A year after Charlie Kirk was killed, young conservatives navigate a divided movement

When Jacob York found out that Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot, he was at baseball practice. Standing in the outfield, he broke down in tears. That night, he decided that Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, should have a chapter on his campus.

So he got to work starting one himself. "I feel like there [were] many of us who had that wake-up call," said York, 21, who attends Olivet Nazarene University, a small Christian school south of Chicago. "I think I submitted the request to start a chapter six times," he recalled.

"There were so many requests that it kept saying, 'Oops, try again later.'" Kirk's death one year ago on the campus of Utah Valley University was as stunning for his followers as it was painful. A little more than a decade earlier, he had founded Turning Point with the goal of getting more young people involved in conservative politics. By the time he died at age 31, he had become one of the most revered figures on the right, especially among Generation Z and millennial conservatives.

From students like York all the way to the upper echelons of the Republican Party, Kirk's death was seen as a call to action. In the days following the shooting, Turning Point reported an initial surge of interest among college and high school students looking to start chapters. His widow, Erika Kirk, spoke about that momentum in her first public remarks, just days after his death.

"If you thought that my husband's mission was powerful before, you have no idea," said Erika Kirk, who has since taken over as Turning Point's CEO. "You have no idea what you've just unleashed across this entire country, and this world." But, as Charlie Kirk's young supporters reflect on the past year, some paint a more complicated picture of the organization he left behind. Rather than a unified and growing coalition of young voters, they describe a movement facing questions about its future — one that has yet to fully coalesce around a new leader and that is grappling with the same issue divides causing friction within the Republican Party more broadly.

The fractures have been felt acutely by young conservatives like 23-year-old Dino Fantegrossi. He spent all of his time on college campuses talking to people my age, whether he agreed or disagreed with them," said Fantegrossi. "He knew — because he was so plugged in — what bugged young people, what needed to be addressed.