The slain head of Turning Point USA stoked campus culture wars and ‘treated faculty and students as enemies’

Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist killed this week while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, never graduated from the community college he briefly attended. But his lack of a degree didn’t stop him from assuming a defining role in the ongoing transformation of US higher education.

Kirk pioneered a style of ideological warfare against what he viewed as bastions of leftism, helping turn campuses into cultural battlefields and paving the way for Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign to weaken American universities and subject them to his movement’s ideological agenda.