On Wednesday evening, Emily Cleary, a 47-year-old journalist and public relations consultant from Buckinghamshire in the U.K., was sitting watching TV with her 12-year-old son when she got a BBC alert that Charlie Kirk had been shot. She’d never heard of him, but she soon gathered from the coverage that he was associated with President Donald Trump. “You might have seen him, Mummy,” her son insisted. “He’s the man on TikTok with the round face who shouts all the time.” He began filling her in on a long, detailed list of Kirk’s views. “He thinks that if a 10-year-old gets pregnant she should be forced to keep it,” he explained.

In the U.S., Kirk was a well-known figure on both sides of the political spectrum thanks to his proximity to the Trump family and profiles in outlets such as POLITICO Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. On the other side of the Atlantic, a schism appeared this week between those perplexed at why Prime Minister Keir Starmer was making statements about a seemingly obscure American podcaster, and those who already viewed him as a celebrity. Debates about the activist’s legacy sprung up in online spaces not usually known for politics, such as Facebook groups intended for sharing Love Island memes or soccer fan communities on X, with some people saying they will “miss his straight talking.” Parents of teens were surprised to find themselves being educated by their children on an issue of apparent international political importance.

To some, this was all the more bewildering given the U.K. offshoot of Kirk’s Turning Point was widely mocked as a huge failure when it tried launching at British universities. But Emily’s son learned about Kirk somewhere else: TikTok’s “for you” page. “He hadn’t just seen a few videos, he was very knowledgeable about everything he believed,” she said, adding that her son “didn’t agree with Kirk but thought he seemed like a nice guy.” “It really unnerved me that he knew more about this person’s ideas than I did.”

Kirk first rose to prominence in the U.S. when he cofounded Turning Point USA in 2012. It aimed to challenge what it saw as the dominance of liberal culture on American campuses, establishing a network of conservative activists at schools across the country. Kirk built Turning Point into a massive grassroots operation that has chapters on more than 800 campuses, and some journalists have attributed Trump’s 2024 reelection in part to the group’s voter outreach in Arizona and Wisconsin.

But across the pond, Turning Point UK stumbled. Formed in 2019, it initially drew praise from figures on the right of the U.K.’s then-ruling Conservative party, such as former member of parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg and current shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel. However, the official launch on Feb. 1 of that year quickly descended into farce: Its X account was unverified, leading student activists from around the country to set up hundreds of satirical accounts.

Media post-mortems concluded the organization failed to capture the mood of U.K. politics. The British hard right tends to fall into two categories: the aristocratic eccentricity of Rees-Mogg, or rough-and-ready street-based movements led by figures such as former soccer hooligan (and Elon Musk favorite) Tommy Robinson. Turning Point USA — known for its highly-produced events full of strobe lights, pyrotechnics and thundering music — was too earnest, too flashy, too American. And although U.K. universities tend to be left-leaning, Kirk’s claim that colleges are “islands of totalitarianism” that curtail free speech didn’t seem to resonate with U.K. students like it did with some in the U.S. “For those interested in opposing group think or campus censorship, organisations and publications already exist [such as] the magazine Spiked Online,” journalist Benedict Spence wrote at the time, adding that “if conservatives are to win round young voters of the future, they will have to do so by policy.” Turning Point UK distanced itself from its previous leadership and mostly moved away from campuses, attempting to reinvent itself as a street-based group.

However, five years later in early 2024, Kirk launched his TikTok account and quickly achieved a new level of viral fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Clips of his “Debate Me” events, in which he took on primarily liberal students’ arguments on college campuses, exploded on the platform. This also coincided with a shift in the landscape of the British right toward Kirk’s provocative and extremely online style of politics. Discontent had been swelling around the country as the economic damage of Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic began to bite, and far-right movements distrustful of politicians and legacy media gained traction online.

