2013, updated 2014, an AP item: https://tucson.com/news/nation-world/government-politics/article_e5d8d8c0-ed8c-5f22-a906-3dfaea00dabb.html
Mid-item :
“Any donor who thinks an organization needs $108 million for a three-state grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign is being taken advantage of,” said Erick Erickson, a nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host and frequent Trump critic. “It sounds like a grift.”
In a statement, Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet said none of the group’s leaders have inappropriately benefited from their financial arrangements. If anything, he said, many were underpaid for their talents.
“If the so-called ‘experts’ know what it takes to build successful ballot chasing teams, why are conservatives apparently so bad at it?” Kolvet said.
Turning Point was founded in suburban Chicago in 2012 by Kirk and William Montgomery, a tea party activist, to proselytize on college campuses for low taxes and limited government.
Despite early misgivings, Turning Point enthusiastically backed Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination in 2016. Kirk served as a personal aide to Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son.
That's interesting. News then, now, not mentioned. Continuing mid item near the end-
Compensation also soared, with Kirk’s climbing from $27,000 in 2016 to more than $407,000 by 2021, tax records show. He bought three high-end properties, all worth over a million dollars. Millions more were paid out to a cluster of companies linked to a handful of group leaders and their allies, according to tax filings and business records.
Kolvet said that much of Kirk’s wealth was derived from his successful podcast and radio show, as well as public speaking fees, though he declined to provide earnings figures.
Yet specifics about how exactly Turning Point spends its money — and who benefits — are often difficult to discern because the IRS does not require nonprofit groups to publicly disclose detailed accounts of their expenditures. Meanwhile, many of Turning Point’s biggest vendors are limited liability companies that are registered in states that do not require public disclosure of ownership.
One branch, the Turning Point Endowment, held more than $55 million in reserve in 2022, while donors were courted to give more.
Kolvet said the money was part of Turning Point’s “50-100 year plan to continue reaching generation after generation of young Americans.” He added that the organization’s leaders were “good stewards of donor money.”
While building for the future, however, Turning Point has shown a willingness to spend lavishly.
In 2019, the group stated that its leaders would travel first-class or by charter plane, explaining later that it was sometimes needed to “ensure the uninterrupted success of the organization’s mission.”
In 2021, Turning Point sponsored a wedding reception for Kirk and his wife, Erika Frantzve, at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess luxury hotel, which was also billed as a ninth anniversary celebration and fundraiser for the organization.
Kolvet said the event was separate from the couple’s small wedding ceremony, describing it as an “elegant and gracious way for Erika and Charlie to mark a landmark in the life of TPUSA (the 9th anniversary) while also inviting a much larger group of friends and family to celebrate a landmark in their own lives.”
Other expenditures defy easy explanation.
A $999,000 payment was made to a limited liability company in Nevada for a “research project on educational outputs,” according to 2020 tax documents. The company, called Clocktower LLC, was dissolved in 2022 and the only corporate officer listed in its business filings is the president of a firm that advises on tax avoidance strategies.
That's not chump change. It's a cashflow feeding many. The entire article should interest readers. Yet, now, with a dead Charlie nobody's talking money trail. Kash and Pam seem to have a perp and have shut things down without any forensic audits of anything or anybody. Nothing to see there, move on? Huh?
Ending paragraph of that years-earlier item:
“Any insinuation that anyone” at Turning Point “benefited from this is defamatory,” Kolvet said.
That was a statement in a context, but it sure as hell fits today. WTF happened to follow the money?
Here is a YouTube of Charlie's chief-of-staff, (that likely having been a well compensated post), and was there a preacher McCoy's other son, a brother to Michael in TPUSA, well compensated leadership? With a role, of some kind, in the organization, before and after the shooting, with what functions, responsibilities, powers, benefits and persona? Or not? These are basic questions of organizational structure and beneficial interests, which change however, after the publicity and fact of Charlie Kirk being shot dead on YouTube.
Presuming there's money, now greater or not than 2013-14, FOLLOW IT, ALREADY!
That is basic Investigation 101 so who's doing it?
------------------
BASIC QUESTIONS: Who takes over this cash cow, what person, persons, or group with money sloshing around, and what's the potential cash flow in the future, with all this current publicity? I don't know, but I know there's no harm in asking. What are the interrelationships of key people? Who gains, who doesn't?
All for now on this topic and related coverage. But it might show motive to remove Charlie, depending upon what inquiry yields.
________________UPDATE______________
Got it! Found on a web video, Ian Carroll, where about 2-1/2 min into the item, there is a Justin mentioned by Pastor McCoy. The pastor on a video clip loaded by Carroll, from some other resource unknown to Crabgrass.
