Read the complete write-up of Charlie Kirk net worth, age, height, family, parents, wife, children, TV shows, controversies as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Charlie Kirk is an American conservative activist and radio talk show host. He founded Turning Point USA with Bill Montgomery in 2012 and has served as its executive director since. He is the CEO of Turning Point Action, Students for Trump, and Turning Point Faith, president of Turning Point Endowment, and a member of the Council for National Policy.
Early life
Name | Charlie Kirk |
Net Worth | $4 million |
Profession | Talk show host, Conservative activist |
Height | 1.75m |
Age | 27 years |
Charlie Kirk was born on October 14, 1993(age 27 years) in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois, and raised in nearby Prospect Heights, Illinois. His mother is a mental health counsellor and his father is an architect. Kirk was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout.
In his junior year at Wheeling High School in 2010, he volunteered for the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, to whom he is not related. In his senior year, he created a campaign to revert a price increase for cookies at his school. He also wrote an essay alleging liberal bias in high school textbooks for Breitbart News which led to an appearance on Fox Business.
At a subsequent speaking engagement at Benedictine University’s “Youth Empowerment Day,” Kirk met Bill Montgomery, a retiree more than 50 years his senior, who was then a Tea Party-backed legislative candidate. Montgomery encouraged Kirk to get engaged in political activism full-time. He subsequently founded Turning Point USA, a “grass-roots organization to rival liberal groups such as MoveOn.org.” At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Kirk met Foster Friess, a prominent Republican donor, and persuaded him to finance the organization.
In a 2015 speech at the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, Kirk stated that he had applied to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and was not accepted. He said that “the slot he considered his went to a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion'” whose test scores he claimed he knew. In 2015, Kirk told The Atlantic that he was taking part-time online classes at The King’s College, and he was taking classes at Harper College, a community college near Chicago, but dropped out to pursue conservative activism. At the age of 23, Kirk addressed the 2016 Republican National Convention and supported President Donald Trump. In 2018, he was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 lists in Law & Policy.
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Charlie Kirk has been CEO, chief fundraiser, and the public face of Turning Point since its founding. According to The New York Times, he has turned the organization into a “well-funded media operation, backed by conservative megadonors like the Wyoming businessman Foster Friess.”
In 2020, ProPublica investigated the finances of Turning Point USA and claimed in their report that the organization made “misleading financial claims,” that the audits were not done by an independent auditor, and that the leaders had enriched themselves while advocating for President Trump. ProPublica also reported that Kirk’s salary from TPUSA had increased from $27,000 to nearly $300,000 and that he had bought an $855,000 condo in Longboat Key, Florida. In 2020, Kirk earned a salary of more than $325,000 from TPUSA and related organizations.
In May 2019, it was reported that Kirk was “preparing to unveil” Turning Point Action, a 501(c)(4) entity allowed to target Democrats. In July 2019, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action had acquired Students for Trump along with “all associated media assets.” He became chairman and launched a campaign to recruit one million students for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign. The unsuccessful effort led to TPUSA and the Trump campaign blaming each other for an overall decline in youth support for Trump.
Turning Point Endowment Inc. is a self-described “supporting organization” whose “mission is to support and benefit Turning Point USA’s charitable purposes and long-term vitality.”
Charlie Kirk is the William F. Buckley Jr. Council Member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), according to the CNP’s September 2020 membership directory. He is a spokesperson for CNP Action, the political arm of the CNP. In October 2020, Kirk began hosting a daily three-hour radio talk show on Salem Media’s “The Answer” radio channel.
Political positions and activities
According to The New York Times, by “[m]ixing, matching and twisting facts, Mr Kirk has come to exemplify a new breed of the political agitator that has flourished since the 2016 election by walking the line between mainstream conservative opinion and outright disinformation.”
Promotion of conspiracy theories
Kirk promotes the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and has described universities as “islands of totalitarianism.” In a 2015 speech at the Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, Kirk stated that he had applied to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, and was not accepted. He said that “the slot he considered his went to a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion'” whose test scores he claimed he knew.
He told The New Yorker in 2017 that he was being sarcastic when he said it. He told the Chicago Tribune in 2018 that “he was just repeating something he’d been told,” and at a New Hampshire Turning Point event featuring Senator Rand Paul in October 2019, he claimed that he never said it.
On July 7, 2018, Kirk falsely claimed on social media that Justice Department statistics showed an increase in human trafficking arrests from 1,952 in the year 2016 to 6,087 in the first half of 2018. He deleted the tweet without an explanation the next day after a fact-checker had pointed out that the false 2018 number had originated on conspiracy site 8chan.
In December 2018, Kirk falsely claimed that protesters in the French yellow vests movement chanted “We want Trump.” These false claims were later repeated by President Trump. In defending the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Kirk falsely stated that during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic it “took [President Barack] Obama ‘millions infected and over 1,000 deaths'” to declare a public health emergency.
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Charlie Kirk has spread falsehoods about voter fraud and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Forbes, Kirk is known for “his repudiation of liberal college education and embrace of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.”
On June 25, 2021, Kirk suggested in a tweet that the Surfside condominium building collapse could be the result of domestic terrorism, saying “I have spoken to several architects who believe that the building collapse in Surfside was not an act of nature. Many are saying this was “domestic terrorism.”
