Slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk was known as a passionate debater.
Before he was killed last year, the Turning Point USA co-founder was a leading voice in the Republican Party. He grew his Phoenix-based
conservative group into a political powerhouse.
That also made him a controversial figure.
The 31-year-old Kirk used his popular podcast to denounce “woke” ideology and promote Christian, conservative beliefs on hot-button issues like abortion.
He toured the country to debate students on college campuses. Kirk’s provocative stances on race, religion and gender often went viral online, which both grew his profile and made him the subject of controversy.
Kirk was shot while debating gun violence on the campus of Utah Valley University one year ago, on Sept. 10, 2025.
Here are some of the beliefs Kirk was known for.
'Free speech' was Kirk’s touchstone
Kirk approached much of his work under the banner of free speech and civic engagement.
He went viral for challenging those who disagreed with him to “prove me wrong.” He accused the left of shying from those conversations.
“It’s OK to hear something you disagree with. You don’t have to run into a safe space,” Kirk said in a 2017 debate with the left-wing commentator Hasan Piker.
“Why is it that it’s always the leftist activists, whining and protesting and storming stages and pulling fire alarms, and us conservatives, we sit quietly when we hear things we disagree with?”
Cultural progressivism is a 'spreading pathogen'
Kirk likened “woke thinking” to a “spreading pathogen” and said he believed it was a serious threat to the nation. He spoke often about LGBTQ issues and called the trans movement “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history.”
He told young, gay conservatives that he disagreed with their lifestyle due to his Christian faith but said he welcomed them into the political right.
Kirk supported Trump’s crackdown on gender identity and sparred with California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom over his state’s protections for LGBTQ rights, though the two found common ground in their view that allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports was unfair.
Kirk was answering a question about how many transgender Americans had committed mass shootings over the past decade when he was killed. Kirk said, “Too many.” The questioner replied there had been five. The person asked Kirk how many mass shooters there had been overall in America during that time, and Kirk replied, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Offline, Kirk and his organization, the GOP heavyweight Turning Point USA, took concrete steps to counter the spread of “woke” thinking.
The group maintains a “Professor Watchlist” of academics who "discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." Two Turning Point USA affiliates faced charges after harassing a queer Arizona State University professor on that list and eventually admitted guilt.
Gun deaths ‘worth it’ to protect Second Amendment
Kirk was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms in the United States.
He opposed new gun regulations and instead advocated for reducing gun violence by “having more fathers in the home” and “having more armed guards in front of schools.”
He acknowledged during a Turning Point Faith event in 2023 that if Americans were armed, gun deaths never would reach zero.
“You will never live in a society where you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death,” Kirk said. “I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Kirk: Civil Rights Act was 'a mistake'
In recent years, Kirk had taken aim at the country’s landmark civil rights legislation.
"I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it," Kirk told the crowd at his annual conservative political conference, AmericaFest, in 2023. "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."
It was a refrain Kirk would return to often in public remarks and on his social media talk show. He argued the bill “created a beast” focused on equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity, and that it “led to more crime.”
The law outlawed racial segregation in public places, schools and federally assisted programs, and it banned job discrimination. It is credited with helping to reduce stark employment inequality in the United States, along with other major federal civil rights laws passed later in the decade.
Kirk also attacked Martin Luther King Jr., calling the civil rights activist “awful” and “not a good person.”
The topic “would have been even more forbidden four or five years ago” but is now accepted “in more and more mainstream circles,” Kirk said.
American left has 'always hated this country'
Though he quibbled with rivals on the right, Charlie Kirk reserved his harshest criticism for the American left, which he said wanted to “deconstruct our country from within.”
"One of the things that Donald Trump has done is he has not changed the left — he has revealed them," Kirk said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. "This is who they have always been. They have always hated this country."
He denounced socialism as an “evil, greedy, self-righteous ideology” and characterized the left as engaged in a long march to erode American institutions, including U.S. democracy, marriage and the nuclear family.
Kirk was fiercely anti-abortion
Kirk was a devout Christian who was almost entirely against abortion.
He discussed his view that “abortion is not a victimless crime” in a 2024 debate against liberal college students. A debate opponent asked Kirk if he had a 10-year-old daughter who was raped and impregnated, whether he’d want her to carry the baby to term.
“The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered,” Kirk said, calling her question “awfully graphic.”
Kirk said there was no difference between a baby conceived by rape or by a loving couple. “It’s all human rights and it’s all human beings,” he said.
“The worst thing to do to the daughter is to then say ‘Hey, we’re going to murder the being inside of you,’” Kirk said.
Kirk said he supported abortion in only rare situations where the mother’s life was at risk. But Kirk cast doubt on even those cases, saying “it is a growing consensus in the pro-life world that abortion is never medically necessary.”
Medical professionals disagree with that view. Abortion can be medically necessary, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Kirk opposed immigration, 'pockets of culture' within US
Kirk supported Trump’s campaign against undocumented migrants and called for a highly restrictive immigration policy, even opposing forms of legal immigration.
His criticism went beyond policy. The United States should have one culture, he said on a livestream in August 2025: “Americanism."
“We have one culture that you assimilate towards. One. We should not put up with all these different pockets of culture,” Kirk said.
“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that,” he said.
“We have 55 million foreigners in this country, and I'm sure many of them are wonderful people. … But we've got to take a step back and say, guys, that you're no longer a nation. You're something else. You're a colony.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What did Charlie Kirk say and believe? A look back 1 year after death