While some of Kirk’s favorite topics — such as his staunch opposition to abortion and support of gun rights — have never resonated with Brits, others have converged. Transgender rights moved from a fringe issue to a mainstream talking point, while debates over immigration became so tense they erupted in a series of far-right race riots in August 2024, largely organized and driven by social media. In this political and digital environment, inflammatory culture-war rhetoric found new purchase — and Kirk was a bona fide culture warrior. He called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” posted on X last week that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America” and regularly promoted the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which asserts that elites are engaged in a plot to diminish the voting and cultural power of white Americans via immigration policy. “The American Democrat Party hates this country. They want to see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white,” he said on his podcast in 2024.

Harry Phillips, a 26-year-old truck driver from Kent, just south of London, began turning to influencers for his news during the pandemic, saying he didn’t trust mainstream outlets to truthfully report information such as the Covid-19 death toll. He first came across Kirk’s TikTok videos in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “I really liked that he was willing to have his beliefs challenged, and that he didn’t do it in an aggressive manner,” he said. “I don’t agree with everything, such as his views on abortion. But I do agree with his stance that there are only two genders, and that gender ideology is being pushed on kids at school.”

Through Kirk, Phillips said he discovered other U.S. figures such as far-right influencer Candace Owens and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whom he now follows on X, as well as more liberal debaters such as TikToker Dean Withers. “America’s such a powerful country, I think we should all keep an eye on what happens there because it can have a knock-on effect here,” he said. University students in the U.K. may not have been concerned about free speech in 2019, but Phillips definitely is. “I believe we’re being very censored by our government in the U.K.,” he said, citing concerns over the numbers of people reportedly arrested for social media posts. He also said Kirk was not just popular with other people his age, but older members of his family too — all of whom are distraught over his death.

In May 2025, six years after the original Turning Point U.K. failed to take off, Kirk found his way back to U.K. campuses via the debate societies of elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge. He wasn’t the first far-right provocateur to visit these clubs, which have existed since the 19th century — conservative media mogul Ben Shapiro took part in a Cambridge debate in November 2023. Oxford Union’s most recent president, Anita Okunde, told British GQ these events were an attempt to make the societies, which were widely considered stuffy and stuck-up, “culturally relevant to young people.”

Kirk’s hour-long video, “Charlie Kirk vs 400 Cambridge Students and a Professor,” has 2.1 million views on YouTube and has spawned multiple shorter clips, disseminated by his media machine across multiple platforms. Clips from the same debates also exist within a parallel left-wing ecosystem, re-branded with titles such as “Feminist Cambridge Student OBLITERATES Charlie Kirk.” Although Kirk has been lauded in some sections of the media for being open to debate, these videos don’t appear designed to change anyone’s opinion. Both sides have their views reinforced, taking whatever message they prefer to hear.

Karen, a British mother in her late 50s who lives on a farm outside the city of Nottingham, said clips of Kirk getting “owned” by progressives are extremely popular with her 17-year-old daughter and her friends. “I had no idea who he was until she reminded me she had shown me some videos before,” said Karen, whose surname POLITICO Magazine is withholding to protect her daughter’s identity from online harassment. “I think he’s a bit too American for them,” she said. “He’s too in-your-face, and they think some of his opinions are just rage-baiting.”

The U.K. political landscape is currently in turmoil, with Farage’s Reform U.K. leading the polls at 31 percent while Starmer’s center-left Labour lags behind at 21 percent. Given the unrest at home, it may seem unusual that so many people are heavily engaged with events thousands of miles away in Washington. Social media algorithms play a role pushing content, as do Farage and Robinson’s close relationships with figures such as Trump, Musk and Vice President JD Vance.

In any case, young people in the U.K. are as clued into American politics as ever. Cleary’s 12-year-old son’s description of Kirk wasn’t the first time he surprised her with his knowledge of U.S. politics, either: He recently filled her in on Florida’s decision to end vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

“I’m happy that he is inquisitive and he definitely questions things,” she said. However, she wonders if this consumption of politics via social media will shape the way he and his peers view the world for the rest of their lives. “He even says to me, ‘No one my age will ever vote Labour because they’re no good at TikTok,’” she said. “And he says he doesn’t like Reform, but that they made really good social media videos.”