Charlie Kirk’s influence went far beyond the United States.
Days before Mr. Kirk, a right-wing activist was fatally shot at a campus event in Utah on Wednesday, he was addressing audiences in Seoul and Tokyo, speaking at conferences there about the conservative movement and how he had recruited young conservatives to join the MAGA movement.
Turning Point USA, the right-wing activist organization Mr. Kirk founded, is a “youth movement that is sweeping the world,” he said last week in a panel interview at Build Up Korea, a conservative conference in Seoul.
“It is a joy to see what we’ve been able to build in America come to South Korea,” he said. Speaking before a crowd that chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A!”, Mr. Kirk discussed the importance of the Bible and encouraged young people to get married and have more children.
Mr. Kirk’s conservative message and influence, which made him a close ally of President Trump’s, has also found audiences among young people in Europe in recent years.
Turning Point UK, the British offshoot of Mr. Kirk’s organization, was founded in 2019 to challenge what it called a far-left bias in schools. Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant party Reform U.K., offered a tribute for Mr. Kirk in the House of Commons on Thursday, saying that Mr. Kirk had a growing online presence in Britain, especially after his recent trip.
Mr. Kirk wrote about his visits to Oxford University and the University of Cambridge in May in the conservative British magazine
The Spectator, saying he encountered a “wall of hostility” at Cambridge.
He described the atmosphere as similar to what he had found in the United States several years earlier as, he said, American college-age students “moved toward Trump.” He wrote that Cambridge students had seethed when he described pandemic lockdowns as pointless and “forced submission to mRNA shots” as “tyranny.”