wednesday afternoon during an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, the first stop in what was planned as his “American Comeback Tour.”
Kirk, 31, rose to prominence for his signature political debates on college campuses during which he would give ample and equal time to students who disagreed with his views.
On Thursday evening, his casket was flown from Utah to Arizona aboard Air Force Two, accompanied by Vice President JD Vance, second lady Usha Vance, and Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk. Video of the transfer showed Erika visibly emotional on the tarmac as the casket passed. The couple shared two young children, Fox News reported.
A celebration of life for Charlie Kirk is scheduled for next Sunday at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. President Donald Trump has confirmed he will attend the funeral, Fox stated.
On Friday evening, Kirk’s widow rallied the TPUSA movement, pledging to carry forward her husband’s mission.
“To everyone listening tonight across America, the movement my husband built will not die,” Kirk said. “I refuse to let that happen. No one will ever forget my husband’s name. And I will make sure of it. It will become stronger. Bolder. Louder and greater than ever,” Kirk said.
She also confirmed that TPUSA’s annual “AmericaFest” conference in Phoenix will proceed as scheduled this December.
Judah Waxelbaum, a former Republican campus activist at Arizona State University, said the assassination had likely awakened a “sleeping giant” and predicted a surge in membership.
“Turning Point’s not going anywhere. Turning Point, I think, will probably actually get significantly larger in the wake of what happened to Charlie,” he told Fox News Digital on Saturday. “You couldn’t do youth politics in Arizona, really anywhere in the United States, without coming across Charlie Kirk.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve woken up a sleeping giant,” he added.
Republicans have criticized Democrats for years over their increasingly violent and heated rhetoric, referring to President Trump as “Hitler” and his supporters as “fascists” who are “threats to democracy.”
But one prominent Democrat – Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania – is pushing back on his party’s hate speech.
“I — if you actually compare him to an actual autocrat, that is not — that is not just that,” Fetterman said in a discussion with CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju, who had suggested that Trump was autocratic.
“Now, last night, for example, people were complaining, you know, they’re protesting about, ‘Oh, that’s Hitler, Hitler.’ I think you just don’t ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler and those kinds of extreme things,” he continued, noting that “we have to turn the temperature down” after Kirk’s assassination.
“It’s like, we can’t compare people to these kinds of figures in history,” he told Raju.
“And this is not an autocrat,” he said of Trump. “This is a product of a democratic election. We lost, and the America…people put us in the minority, and now that’s — that’s democracy.”
