Charlie Kirk, was raised in the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights, Illinois. Kirk became politically active during high school. In his junior year of school in 2010, Kirk volunteered for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk.
In 2012 when he was a senior at Wheeling High School, Kirk wrote an essay for Breitbart News alleging liberal bias in high school textbooks leading to an appearance on the Fox Business Network. Charlie founded Turning Point USA. At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Kirk met Foster Friess, a Republican donor, and persuaded him to finance the organisation.
Kirk addressed the 2016 Republican National Convention. In an interview with Wired magazine during the convention, Kirk said that while he “was not the world’s biggest Donald Trump fan,” he would vote for him, and that Trump’s candidacy made Turning Point’s mission more difficult. The Dallas Morning News described Kirk as leading the “millennial assault” for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Kirk wrote the 2018 book Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters.
In 2018, Kirk praised Kanye West for getting involved in politics and advocating for President Trump. Later that year when Taylor Swift endorsed a Democrat in the Tennessee Senate race, Kirk condemned her endorsement and told her to “stay away from politics.”
In May 2019, Charlie Kirk was awarded an honorary doctorate from Liberty University, a private evangelical Christian university co-founded by Jerry Falwell. In July 2019, Kirk became Chairman of Students for Trump and launched a campaign to recruit one million students for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign.
