The lesson that a lot of right wing influencers raised themselves on is, make yourself a useful tool for the richest, greediest, most destructive criminals on the planet, and you can get a lot of support, and make a lot of money.
The term “plant” is often used to describe someone whose success was not solely the result of a grassroots movement, but instead bolstered by powerful corporate interests who secretly poured massive amounts of money into ensuring their fame.
For example: Charlie Kirk was a fossil fuel industry plant. The right-wing activist murdered last week built his massive platform for racism, sexism, transphobia and climate denial in part by using anonymous funding from Big Oil.
Turning Point USA, the group Kirk founded to ignite a culture war on college campuses, has managed to hide much of its funding sources. Roughly half of the group’s $40 million in income in 2020 came from 10 anonymous donors, NBC News reported.
But in 2017, Kirk admitted that some of the group’s anonymous donors “are in the fossil fuel space.” Speaking to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Kirk disclosed that he’d fundraised for TPUSA at the annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), as well as the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association.
In those meetings, Kirk promised oil and gas companies he’d fight “the myth that fossil fuels are dirty,” and target the “leftist professors” on college campuses who “perpetuated” the “myth.”
The meetings “went great,” Kirk told Mayer. The IPAA’s president, Barry Russell, wound up joining TPUSA’s advisory council, where he remains today. (Kirk had said that most advisory council members are also TPUSA donors).
Over the next nine years, Kirk worked to chip away at young Americans’ rising concerns about climate change. He did this by claiming climate science is still debated—and then peddling the conspiracy theory that all climate policies are a Democratic bid for government control.
“A tyrant’s fantasy is to have a massive green economy transition,” he said in 2023. “You can get rid of private property, you can control people’s movements. It’s fundamentally the abolition of civilization as we know it.”
To justify his claim that climate science is unsettled, Kirk would often cite “experts” who downplay the seriousness of planetary heating. For example, in 2023, Kirk claimed climate science is “debated” because “a Nobel prize winning scientist recently came out and said there is no real climate crisis.” Kirk also cited the opinions of John Coleman, the now-deceased founder of the Weather Channel, as evidence that climate change is a hoax.
But the experts Kirk cited were almost always unqualified. For example, Coleman was a meteorologist, not a climate scientist, and his claims were frequently debunked by publishing climate scientists. The Nobel-Prize-winning scientist Kirk referenced, John Clauser, is not a climate scientist, and won the Nobel for physics in the 1970s. No other Nobel Prize-winning physicist denies mainstream climate science; in fact, some of them are climate scientists themselves.
Charlie Kirk labelled himself a “true patriot”. He was one of the most prominent conservative activists and media personalities in the United States, as well as a trusted ally of President Donald Trump. At the age of 18, shortly after Barack Obama’s re-election, he co-founded Turning Point USA, aiming to spread conservative ideals in liberal colleges, challenging students in polarising and viral debates.
He was known for his anti-transgender views and scepticism about the Covid-19 pandemic. He supported the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. A great lover of guns, he went so far as to say that defending the Second Amendment for the free circulation of weapons was worth “a few unfortunate victims of gun violence.”
Among his favourite targets were environmentalism and climate change. Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA have for years mocked science in the name of “free thinking”. Man-made global warming? “A hoax, a left-wing ploy to expand control over citizens”, even in violation of the historic principle of nature conservation that originated within the Republican world.
In a video, Kirk explains that “climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. Marxism is at its core, and climate change is on the outside. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism: it’s a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It sounds like a cliché, but it’s absolutely true.”
Violent and anti-democratic ideas, certainly. But they should be defeated on a rhetorical and political level, not with a bullet in the head. However, it may be too late to close Pandora’s box.