Of interest? Crabgrass judges it so. All I know is what I find on the web.
FURTHER: One site, two items, here and here, one of which embedded the Carroll video.
More in future posting, maybe.
FURTHER: We'll see whether Charlie had left a will which will surface, or not. There was a ton of money sloshing around, so, we'll have to wait, but the answer exists and will surface. Was there a trust for the children set up, as you'd expect in big buck estate planning?
FURTHER: The widow says the show goes on. View the full statement she made. It should be profitable. There seems ambition to the voice, yet different persons will see her speech differently. I saw it as less rather than more. She is now the CEO of the show.
FURTHER: Grief - https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1764917/erika-kirk-jd-vance.webp
FURTHER: The show must go on. A quick new event, Charlie gone, Erika feathred. The operation has new momentum. Bigger? Better? A business plan, JD with a place in things, for now, for later?
"Charlie's gone, so what do we go next," one of the interviewees says, "Fight, fight, fight." "Someone else caputured the energy . . ." "Membership is balloning . . .".
FURTHER: To Crabgrass, Charlie Kirk and TPUSA - before the shooting, some guy in Arizona, a Christian Nationalist Trump supporter, so what? Now, a martyr.
It is admitted, Crabgrass was not attuned to Right wing media, being interested instead in the Bernie AOC Oligarchy tour facts.etc., instead. But now, one thing has to be said, emphatically, Kirk zeroed in on how the young are being screwed by greed and politics as usual leading them into debt slavery.
Refinding the story - This is not an after shooting whodunit. It is where, after the shooting made me pay attention enough to ask, what made Charlie Kirk effective? With Gen Z as they are called, in college, costing a lot and so what's the payout, where does it lead? With no college, AI looming as a job killer, where does that lead? Important things needed to be understood by readers and those with power.
This will end the post. Because there is no way of knowing where the money machine TPUSA is set to become under Erika Kirk ownership and management, new directions being in a future where nobody has a crystal ball to say. Start with the quick intro article, then the beginning part of the full video.
And say it now, the full session video has a part where Tucker goes vile on "boomers" as selfish. Tucker grew up in relative affluence and the boomers he criticizes are those he's seen and been with, i.e., those of equal affluence, those not drafted int Vietnam, those (like the Clintons) not left by others of their generation to hang, but rather those Tucker might be more familiar with who did okay without a thought to the future they were leaving, nor to the others of their generation they were leaving out of any comfort or doing well. There are two parts to the boomer generation, some hanging on, some who got coopted from '60s moods and some who didn't. Too many were abandoned by the cooptees and their mentors.
That anti-boomer rant is near the end of the full video, and also missing from the video is the part immediately follow the linked segment, which is where Kirk warned conservatives should care because the situation is untenable and if it continues to be dismissed as "they should manage a budget better," then things will come to an unstable crunch, far harder on the country than if the situation is faced now and fixed as much as possible while facing billionaire and millionaire greed for lower taxes and deficit spending. Kirk warned that the situation was a disequilibrium with possible grave consequences.
I could not relocate the full video. Only this part, which is enough of the nub of things showing Kirk was not a lightweight right wing Chritian proselytizer only, as I'd preemptively dismissed him before the shooting and before delving deeper.
That said, as a caveat about the missing stuff from the later part of the full session's video - Here's the stuff. An MSN carried descritive report. The video. Don't take all of the MSN item too seriously, and do watch the video part.
Respectively titled -
Charlie Kirk Slams Buy Now Pay
Later As 'Predatory' — Podcaster Warns Gen Z Is 'Financing Their
Coachella Tickets' Without Guardrails
and
Charlie Kirk Exposes the Debt Trap Enslaving 60% of Gen Z
When/if I rediscover the link for the full Tucker/Charlie item the post will have that update added, otherwise, this ends it. That caveat is not to minimize the two linked items. Read and watch!!
Another online Kirk on campus pre-shooting video worth the time to watch it:
Prove me Wrong: College is a Scam
Crabgrass undergraduate years remain treasured, before entering "the real world," but not as a career path necessity or boost, but for having leavened the mind. Kirk never sought/earned a degree, but had capabilities that served him well financially, and he enjoyed living. Some of his politics and God/Jesus/afterlife notions are not compatible with the Crabgrass view of things, but he was not a lightweight. That part I'd earlier misunderstood. Christian societal cohesion can be good and helpful to living a happy life among others, apart from doctrine. Some churches do good. Some don't.
There might be further posting about post-shooting stuff as news happens. IF SO =- It will be via separate new posts. not by any further updating here, (beyond possibly adding a link to the full Tucker/Charlie item - as already noted).