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3,723 words · no email, no account
No. 111 · Power & Politics · American Politics
The Founder
a biography of Charles James Kirk
What the book is
He was born Charles James Kirk on October 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, the second of three children of an architect and a counselor. He was eighteen years old when he co-founded Turning Point USA in June 2012 with the long-time conservative activist Bill Montgomery. By 2020 TPUSA was a $39 million annual-revenue operation with offices in 12 states and 250,000 high-school and college members. He grew the Charlie Kirk Show podcast from a January 2021 launch into the most-downloaded American political podcast by 2024.
Theodore Pemberton's biography traces the arc through the suburban Chicago childhood and the Wheeling High School student-council presidency, the Harper College semester Kirk left to co-found Turning Point, the long campus AmericaFest annual conferences in Phoenix, the The MAGA Doctrine (2020) and The College Scam (2022) books, the long alliance with Donald Trump and the 2024 campaign 'ballot harvesting' operation in Arizona and Wisconsin that the press has credited with the 1.1 percentage-point Trump Arizona victory, the 2021 marriage to Erika Frantzve, the two Phoenix children, and the Phoenix studio operation in the post-election year.
What emerges is a portrait of the suburban-Chicago college-dropout who built, before his thirtieth birthday, the largest American youth-political organisation of his generation — and the long right-wing media operation that has, in the second Trump administration, made him one of the most listened-to conservative voices in the country.
At a glance
- Subject
- Charles James Kirk
- Shelf
- Power & Politics · American Politics
- Written by
- Theodore Pemberton
- Chapters
- 21 across 204 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 21 chapters
- 01Prospect HeightsRead free
- 02Skipping the Line3,271 words
- 03The Machine2,833 words
- 04The Trump Convergence2,462 words
- 05The Campus Wars2,547 words
- 06The Donor Class2,612 words
- 07The Owens Experiment2,631 words
- 08AmericaFest2,381 words
- 09The Pivot2,851 words
- 10The Daily Show2,348 words
- 11The Church Turn2,503 words
- 12The Chase2,488 words
- 13The Race Question2,629 words
- 14The Infrastructure2,473 words
- 15The Grift Question2,418 words
- 16The Court of Trump2,510 words
- 17The Generation2,169 words
- 18The Boy Who Skipped3,529 words
- 19The Continuation4,327 words
- 20The Fault Line4,317 words
- 21The Widow2,616 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 204 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-108-6 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley
ISBN 979-8-90623-168-0
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Founder about?
Charles James Kirk. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Founder — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,723 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 59,000 words, 21 chapters, 204 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
