There’s definitely going to be a good piece tracking his history sooner or later but he wasn’t just some random far right streamer. He popped up basically out of nowhere in 2012 when he was 18, had donors that helped him fund TPUSA. I faintly remember that he had some vague association with the Tea Party and it was primarily libertarians spamming quotes of him, very astroturfed popularity. I’m not entirely sure but he may have been the first one doing this debate libs, trigger libs then post the vid grift and Shapiro followed as another “conservative youth”.

It’s nuts to say this but I suspect that this was a GOP strategy to get young voters after Ron Paul accidentally became a meme on 4chan and gained some half-ironic following there. Kirk, Shapiro etc were basically provocateurs for hire with extreme positions but their views shifted depending on who was funding them. Part of the Koch Bros online agitator ecosystem. He wasn’t religious until much later when he had an “awakening” and I think he didn’t support Trump at first either.

ToiletpaperUSA on reddit has good stuff on his history. These people including Crowder, Molyneux etc were fringe shockjocks for pay and floated to the surface during the gamergate and Trump’s 2016 campaign. It’s hard to believe they got to be GOP media frontliners and so prominent that one would get assassinated like that because they all started as an intentionally extreme opposition to radlib woke SJWs etc and nobody took them very seriously.

If anyone tracks or remembers the rhetoric strategies of the Trump and Clinton campaigns back in 2016 and sees how initially fringe debate assholes like Charlie Kirk were positioned then the whole republican to fascist groupshift will become far more clear. Wild that it took less than a decade. I don’t think this trend will decline post Trump.