This story was written in partnership between RANGE and FāVS News, a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest. Learn more about FāVS’s work here.
The first time I saw Gavan Spies, he was helping to fight Charlie Kirk’s war against queer people. It was late July 2023, and the battlefield — not one of “flesh and blood,” the warriors insisted, but one that existed on a spiritual plane — was a worship concert near the Capitol Building in Olympia. That night, the gospel rang across the Capitol campus. Spies and his faithful were there to claim the state from “demonic” forces, embodied in elected leaders who were too deferential to queer rights, for Jesus.
This was the Washington portion of a 51-stop tour called “Kingdom to the Capitol” (K2C) led by the anti-queer worship pastor Sean Feucht. K2C visited every capitol building in the US between 2023 and 2024, arguing with song and testimony that the American public square should be controlled by God, not the voters. As I reported that August, Spies — just an obscure Airway Heights man before Kirk anointed him in 2022 as a regional strategic director for the new faith arm of his far-right nonprofit Turning Point USA — had engineered the Olympia event on behalf of Feucht and Kirk.
Turning Point USA Faith, the arm of TPUSA Spies reported to, organizes worship events, teaches parents how to talk to school boards about library books they want to ban and, according to its website, seeks broadly to “eliminate wokeism.”
According to Kate Bitz, a senior organizer for the Western States Center, the tour was “pushing a disturbingly narrow vision of who belongs in our communities, who belongs in our government and who deserves civil rights in our country.”
Before Feucht took the stage in Olympia to lead worship, I overheard Spies talking with a pair of Christian leaders from Spokane’s On Fire Ministries (OFM) about a gaggle of protesters affiliated with the Boise Temple of Satan, who had set up under some trees in the distance. The Satanists were demonstrating against Feucht’s high-profile statements that LGBTQIA communities were influenced by demonic forces and had to be eradicated. Spies told his brethren he had sent a team of people to pray for them, but the protesters had spurned the team’s offer.
Spies laughed. “So it turns out our antagonists are just a bunch of homos over there.” His OFM friends laughed, too. Spies could afford to say things like that in ways some of the higher-profile folks in the operation could not. Onstage, the TPF message is not that queer people are just a bunch of homos or any other slur. Instead, on stages like the one in Olympia, Feucht and others express their opposition to LGBTQIA rights in terms of being concerned about souls.
But Spies was not a visible person in TPUSA. His work happened behind the scenes. He was a well-connected member of Spokane’s Christian nationalist circles, which are always instrumental in state far-right religious organizing, even on the west side of Washington. He was good friends with Feucht. His small following on Twitter included Jim Walsh, the Republican state representative who made a cameo onstage with Feucht and Spokane Pastor Matt Shea before the Olympia concert, blessing their effort to take over the state for Christ’s kingdom. Spies’ name appears only scantly in the social media record, which includes a shining Instagram shout out by TPFaith and a tag on Facebook by OFM. In fact, a good portion of Spies’s public profile exists only in RANGE archives.
Spies filled in some of his biography in a speech he gave during a September 13 prayer vigil OFM organized for Kirk, who had been assassinated in Utah on September 10. In 2022, Spies had worked as a graduate instructor for Eastern Washington University (EWU). But that experience had put a bad taste in his mouth when the university started requiring employees to be vaccinated for COVID. “I was going to lose my job because I didn’t want to put that in my body,” he said.
(EWU spokesman Linn Parrish declined to comment on Spies’s employment because it’s a personnel issue, but he confirmed that Spies took graduate classes. Spies also has an empty Rate My Professor profile that says he worked for the university.)
So Spies applied to be a regional strategic director for TPUSA Faith, a job he said he was “way too overqualified” for. During his job interview, he said, he told Kirk — who harbored his own prominent agenda against college as an institution — “I can be whatever you want me to be when it comes to reclaiming our culture.”
TPUSA allowed Spies to fight COVID mandates — one of Feucht’s, Shea’s and Kirk’s primary personal bugaboos — along with other progressive causes, most prominently queer representation in the public square.
And thus Spies became, at least for a time, a footsoldier in Kirk’s war on “woke” that holds transgender people and pregnant women should not be allowed to access gender-affirming or reproductive health care, the US should put a moratorium on immigration, small girls should be forced to carry their rapists’ babies to term, women must “submit to your husbands,” the Civil Rights Act should be repealed and a litany of other regressive positions.
That campaign is being brought to bear in the separated presidencies of Donald Trump, which have codified some of those stances in national policy and credited Kirk with being instrumental in the cause. Underneath that influence is a big machine. TPUSA boasts more than 800 chapters at college campuses across the country, including EWU and Gonzaga and Whitworth universities. According to its 2024 tax filings, the latest available, TPUSA brought in $85 million in revenue and employed 458 people in 2023. It claims a quarter million student members. Its influence was so powerful that The New York Times’s Robert Draper dubbed Kirk “the Youth Whisperer of the American Right.” He claimed credit for driving young people rightward, a trend that showed up in polls, during the last election cycle. And though such an audacious claim lacks conclusive evidence, he was perceived by his right-wing supporters as being so important that Vice President JD Vance cancelled an appearance at a 9/11 memorial to put Kirk’s casket on Air Force 2.
Such recognition doesn’t come without a nationwide army of Spieses.
