The person credited with financially kick-starting Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization was a rags-to-riches Wyoming businessman who ran for state governor in 2018.
Kirk was killed Wednesday when he was shot in the neck at Utah Valley University. He was speaking to a crowd as part of his “American Comeback” tour.
The FBI on Thursday morning released photos of a person of interest in Kirk’s shooting death, and the agency is asking the public for tips.
By the time of his death, the 31-year-old had become one of the most powerful political voices from the conservative and Christian right, especially young people.
The group he co-founded, Turning Point USA, sprawls across higher learning campuses and by fiscal year 2024, reported $17.9 million in net assets and nearly $4 million in net income, according to tax filings. That was after paying out millions in grants and salaries from a total revenue of nearly $84 million.
When the group started, Kirk was 18, and Wyoming multimillionaire Foster Friess saw something in him, Cowboy State Daily co-founder Annaliese Wiederspahn recalled Thursday, still reeling from Kirk’s death.
Earlier that year, around the spring of 2012, Kirk met 71-year-old Tea Party candidate Bill Montgomery, who encouraged him to undertake political activism, The Independent reported. They co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as a nonprofit focused on advocating for conservative causes at schools, colleges and universities.
The organization started out by sponsoring debates between Democratic and Republican students on college campuses in the Midwest.
‘The First Check’
By August that year, Kirk was at the Republican National Convention. He bumped into Friess in a stairwell and convinced him to bankroll the group, according to The Independent.
It was more than that, said Wiederspahn.
“Foster was sort of a great people picker,” she said. “He had a nose for that, for when people were really onto something that had legs, and they had the execution ability.”
Wiederspahn, who is no longer involved with Cowboy State Daily, had also benefitted from Friess’ famous generosity when founding the outlet in 2019 alongside Executive Editor Jimmy Orr.
She secured an initial grant from Friess months prior.
“He was the first check to Charlie at Turning Point, and among the first checks to (government spending tracker) Open The Books,” she said.
National outlets have corroborated this account at least anecdotally, noting that Kirk publicly credited Friess with kick-starting TPUSA.
“He just saw in Charlie what so many people came to see,” said Wiedersphan. "Just this passion and this charisma — this unique ability to cultivate his passion for Christ and for the truth."
That year, fiscal 2013, the group reported $78,890 in total revenue, all from contributions, gifts or grants. It reported $51,942 in expenses and net assets of $26,948.
Its growth was exponential, hitting nearly $1 million in net assets by fiscal year 2015 and soaring to the nearly $18 million reported in recent filings.
The Ride
In the autumn of 2018, Friess invited Wiederspahn and others to join him at the Washington, D.C., banquet for the Horatio Alger Award.
Wiederspahn described the award as for people like Friess, who had risen from comparable poverty to positions of success and influence.
She sat next to Friess’ wife of nearly six decades, Lynn, and Kirk sat next to Friess.
“And Charlie was recounting to the table that Foster was the very first person to fund Turning Point USA,” Wiederspahn remembered.
The next day left a vivid memory.
The group was going to an event at the Museum of the Bible, but the intervening traffic was terrible, Wiederspahn recalled.
“So Foster and Lynn rode bicycles with Charlie and Erika,” she said.
It was a cool, relatively dry autumn day and no one was yet bothering with jackets.
“I found it so endearing at the time,” Wiederspahn said. “This mid-20-something couple — I don’t think they were married yet — rode bikes with these 70-year-olds.”
Erika Frantzve, a Miss Arizona pageant winner, and Charlie Kirk had started dating that summer, ABC News reported.
Friess that year ran in the Republican primary election against Mark Gordon and others, losing to Gordon, who is now in his second term as Wyoming governor.
His generosity was already legendary by then, as he backed conservative political candidates but also, along with his wife Lynn and through their foundations, furnished scholarships, financed work for homeless people, supported water projects in Africa and other charitable causes.
His organization said Friess had donated $500 million in his lifetime, The New York Times reported when Friess died in 2021.
Wiederspahn said that Kirk and Friess genuinely cared for one another, and had their Christian faith in common.
“I’m just, I’m heartbroken for her, particularly for Erika and for the kids,” said Wiederspahn. “You know, it’s true what people have said: he died doing what he loved and what he was passionate about.”
The Outcry
Even after his death, Kirk remains a controversial figure.
Generally beloved on the political right, Kirk has drawn ire from the left for many of his views.
The Independent emphasized Kirk’s connections to the Trump family, his early childhood in a wealthy household, and his staunch pro-Second Amendment stance.
Former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, called Kirk “human garbage” in 2023, after Kirk promoted the theory that Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest due to the COVID vaccine.
Kirk’s detractors in the wake of his death have pointed to the multitude of quotes he made along the lines of “you will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death,” and, “I think it’s worth (it) to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
On the right, some influencers went so far as to call for “war” over Kirk’s apparent homicide.
Conservative-leaning news outlet the Daily Caller stopped short of that, but published a Sept. 11 editorial by senior editor Amber Duke titled, “We’ve Had It.”
“This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end,” the editorial reads, after referencing other acts of violence.
Those include Luigi Mangione’s reported shooting of an insurance company CEO and recent surveys in which 48% of liberal-leaning survey takers said it would be “somewhat justified” to murder former top Trump adviser Elon Musk.
“The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials has turned the left into a ticking time bomb,” says the editorial, adding, “How do we continue to live in a country filled with people who hate us and want us dead?”
The rhetoric was less inflammatory among Wyoming leading figures, generally.
“It’s horrific that people are being murdered over politics,” wrote the Libertarian Party of Wyoming in a Wednesdaystatement. “We need to understand that political violence is what happens when populism and hyper-factionalism exist. We are a broken nation.”
The Wyoming Democratic Party condemned the act and all political violence “in the strongest possible terms.”
“This cannot become a pattern in our country,” says the party’s Wednesday statement. “It is reprehensible, and we cannot allow violent political rhetoric to become normalized in the political discourse.”
And the Wyoming Republican Party mourned Kirk in its own Wednesday statement, recalling the speaker’s visit to the 2020 Wyoming Republican Convention.
The state party called for civility, not war.
“We can honor his legacy by matching his example of civil discourse and constant vigilance in the defense of our nation’s highest ideals,” the statement says.
Clair McFarland at clair@cowboystatedaily.com
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
