Slain US conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was known for his radical views that attracted both supporters and critics, and his views on Ukraine were also controversial, ERR News reports.
Estonian political expert Lauri Almann said that Charlie Kirk was one of the most visible faces of US President Donald Trump’s conservative MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, especially popular among young people, and an extremely influential speaker.
Almann noted that Kirk’s special technique was to go to liberal US college campuses and debate controversial and emotionally charged issues, and turn the discussion process into promoting the messages of ultra-conservative America.
Kirk was fatally shot on the 10th of September while speaking at the University of Utah. It was the first event of a tour by Turning Point USA, a youth organization founded in 2012 that promotes conservative politics in US schools and colleges. Almann noted that both the debates Kirk won and lost were watched by millions of people, and Kirk’s broadcasts had millions of listeners.
According to the expert,
Kirk was not speaking just to provoke – he truly believed what he was saying.
Kirk’s controversial position also included relations between Russia and Ukraine. A few days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kirk declared that it was nothing more than a conflict over the border. After the war began, he criticized both Democrats and Republicans for focusing too much on Ukraine, rather than on the southern border of the United States itself, calling it a “moral disgrace.” Among the influencer’s statements was a claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is actually an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “From Estonia’s perspective, people are judged by their stance on Ukraine. And his arguments were full of Russian propaganda,” Almann added.
Kirk entered politics by co-founding Turning Point USA, an organization created to appeal to young voters. He initially did not support Trump, but that changed in 2016 when Kirk helped reach a demographic that Democrats were not reaching: young men. Almann noted that Kirk valued freedom over security, and paraphrasing what Kirk said in 2023 about gun deaths in the United States, said: “And when it’s a matter of freedom, then he was on the side of freedom — and if that came at the cost of some deaths, he was willing to take that risk. That risk, of course, ended up coming back to him.”
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