Editor’s Note, Sunday, November 2, 2025, at 5:40 p.m.: A previous version of this article included the names of the vigil organizers. For security reasons, the names have been removed.

Immediately following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, conservative college groups nationwide organized memorials, often using nearly identical language about setting aside political disagreement. In a school-wide email, the Bowdoin Conservatives announced a candlelight vigil on the museum steps on September 14 to celebrate Kirk’s “devotion to his faith and his commitment to family values” and insisted it was “not about politics.”

However, Kirk’s life was nothing if not political and was premised on making conservative ideology legible to contemporary audiences. So, why would a conservative political club avoid the politics of a political commentator they celebrated?

1.     Kirk’s “faith” wasn’t about God or community; it was about Christian ethnonationalism. He called separation of church and state a fabrication, argued that “you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population” and proclaimed that “the Democrat Party supports everything that God hates.” His vision was explicitly theocratic: America needed Christian rule because “we have a Christian form of government” that was “incompatible” with a non-Christian population.

2.     His “family values” weren’t about caring for family or community; they were about restricting who could form a family, who deserved citizenship at birth, who could have an abortion and who deserved to die alongside their family.

The white supremacist foundation of Kirk’s work wasn’t subtext. His organization claimed Black people were “socially incompatible with other races.” Kirk said Black women lacked “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” insisting they had to “steal a white person’s slot.” He promoted the conspiracy that Jewish donors were “the number one funding mechanism” of anti-white policies. He said Muslims are secretly planning “demographic replacement” and called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” He stated that Haitian immigrants — “rapists, thugs, murderers” — would “become your masters.” He created a Professor Watchlist to harass academics he called un-American, called the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake” and described Martin Luther King Jr. as an “awful” person. Staff messages at his organization have included “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Kirk launched Turning Point USA at 18 with the financial backing of Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Freiss and his own father, who was a prolific conservative donor. The student activist story obscured what Turning Point was: a well-funded machine built to give white supremacist talking points a youthful face and institutional presence on campuses, complete with resources to harass professors and stage nationwide tours.

The event would have been an extremely meek version of a white supremacist rally. The organizers claimed the vigil would create “space for mourning” and “affirm the shared humanity that binds us all.” However, shared humanity would require engaging with what Kirk stood for and spent his life evangelizing. Instead, the group asks for his politics to be set aside. When the organizers solicit to the entire student body that “this gathering is not about politics or debate,” they are not offering neutrality but implying the degradation of all other students.