With Charlie Kirk gone, the era of Charlie Kirk content will begin.
As conservatives mourn the death of the right-wing activist and campus influencer, a new collection of blog posts, social offerings, videos and podcasts continuing his movement is expected to flourish, as a slew of people who worked with and learned from Kirk stand by to take the baton.
Experts say the movement has been supercharged by the killing and could lead to an intensified form of already pointed content. “People on the right feel personally attacked — it’s ‘they got one of us, they killed us,’ not ‘they killed him,” says Tim Weninger, a professor at Notre Dame University who researches social media and the far right. “I see a lot of this rhetoric continuing and getting ratcheted up.”
That vibe has been on display even at the highest levels of government as Vice President JD Vance on Monday guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast. Vance brought on top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who said that “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people,” referring to an alleged group of progressives supposedly planning violence. And far-right influencers like Libs of TikTok have led an organized campaign to dox and contact the employers of those they see as diminishing Kirk’s death, in some cases resulting in employees getting fired.
But who will actually be leading this post-Kirk charge? At Turning Point USA, Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, has pledged to continue heading the campus-oriented organization she already helped run, noting “the fire that you have ignited within this wife.” But experts say the movement to make young people more politically and socially conservative will now broaden, leading to a bigger circle of Kirk acolytes taking the reins. Whether that person becomes a formal leader in Turning Point or simply one of its avatars, Kirk’s death means one or more influencers wearing his crown.
“There’s an opening to take the helm of the movement — there’s always a successor,” says Daniel Karell, a Yale University professor who has extensively studied the far right. Here’s who’s on the shortlist.
Allie Beth Stuckey
In one sense the 33-year old has an impossible job: convincing people her age and younger that gay marriage and abortion shouldn’t be legal. But Stuckey has made a career on conservative powerhouse platforms arguing just that. Her podcast Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey on Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media, her books with conservative publisher Sentinel and her appearances on Fox News and Beck’s own podcast have all given the evangelical Christian an influential means of tilting young people to her — and Kirk’s — view of the world. (She went viral back in 2019 for a video skewering AOC.) The Atlantic has already profiled Stuckey as the new Phyllis Schlafly, while she’s given prime interviews with the likes of The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. All of it gives her a leg up to continue Kirk’s Jesus-centric mission and translate a conservative-religious message from an older establishment audience to the Gen Z crowd the movement needs.
Xaviaer DuRousseau
A Black gay former progressive, DuRousseau can potentially expand Kirk’s core audience even further than it’s already gone, reaching out to students and other young people who might not otherwise be inclined to conservatism. The PragerU affiliate, 28, already has some three-quarters of a million followers on TikTok and X combined, where he creates short videos framing anti-immigrant messaging as a way to protect women, among other liberal-subverting ideas (like his vocal stance on a more muted Pride that went viral). DuRousseau was a protege of Kirk’s and says he believes the activist’s “life was cut short because he dared to invite discourse on a college campus in 2025.” The influencer also says that Kirk’s assassination “didn’t silence him — It amplified everything he ever stood for.” Expect DuRousseau to continue carrying the megaphone.
Alex Clark
Perhaps Kirk’s most natural successor is someone who already works for him. The Turning Point staffer came to prominence hosting the Web series Poplitics, blending the rigors of conservative politics with the breeziness of pop-culture chatter (check out her interview in 2020 with Kirk talking about what reality show he’d flourish on). The 32-year-old currently hosts the Turning Point web show Culture Apothecary, where she mixes conservative ideology with wellness tips. After the assassination she posted that, “Yesterday I woke up wanting to die. Today I woke up ready for war.” She has vowed that “TPUSA will be bigger and bolder than anyone could ever imagine” as “the conservative movement will unite like never before. And we will do it for Charlie.” Clark is already promoting Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix in December to “celebrat[e] Charlie Kirk’s legacy” and offering discounted tickets to her half a million Instagram followers.
Riley Gaines
A contributor to Turning Point who credited Kirk with “making MAGA cool again,” Gaines is among the younger of the Kirk acolytes. At 25, the former Kentucky Wildcat swim star has also become one of the leading voices against trans women competing in women’s sports. She has spoken at the RNC and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, and has engaged in more than her share of social-media battles on the issue, most notably with Simone Biles. With a combined four million followers on X, Instagram and TikTok, Gaines has an audience most political influencers only dream of. Gaines, who hosts an Outkick/Fox Nation podcast, appeared on Fox News shortly after Kirk’s death to talk about his mission — to turn young first-time MAGA voters into lifelong conservatives. She now seems poised to spend the coming decades carrying it out herself.
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How these successors handle the job could end up being rather different than Kirk’s approach — precisely because of his death.
“I think that Kirk’s death has made a greater percentage of people comfortable with more heated rhetoric,” Karell says. “If 50 percent of the people who came to his rallies before were just kind of curious and wanted to skip class, I think you can say at least ten percent of that group now may be open to something more intense. These influencers can serve that.”
If anyone doubts the ferocity of the post-Kirk influencer movement, Stuckey quells them. She has framed Kirk’s death to her 640,000 YouTube subscribers as part of a holy Armageddon (“Satan is glad that he took an effective soldier out of the fight”) and even said Kirk is “largely responsible for Trump winning and preserving what’s left of Western civilization.”
“With enough time,” she added, “he would have been president”
Yet despite all the promising young stars in Kirk’s orbit, the odds of them having the same impact may be pretty low. Philip Schrodt, a retired University of Kansas and Penn State political professor who pioneered the use of modeling to predict political trends, said in an email to THR that history tells of many hurdles.
“[Someone could] emerge to fill pretty much the same leadership function,” Schrodt says of a Kirk successor, “though a good comparison to Kirk might be Malcolm X: the movement definitely continued and he was lionized as a martyr, but no leader of comparable stature took his place.”