Charlie Kirk saw something in young people “that we don’t even see in ourselves,” Mikey McCoy, who served as Charlie Kirk’s chief-of-staff, said during an appearance on The Alex Marlow Show.
McCoy spoke to Marlow in a rare interview as part of the Breitbart News editor-in-chief’s series speaking with people who were close to Kirk.
“I met Charlie when I was 18 years old, and he was speaking at my dad’s church, and it was kind of his first introduction to speaking at churches. It’s not something he had done before. It was kind of coming out of this COVID era where you know the church was closed, but marijuana dispensaries were open, strip clubs were open, and Charlie saw something deeply wrong with that, and so he wanted to take a stand,” McCoy said, noting that he offered to drive him and his then-girlfriend Erika to the airport after the event.
“And it was like an hour and a half drive, awful traffic. Looking back now, I’m so grateful for the traffic. Got got so much time with him,” McCoy said, recalling that Kirk was “grilling” him in the car.
“I mean, you know, where did you go to high school? Where are you going to college? Why are you going to college? What is — you know, like all these questions. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, American history, this battle, that battle. What’s the significance? And I didn’t have the answers to like 90 percent of it, and so it’s kind of like for me, Charlie was my hero,” he said.
“I thought maybe, you know, he probably thinks I’m an idiot because I couldn’t answer these questions, and we get to the airport. And right before he gets out of the car, he goes, ‘You know, I don’t think you should go to college.’ And subconsciously, I’m like, ‘Ok, probably because I didn’t answer 90 percent of the questions, he thinks I’m an idiot.’”
“But he goes, ‘No, I don’t want you to go to college. I want you to come work for me instead.’ And I was like, wait, what? And the entire drive home, I was just pondering to myself, like, how could such a legend and massive man as Charlie Kirk want… me? Like, what? That doesn’t make sense. I’m an 18 year old kid that obviously doesn’t know anything, and it just didn’t make sense to me.”
However, McCoy said that Kirk truly “saw something in young people that we don’t even see in ourselves.”
“He saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself, and he wanted us to be better, bigger, greater than what, you know, news networks or you know public sentiment was towards young people or where they were going. He saw a problem. He saw young people not being able to afford homes, not being able to get married, not being able to afford children. You know, he saw young people having to inherit a future where America isn’t, you know, what it was for the older generations, and he wanted to fix that,” McCoy said, explaining that Kirk wanted to show young people that there was a “better version that they didn’t even see for themselves.”
“So he went on college campuses, and as I kind of saw this trajectory, I had the privilege of seeing you know five people at his tent, ten people at his tent, 15, 20, 25, and I was going through my camera roll, and in October 2023, he’s at the University of Arizona, and there’s about 15 to 20 people at the tent,” he said, noting how the figures blew up.
“Because it finally clicked for young people. They saw his videos, and even though you know liberal students may not have agreed with him, even though you know maybe center students wouldn’t have agreed with him, they respected him because he authentically and consistently showed up. He didn’t pander to young people. You know, Gen Z has this ability to kind of sniff out when somebody’s pandering to them, speaking the Gen Z lingo or trying to imitate Gen Z culture. Charlie didn’t do that,” McCoy noted.
“He didn’t tell young people what they wanted to hear. He told young people what they ought to hear. It was a very different message, and young people rewarded him for it. They started to show up, and they started to listen to him, and they started to say, ‘You know what? There’s something about this Charlie Kirk guy, you know.’ And Charlie, he could have given up. He could have ten years prior, when nobody was showing up to those tables… ‘Maybe this isn’t for me. Nobody’s showing up. It’s not clicking.’ But for him, it wasn’t just a job,” he said.
Rather, it was “a care, a genuine love.”
“It was a mission for him,” McCoy said. “Like he had to show up, and it was just like, such a privilege for me to be able to follow him all these years, and you know, really get to be under his tutelage, but also just watch him… It was so powerful.”
The Alex Marlow Show, hosted by Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow, broadcasts coast to coast on weekdays from noon to 1 p.m. Eastern on the Salem Radio Network stations. You can listen to the radio show online here. The show also airs at 9 p.m. Eastern on the Salem TV news channel. Marlow’s podcast, The Alex Marlow Show Presented by Breitbart News, is released weekdays at 9 p.m. Eastern. You can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Rumble, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
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