Washing Kirk clean
Charlie Kirk was a tall man with a boyish smile and quickness of tongue that charmed some of the nation’s most prominent journalists, including Draper and The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, both of whom had close access. I was not one of these people, but I briefly met Kirk once, and am more familiar with the Kirkiverse than the average bear (central insights of which familiarity I owe to investigative reporter Daniel Walters, who in 2023 talked to me for more than an hour explaining the Groyper wars and Kirk’s opportune shift from traditional fiscal conservatism toward Christian nationalism.)
On September 10, I watched the video of Kirk being shot in the neck between journalism classes I teach at Gonzaga University. Within minutes, Donald Trump told the world Kirk was dead (the media soon followed) and, almost immediately, armies of online Christian nationalist commentators went to work downplaying the extremity of Kirk’s views and casting him as a martyr for Christ.
Three days after he died, I went to a candlelight vigil for Kirk under the clock tower in Riverfront Park. Hundreds of people had shown up to pray and hear TPUSA chapter leaders, pastors, and conservative activists talk about their fallen leader. For the first time, I saw Spies step forward and speak from the stage. (He hinted at nonviolence, saying conservatives should not “retaliate” but promised Kirk’s work would continue.) As a group, the speakers painted Kirk as a moderate conservative and kind-hearted Christian mostly interested in bringing people to Jesus.
Most local reporters reflected that image in their reports. The intent of organizers was for people to leave that event thinking Kirk was a folk hero, and the media obliged.
This is not an accurate portrayal. Kirk’s advocates said he was dedicated to free speech; the first mission of TPUSA was to launch a “professor watchlist” aimed at “detailing instances of radical behavior among college professors,” encouraging harassment and doxxing. They said Kirk was interested in even-handed debate; at his PMW events. He would show up fresh and sober in the public squares to spar with impassioned but nervous and possibly intoxicated college students, resulting in videos that would go viral among Kirk supporters hungry to see lefty college kids get owned by a fast-talking conservative experienced in public speaking and rhetoric. They said he was a martyr who died preaching the gospel; Kirk died just after implying that mass shootings are primarily the fault of predominantly Black communities.
Kirk had spent his entire public life creating the infrastructure and mechanisms of this automated white-washing. It has been working.
Kirk mattered less for the originality of his thinking than for his skill at building the infrastructure to advance a broader Christian nationalist agenda that many shared but few could mobilize as effectively. The mechanism through which it’s materializing and through which Kirk is being wiped clean of his more odious stances is the closing ranks of an enormous web of people like Gavan Spies leveraging the vast and nimble complex of social networking embodied in TPUSA. These people are faithful, they are people who would work even though, like Spies, they were overqualified, because they, Spies said, “want to win.”
TPUSA: a home for the angry
Who is it Spies wants to defeat? Well, universities that want him vaccinated, for one. But there are more. One day in 2023, at a city council meeting where he had been doing some activism, he showed me on his phone photos of four drawings that depicted sexual acts, with a good dose of nudity. I hadn’t known it then, but they’d come from the graphic novel Gender Queer, the biographical story of transgender author Maia Kobabe coming to terms with who they are. The book is shelved in some high-school libraries and is intended for older teens and parents. But Spies had made it seem as if the text constituted pornography and is taught as curriculum in very young grades.
“Do you want your daughter seeing this?” he had demanded.
“No? Where’d it come from?” I had said, not knowing whether to challenge it.
Spies had been fired up. Later during that same meeting, when the city council had voted to denounce then-Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward for appearing onstage with Shea and Feucht at another of Feucht’s Christian nationalist concerts, Spies had stood up in the gallery, shouted “Cowards!” and stormed out of the building.
Spies was always civil with me, except when he complained of a joke I made in a story about the small field kits Christian groups use for large-group communion — I’d called them “sacred Lunchables;” Spies found that disrespectful — but he was not so staid when talking about queer people. He had made the homophobic comment at the state capitol quietly, but it carried a menace that to queer communities was always present in Kirk’s rhetoric. Kirk, who referred to queer activists as “freaks” and the “alphabet mafia,” is famous partly for asserting that God’s “perfect law” regarding homosexual acts is to stone the perpetrators to death.
I had a long conversation with Spies at the Spokane Valley Assembly in the fall of 2023. We sat near the church’s coffee shop while the sermon played on a screen above us. I was not reporting, but Spies told me the Kingdom to the Capitol tour had been his idea. He would later help to stage the Spokane concert where Feucht and Shea would pray over then-Mayor Nadine Woodward — the act for which she would later be censured.
He also helped Feucht retrieve a fancy guitar an unhoused man stole from Feucht’s vehicle when Feucht visited OFM in June 2023. Feucht later invited the man to the same concert Woodward appeared at and faked the man’s salvation and baptism. Shea dipped him in a horse trough that night despite his insistence that he didn’t want to be baptized.
Charlie Kirk gave people like Spies a place. He gave them something to do, and it’s changed our world. With Kirk’s widow Erika newly at the helm, these footsoldiers promise to carry his work forward more aggressively than Kirk ever could have done himself before he was martyred.
“No one will ever forget my husband’s name,” Erika Kirk promised in a speech after Kirk was gunned down. “And I will make sure of it. It will become stronger. Bolder. Louder and greater than ever. My husband’s mission will not end. Not even for a moment.”
Editor’s note: this story has been edited to correct a typo in sentence structure.
