Thursday marked one year since Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a campus event at Utah Valley University in 2025. The anniversary has brought renewed attention to the moments that made Kirk one of the most recognizable voices in conservative activism: his willingness to walk into hostile rooms and argue his positions in public, on camera, without a script.
Kirk built his reputation on college campuses, where he regularly opened the floor to students who disagreed with him. In 2018, at a Politicon debate against Twitch streamer and former “Young Turks” personality Hasan Piker, Kirk pressed his opponent on whether he actually lived by the socialist principles he advocated.
“I live what I practice. I am a free-market capitalist,” Kirk said. “I employ people. I took a risk. I have my own startup business. Every single day I practice what I preach. He wants other people to contribute to what he considers to be a good idea, what he considers will make the world a better place. You have the freedom to go live as a socialist. Go do it, Hasan. What’s stopping you?”
Kirk kept up that same combative-but-open format for years. During a 2024 campus debate, a student asked whether he felt “silly” arguing with college students as a man in his 30s. Kirk turned the question back to the stakes involved.
“So I vote and you vote. So I’m talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of Western civilization. That’s what I’m doing here, too,” Kirk said.
At another 2024 event, a student called him a “fascist.” When Kirk asked the student to name a single belief of his that qualified, the student couldn’t answer.
“I’m such a bad fascist I let the people who disagree with me an open mic to talk to me for two hours uninterrupted. I’m an awful fascist,” Kirk joked.
Not all of his most-discussed moments came from campus sparring. On “The Iced Coffee Hour” in 2025, Kirk argued that a man should never let a woman pay for a date, even if marriage is the eventual goal, framing the opposite view as a product of feminism.
“This is feminism. Feminism is that you have to be this like self-independent,” Kirk said. “It’s not a nice gesture. It’s you trying to be like egalitarian. No. You, as a woman, should want to be provided for. In fact, you should have an expectation that you, as a woman, are so important and so critical and so necessary and beautiful that it shouldn’t even be a question.”
Months before his death, Kirk sat down with Bill Maher on “Club Random” to discuss the existence of God. When Maher, an outspoken atheist, said “nobody knows” the answer, Kirk pushed him further.
“Do you hope you’re wrong? That’s the most important question,” Kirk asked. Maher called it “a great question.” Kirk followed up: “Do you hope there’s a heaven?” Maher replied, “I hope they figure out how I can live forever. I like it here with you, Charlie, drinking this and smoking pot.”
Kirk also took on 25 liberal college students at once in Jubilee’s “Surrounded” series in 2024. Asked about a woman facing a serious health complication during pregnancy, Kirk raised the option of a C-section, explaining the procedure in detail when the student he was debating admitted she wasn’t familiar with it.
“Cesarean section … it’s a C-section. They do an insertion … they go right below the belly button, and they deliver the baby and that way she doesn’t have to give birth. It’s technically birth, but it’s much safer. So that’s actually safer than an abortion procedure.”
One of Kirk’s final high-profile appearances came at Oxford University in August 2025, where he challenged a student’s claim that President Trump had deported U.S. citizens.
“I’ll give you 1,000 pounds right now. If you could tell me the U.S. citizen that was deported under Donald Trump. You said that twice. The U.S. citizen that was deported under Donald Trump. Can anyone tell me, 1,000 pounds? I’ll give it to you right now,” Kirk said, adding, “That was a lie. You should know better than that. You go to Oxford.”
At a 2025 Turning Point USA event, Kirk laid out his opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion policies in blunt terms.
“What we believe as conservatives is that skin color really doesn’t matter that much. We care about character and merit. We want a country built on what you bring to the table, not how you look,” Kirk said. “If you do something racist on top of something racist, that doesn’t make the second racist action good.”
He also compared the scale of abortion to the Holocaust during another 2025 debate, arguing there was no moral distinction between an unborn child and a Holocaust victim based on age. When a student said “one of them is a person,” Kirk asked what species the baby in the womb was. The student answered, “It’s a human.” Kirk replied, “Therefore, they should have human rights.”
Kirk’s national profile extended beyond the debate stage. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, he addressed a Gen Z audience directly, arguing that the country’s direction is not fixed but chosen.
“You don’t have to stay poor. You don’t have to accept being worse off than your parents,” Kirk said. “You don’t have to feel aimless and unhappy. You don’t have to support leaders who lied to you and took advantage of you for your vote. America’s future is a series of choices. Our current state of slow-motion national decline is a choice. This November, we’re going to choose success.”
A year after his death at Utah Valley University, these exchanges remain the clearest record of how Kirk operated: taking questions live, unedited, from anyone willing to challenge him.
