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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Alice Speri

How Charlie Kirk turned campuses into cultural battlefields – and ushered in Trump’s assault on universities

A man in a blue blazer stands, speaking into a microphone, to a man across him while in a room of people
Charlie Kirk debates with students on 19 May in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. Photograph: Nordin Catic/Getty Images for the Cambridge Union

Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist killed this week while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, never graduated from the community college he briefly attended. But his lack of a degree didn’t stop him from assuming a defining role in the ongoing transformation of US higher education.

Kirk pioneered a style of ideological warfare against what he viewed as bastions of leftism, helping turn campuses into cultural battlefields and paving the way for Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign to weaken American universities and subject them to his movement’s ideological agenda.

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