When I first met Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old right-wing activist who founded Turning Point USA, while reporting on my book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, he had just finished a 10-mile jog around the National Mall. He told me that getting a run in no matter the circumstances was one of his key goals every day.
It was the fall of 2018. I was in Washington covering his organization’s first Black Conservative summit and had been subsisting on junk food and no exercise for days. Kirk’s discipline impressed me. So did his easygoing gait, his conversational tone, and his passion for politics. If you wanted to debate the pros and cons of postmodernism, how P.C. culture was hurting the Democrats, or what Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey had to do with a politician’s rise to power, Kirk had the interest and the time.