Racial issues
Charlie Kirk has consistently asserted that the concept of white privilege is a myth and a “racist lie”. Kirk served on President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, a response to the 1619 Project, and an effort to instil “traditional values.” In 2021, Kirk is scheduled to tour campuses to debunk critical race theory as a “racist lie.” During a September 2021 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, he called for Texas to deputize a “citizen force” and have them deport Haitians.
Additionally, he levied unfounded accusations that Democrats intend to admit refugees in order to gain an advantage in terms of voting demographics, by “bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America”.
Climate change
Kirk has consistently supported the extraction and use of fossil fuels and has falsely claimed that humans have no significant effect on global climate change. Kirk has also stated that he is against the death penalty.
Republican and pro-Trump activism
Charlie Kirk addressed the 2016 Republican National Convention. In an interview with Wired magazine during the convention, Kirk said that while he “was not the world’s biggest Donald Trump fan,” he would vote for him and that Trump’s candidacy made Turning Point’s mission more difficult. Kirk flipped to supporting Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention and spent the remainder of the campaign assisting with travel and media arrangements for Donald Trump Jr. In October 2016, Kirk participated in a Fox News event along with Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Lara Trump that had a pro-Donald Trump tone.
In July 2019, Kirk became chairman of Students for Trump, which had been acquired by Turning Point Action, and launched a campaign to recruit one million students for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign. The unsuccessful effort led to TPUSA and the Trump campaign blaming each other for an overall decline in youth support for Trump.
At an August 2020 meeting of the Council for National Policy, Kirk said: “Democrats have done a really foolish thing by shutting down all these campuses… It’s gonna remove ballot harvesting opportunities and all their voter fraud that they usually do on college campuses – so they’re actually removing half a million votes off the table. So please keep the campuses closed – it’s a great thing. Whatever!”
COVID-19 misinformation
Charlie Kirk spread false information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 on social media platforms, such as Twitter, in 2020. Kirk sharply criticized Democrats’ criticism of Donald Trump’s withdrawal of World Health Organization (WHO) funding and referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus”, which was retweeted by Trump.
Kirk alleged that the WHO covered up information about the COVID-19 pandemic. He was briefly banned from Twitter after falsely claiming that hydroxychloroquine had proved to be “100% effective in treating the virus”; and that Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, threatened doctors who tried to use the medication. These falsehoods were retweeted by Rudy Giuliani whose account was then suspended by Twitter as well.
He also described the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches as a “Democratic plot against Christianity” and made the unfounded assertion that authorities in Wuhan, China, were burning patients. Kirk has said that he refuses to abide by mask requirements, claiming that “the science around masks is very questionable.”
In July 2021, Kirk pushed misleading claims about the efficacy and s afety of COVID-19 vaccines. On Fox News’ Tucker Carlson show, Kirk called student mandatory requirements for taking the Covid vaccine “medical apartheid.”
Election fraud claims and the 2021 United States Capitol attack
Immediately after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Kirk promoted unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the election. On November 5, 2020, Kirk was the leader of a Stop the Steal protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix.
On January 5, 2021, the day before the Washington protest that led to the storming of the United States Capitol, Kirk wrote on Twitter that Turning Point Action and Students for Trump were sending more than 80 “buses of patriots to D.C. to fight for this president”. A spokesman for Turning Point said that the groups ended up sending seven buses, not 80, with 350 students. On his January 6, 2021, podcast, Kirk said he was “getting 500 emails a minute calling for a civil war.” Afterward, Kirk said the violent acts at the Capitol were not an insurrection and did not represent mainstream Trump supporters.
Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty
In November 2019, Kirk and Jerry Falwell, Jr. co-founded the “Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty,” a right-wing think-tank funded, owned and housed by Liberty University. Fellows included Antonio Okafor, director of outreach for Gun Owners of America, Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Trump, and Jenna Ellis, a senior legal counsellor for Trump. In 2020, the Falkirk Center spent at least $50,000 on political Facebook advertisements promoting Trump and Republican candidates.
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Students and alumni raised objections about the organization’s aggressive political tone, which they considered to be inconsistent with the university’s mission. Falwell resigned as president of Liberty University in August 2020, and the university did not renew Kirk’s one-year contract in late 2020. In 2021, the university renamed the organization “Standing for Freedom Center”.
Books
Charlie Kirk co-wrote, with Brent Hamachek, the 2016 book Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations (Simon & Schuster).
Kirk wrote the 2018 book Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters. In a review for The Weekly Standard, Adam Rubenstein described the book as a “hot mess”, “nothing more than a marketing pitch for TPUSA” and said the “thin” book was “stuffed with reprintings of his tweets and quotes from others.”
In 2020, Kirk’s book The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future was published. Kirk’s Twitter account had the ninth most interactions in the three-month period from November 2018 to February 2019.
Wife
Charlie Kirk is married to Erika Frantzve, they had their wedding in May 2021. His wife Erika Frantzve is a podcaster and businesswoman who was Miss Arizona 2012. Kirk is an evangelical Christian. However, in 2021, Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point Faith, an organization dedicated to “recruit pastors and other church leaders to be active in local and national political issues.” Its activities include faith-based voter drives “and educating members on TPUSA’s core values.”
Charlie Kirk net worth
What is Charlie Kirk net worth? Charlie Kirk net worth is estimated at around $20 million. His main source of income is from his career as Speaker, TV host, Political commentator, and Daily Wire. Charlie Kirk’s successful career has earned her some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy cars. He was listed on the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Law & Policy. In May 2019, Kirk was awarded an honorary doctorate from Liberty University.