Debunking the Charlie Kirk Origin Story
First, let me say this will not be the usual ‘debunking’ post you see on my account. There is a narrative to challenge that Kirk uses in his 28-minute interview with The Daily Caller (who titled its video his ‘origin story’). But this post will give some context to the story Kirk tells, and argue how that origin affects him and the organization he began.
In what seems to be during Turning Point USA’s recent Teen Student Action Summit in June 2019, Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point, sat for an extended interview with the conservative Daily Caller. In that video, which the DC called ‘The Charlie Kirk Origin Story’ and posted August 3, 2019, Kirk shares never-before-heard details about his youth and origins of Turning Point.
Those details shed new light on the impact on Kirk from the Tea Party and the 2008 financial crisis. If you want more on Kirk’s origin story, read my analysis of his first Breitbart post here. Also here is two minutes from what Turning Point calls the speech that launched the organization.
West Point Denial
I’ll begin here even though it is not the first subject they discuss because Kirk rewrites his own questionable history on this subject to hide that original dubious origin story.
Kirk said he was “really disappointed” to not get into West Point. He said that rejection was a “gift God has given me.”
But he adds: “It is easy though to want to play the victim in times like that. I remember feeling for like a week or two weeks, I am the victim. Feel sorry for me.” He then got sick of that and started Turning Point.
This elides the story he has told more than once about the reasons he said he was rejected from West Point.
The New Yorker in its December 2017 profile of Kirk wrote that “the slot he considered his went to [quoting Kirk here] ‘a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion’ whose test scores he claimed he knew. (Kirk said he was being sarcastic when he made the comment.)”
Yet in April 2018 Politico in its profile of Kirk wrote that “Kirk told me — and has said in public several times — that in high school he received a congressional appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but lost that slot to a different candidate — a person he told me was of ‘a different ethnicity and gender.’ He believes the other candidate may have been admitted because of affirmative action. (West Point officials have said they do consider race in admissions, but only for candidates who also fully meet their admission criteria.)”
[According to West Point, a little more than half of the students nominated actually are qualified academically. And only half of those qualified are accepted.]
In October 2018 The Chicago Tribune wrote: “[Kirk] had wanted to go to West Point but wasn’t selected — he claimed in a 2015 speech that he lost out to “a far less-qualified applicant in my district that was of a different gender and a different persuasion,” but now says he was just repeating something he’d been told — so with his parents’ blessing, he decided to take a chance. Two days after graduating from Wheeling, he formed Turning Point USA.”
Here is that 2015 speech.
It is obvious Kirk has tried to “spin” his earliest comments about the denial — sarcasm, repeating what he was told (by who?).
But also it is clear why he is erasing those comments.
Kirk doesn’t need anymore the outrage generated by the line about who got the seat. The line aided him as a teen to boomer donors and conservative audiences and gained him a platform.
But now with a huge platform and at age 25, the line has more negatives than positives.
One, it draws attention to his desire to go to college — an institution he has routinely attacked.
Two, the racial and “persuasion” aspect, with persuasion most likely a nod to homosexuality, also draws countering attention to his efforts to downplay the racism at times in his organization. And now with a gay director of communications, the line hurts.
So Kirk has changed his focus on the reason for denial to religion. That aspect aids him with teens who face “closed doors” and want some way to face them. It’s uplifting, not victimhood. And yes, Kirk has played the victim on that line for at least six years.
What is new in regard to details to this denial story is Kirk’s summary of his family economic situation. He said the 2008 financial crisis/recession hurt his “upper middle class” family in Illinois and four years later he was faced with the prospect of paying for college on his own.
This fact certainly could have led Kirk to apply to West Point as that is paid for by the government. As Kirk notes, that is repaid by at least five years in active service as an officer.
After he was denied acceptance, though Kirk said he wasn’t willing/wasn’t ready to take out “$50,000” in loans for college.
Kirk has said he was accepted by Baylor in Waco. Baylor tuition, room and board, and fees, per semester in 2012 was at least $15,000. The link above also notes after starting Turning Point Kirk took courses at a Chicagoland community college.
One conservative media site which interviewed him in 2012 said Kirk was planning on entering Baylor in January 2013. During the months before Kirk was “organizing debates” on the national debt “at as many colleges as possible throughout the Midwest.”
Kirk also says in the video he told his parents he wanted to take a “gap year,” which would imply he was going to apply to some college after that.
But then he met Bill Montgomery who offered to fund him to fulfill the vision of a conservative youth political group.
