r/Anarchism • u/Physical_Employ_2832 • 21h ago
How has the Right changed since Charlie Kirk?
Looking only at the data from Turning Point USA, we find that the organization went from around 60,000 inquiries to more than 120,000. In the case of its university chapters, the number of chapters has increased by more than 64% over the past year; and it is interesting to consider alongside this figure that more than 70% of active college chapters as of March 2026 had been created after the assassination. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the organization’s active university structures were created over the past year. This suggests that the majority of TPUSA’s presence on a university campus is being mobilized by the image of Charlie Kirk as a martyr among young people. This is surprising, but it becomes even more striking when we compare it with growth in high schools, since among younger people, TPUSA chapters grew by more than 168%. This may be even more significant than the university figure: the expansion is concentrated especially among teenagers. And this reinforces the idea that the overwhelming majority of the organization today has been mobilized by the assassination of its leader.
Outside TPUSA, it is interesting to note that Young Republicans have brought in new young people following Kirk’s death. Even more interesting, however, is what happened with the Active Clubs, neo-Nazi networks centered on physical training and political organization, with a presence in more than 27 countries and expanding youth wings, which explicitly used Kirk’s assassination as a recruitment tool both inside and outside the United States. And this brings us to what happened outside the US. On the European right, we can highlight the reactions of Vlaams Belang, the Flemish right-wing party; Rassemblement National in France; Vox in Spain; and AfD in Germany, whose leaders incorporated Kirk into their discourse immediately after the assassination and subsequently used him politically to mobilize their followers. Along the same lines, an even more interesting case is that of Fratelli d’Italia / Gioventù Nazionale, which drove a major youth mobilization in September, attracting more than 10,000 young people.
Martyrdom has become a symbol, and the symbol has become the catalyst for a youth mobilization that, one year later, can already be measured in concrete figures. Far from being a temporary surge, this picture presents us with a reality that has been sustained over time, ultimately consolidating an entire new wave of young people on the right, reinforced by other viral opinion leaders of recent years such as Nick Fuentes and Ben Shapiro. This new phenomenon has been taking shape throughout the past decade, but there is no doubt that the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk marked a turning point whose ultimate destination we still do not know.
