Josh Thifault, one of the earliest leaders at Turning Point USA and a close friend of its founder, Charlie Kirk, sat down for an exclusive interview with The Tennessee Star’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Michael Patrick Leahy, last week, where he described Kirk as a once-in-a-generation leader whose vision and intensity reshaped the conservative movement.
Kirk died after being shot at his American Comeback Tour event held at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.
Thifault said he first met Kirk in 2014 at a small Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, at a time when he had planned to leave politics altogether.
“It was the last political event I was supposed to go to before I went back to Indiana to work with my father. I had no plans of going into politics in the future,” he explained on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Thifault said Kirk, then a young activist who had started Turning Point USA “in his garage,” delivered a speech that immediately stood out to him during that event.
“The keynote at this last political event I’m going to go to is this crazy kid named Charlie Kirk. He gives this unforgettable pitch that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life about how we can make it cool to be a conservative, how the conservatives need to actually play in culture, and how the only hope for the future of our movement is to actually attempt to win over young people,” Thifault said.
After the event, Thifault said he spoke at length with Kirk, who he said challenged him directly in helping grow Turning Point USA.
“I had never met anybody who believed it was possible to win over young people with a conservative cause in a wide scale, national, mainstream way before I met Charlie,” Thifault said.
“At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘I don’t know what you have planned, but you should drop everything and help me build this Turning Point thing. It’s going to change the country,’” he added.
While he admitted he “didn’t say yes right away,” Thifault went on to join Turning Point USA in 2015, despite skepticism from nearly everyone around him.
“[Kirk] knew that he wanted to just keep texting me until I said yes. And praise God, I did. Prayed about it a lot and just about everyone around me thought that I was completely nuts,” he said.
Thifault said working closely with Kirk revealed an unmatched level of drive. He detailed that, like billionaire Elon Musk, Kirk had an “obsession with the future” and “the belief that you can do insane, crazy things that no one else thinks are possible.”
“All the way up until the last few days of his life, he was maniacally intense, and I mean that as the highest compliment…[Charlie] was wise, he was aggressive, and he was very effective,” he added.
Kirk’s mind, Thifault said, never slowed down. He pointed to the night of the inauguration of President Donald Trump last year, when Kirk had texted him about a strategy to get Vice President JD Vance elected in 2028.
“The night of the inauguration last year, he was texting me about strategy to get JD Vance elected in 2028. He just never stopped. And when he felt that God was calling him to do something, it was just like water going downhill. Nothing could stop him because God was with him,” he said.
Reflecting on Kirk’s death, Thifault urged supporters not to lose heart. He explained how he does not see Kirk’s death as the end of a movement, but as a call to action.
“Don’t be intimidated by the fact that we lost the greatest man in my generation: He’s experiencing his reward, and now God is ready to use us,” he said.
Thifault credited Kirk with changing his life.
“I look at everything that’s happened in the nation because of Turning Point. I look at all the people I’ve met, I look at the amazing life I have now. The best part of all of it was I met my wife…at a Turning Point event in 2017…I owe a lot to Charlie,” he said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Charlie Kirk” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 4.0.