Kirk’s High School
The desire to go to West Point and join the armed services seems out of step for a guy who was not in ROTC (I can’t find any time he has mentioned it) and who described his high school years at formative for his political activism.
What seems apparent is that the 2008 recession had a tremendous impact on Kirk personally and like a segment of the Republican Party, he became more activist after it. That Kirk was forced by that recession to pay for college on his own though coming from a “comfortable” economic situation says a lot. He certainly could have tied his denial from West Point and his family’s inability to pay for his college to his political ideology.
That segment of the Republican Party mentioned above is of course the Tea Party. It began in the aftermath of the 2008 government bailout of major banks under Bush late in his term, which Obama approved.
The noted start of the Tea Party is February 2009, just after Obama’s auto bailout and just as his stimulus package was passed.
Ironically, Kirk aided the 2010 Senate campaign of Mark Kirk (no relation). The latter Kirk was very much not a Tea Party darling. The former Kirk said he did it on a whim.
Yet Charlie Kirk toured Tea Party groups in the Midwest in the summer of 2012. The Tea Party was largely funded by the Koch brothers who indirectly funds Turning Point. The first major donor to Turning Point USA, Foster Friess, is also a major donor to Koch brothers’ political activities. Montgomery also has ties to the Kochs.
I did a thread on the Tea Party and Kirk here. In 2014 Kirk spoke to a Tea Party group about Obama.
What about Kirk’s high school experience so formed his political ideology?
Kirk notes that despite his upper middle class situation he went to a lower median income school. It was also a school that was tremendously diverse by race and nationality. Kirk notes as white he was a minority in the school. The school website says 17 countries are represented at the school.
It also notes that “the graduating Class of 2011 boasted the highest ACT math sub-test score of 23.1 and composite score of 22.1 in our school’s history.” And 96% go on to higher education. [West Points notes that the mean score on the ACT math for its incoming freshmen is 29.]
Kirk notes of his high school: “I knew people who were in this country illegally. I went to high school with them.”
In that thread I linked to above, I asked why does Kirk sympathize with white privilege, denying racism broadly? I then linked to a study that “found people who supported the Tea Party were more likely to feel resentment against races other than their own…”
The study adds that “those supporting the Tea Party relied more strongly on their racial resentment in evaluating Obama.”
Kirk said he was “naturally conservative” and tried at his high school to “convince people who had never heard a Republican conservative in their life.”
It’s clear that after 2010 Kirk became even more anti-Obama and for the Tea Party, which has been seen in rhetorical style as a forerunner of Trump.
In that 2015 speech, Kirk says that he started to pay more attention to politics after getting rejected from West Point during his spring semester of senior year in high school.
He said he saw Moveon.org — the Democratic grassroots organization — in his school many times a week. Kirk has said many times that he pitched Turning Point to donors as a conservative Moveon.org. He said then he went to the Illinois GOP, asking for help to start a youth conservative group. Kirk said the state GOP didn’t think it was a good idea. It was after that he pitched his ‘gap year’ to his parents. Which he says was actually 90 days.
Most fascinating Kirk mentions in the DC interview an August 4 2011 tweet made about Trump, urging him to run for president. “Your country needs you,” Kirk wrote. Trump’s name was popping up then but he decided not to run in 2012.
The New Culture War
This Tea Party ideology that Kirk has doesn’t have roots in the “culture wars” of the 90s between Christian conservatives and allies of President Clinton. Instead this new culture war is depicted as an economic populist uprising against the “big government” that bailed out corporations. However off that historical narrative is, there was and remains real anger and activism behind it. Kirk is a product of that.
Kirk was asked about the “rise” of conservative activity post-2012 and up to Trump announcing in 2015. He said it was a combination of the rise of social media, Trump himself and “a generation who just aren’t going to take it anymore.”
This is why Kirk labels Turning Point and Trumpism a “counter culture” movement, countering the “domination” by liberals of the media, Hollywood, academia, and the White House from 2009 to 2017.
Kirk specifically calls out professors as “overly educated, under performing elitist academics” who have “no cultural ethos at all.”
One may think Kirk is talking about the way in which professors lack an understanding of other cultures outside their bubble. But with “cultural ethos” and their lack he is referring to a lack of the American (white) Christian ethos he sees as the nation’s cultural foundation.
This kind of culture war rhetoric is the kind of rhetoric that it seems Trump will use during the next year in campaigning for re-election. It is the kind of Christian nationalism Kirk has spread since 2012.
