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The first and, as it turned out, last time I met Charlie Kirk, the wunderkind conservative political operative, was in a cafe somewhere in southwestern Ohio. The setting was the kind of stereotypical diner featured live on Fox News or MSNBC during primary campaigns, and indeed, it was that political season.
On a beautiful spring day (not unlike the autumn day that was his last) in early May 2022, Kirk was a member of the small campaign inner sanctum that surrounded then-New York Times bestselling author J.D. Vance as the candidate barreled down on a do-or-die primary for Senate in the Buckeye State.
The cafe court was presided over by the future vice president, but the conversation was frankly dominated by Kirk. Kirk’s style was not for everyone. But Kirk was also admirably atypical among millennials, a counterpoint to the rap against our generation: He was not visibly anxious, he was a self-made millionaire, and he was, of course, the furthest thing from a liberal.
As coffee poured, Kirk was adamant. He was adamant about starting a family. He was adamant in the righteousness of his cause and the wickedness of the American left. The contrast with Vance struck me as notable: Though Vance’s own story has (famously) humble beginnings, the politician also rose through the ranks of Yale, Silicon Valley, the prestige media circuit, and the world’s most powerful military.
Kirk’s story had none of that.
Kirk had been a college dropout from Chicago, and he had made his name in veritable hand-to-hand combat on college campuses—the American institution he himself scorned. These were clashes that, until September 10, 2025, were helter-skelter but not homicidal. Kirk, condemned by some conservative detractors (including a long-running rivalry with the prejudice merchant Nick Fuentes, incidentally a fellow Chicagoan) as an arriviste and naïf, seemed to care deeply about being taken seriously as an intellect in his own right.
Vance, whose reputation then was of polished conservative pundit from liberal salons, seemingly stood to gain from learning a little from Kirk’s take-no-prisoners partisan approach.
The two formed a fast partnership and, I sense, genuine brotherhood that in under 30 months made one vice-president-elect and the other perhaps the most powerful conservative in the country under 40. This week, of course, changed everything. On Thursday, the man first in line to the presidency escorted Kirk’s casket and family on Air Force Two to Phoenix.
Vance said Wednesday on X: “Some of our most successful events were organized not by the campaign, but by [Turning Point USA],” the main vehicle of Kirk’s empire. “He wasn't just a thinker, he was a doer, turning big ideas into bigger events with thousands of activists. And after every event, he would give me a big hug, tell me he was praying for me, and ask me what he could do.”
Kirk was what you could call a streetfighter, a term of art sometimes bestowed as a badge of honor in Republican political circles. And in the coming days the president he helped elect will posthumously award him the presidential Medal of Freedom, the civilian companion in spirit to the Medal of Honor. But for millions of Americans stateside and horrified onlookers abroad, Kirk might as well have died on the battlefield. He did, after all, die in the line of duty.
Kirk’s livestreamed assassination was straight out of Hollywood. After generations of erosion of the taboo on graphic violence in media, Kirk was nearly decapitated by his assailant in front of an audience of mostly young adults at Utah Valley University. And the video belongs to cyberspace for eternity. There quite arguably hasn’t been anything of the sort in American life since the killing of President Kennedy, but of course the sophistication of this footage puts the famous Zapruder film to shame. To round out the ’60s link, the social conservative activist Terry Schilling on Wednesday directly compared Kirk to Martin Luther King, Jr.
The coming days will be a test of how Kirk’s legend, now secure in some form, grows and of the sociopolitical consequence of his gruesome murder. Kirk was more polemicist than theoretician or original thinker, and he was distrusted as an establishment veneer by critics of his politics, some (including Fuentes) less savory than others. It’s nothing that I and others wouldn’t have said to his face in life, and indeed I did, first lightly beefing with him in 2019. On the other side, however, Kirk was increasingly if inconsistently critical of the hawkish turn of the Trump Administration and the influence of Israel on the political right.
Kirk, of course, was on the whole fiercely pro-Israel. “I hate being lied to, and I hate being propagandized,” Kirk said over the summer. “And this weekend, there was an all-out propaganda campaign trying to make it seem as if Israel is intentionally starving the people of Gaza.” As my colleague Andrew Day at The American Conservative wrote in August, “Kirk may be seen as a leader of young MAGA conservatives, and sometimes even as a critic of Israel. But that is a superficial interpretation. What Kirk in fact seems to be doing is blocking young MAGA conservatives from turning fully against Jerusalem.”
Some frankly fret that a figure like Fuentes is poised to fill the void, supplying rudimentary white nationalism to his aggressive and aggrieved young followers. While Fuentes remains more Jim Jones than Hitler, long on grievance and worldview but short on a path to power, such a projection also underrates the complexity of present-day conservative politics, especially among the under-40 set. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon overtly alluded to the dynamic on Wednesday, posting on his social platform: “The law of unintended consequences,” in response to the idea that the Zoomer agitator stands to gain.
Bannon’s projection should be taken seriously, as he himself was once the successor in the aftermath of another shock right-wing early death. Andrew Breitbart, namesake and founder of Breitbart News, was a decade older than Kirk and not butchered on Americans’ phone screens, but occupied a similar position in the conservative media constellation. Indeed, the title of Breitbart’s 2011 manifesto, “Righteous Indignation”, matches both the ethos of Kirk’s career and the incandescent zeitgeist in Trumpist circles in the wake of the murder.
Kirk’s operational legacy, the vast TPUSA network, should not be discounted as a power unto itself. In 2012, after Breitbart’s death, the then-obscure Bannon took charge of the broadsheet and turned it for a time into an unrivaled vehicle of Trumpist power and the epicenter of global right-wing populism. An as-yet unclear and formidable successor in Kirk’s fold could emerge, and organized conservatism could yet prove nimble enough to prudently and appropriately incorporate youthful frustrations without succumbing to identitarianism. For his own part, Kirk himself seemed on his way to doing just that.
In the meantime, this would seem as dangerous a time in American life as any since 24 Septembers ago.
Democratic elite reaction to Wednesday’s wickedness was commendable—there were swift denunciations of the violence and condolences for Kirk’s family from the party’s last two presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who were quickly joined by California Governor Gavin Newsom, the party’s likely front-runner for president who famously hosted Kirk on his podcast earlier this year.
But broadcast media reaction to Kirk’s death was overall mediocre and at worst disgraceful, with the operative-turned-journalist Matthew Dowd losing his job on Thursday after saying on air that Kirk brought his death on himself. And on Bluesky, the lefty rival to X, there has been widespread, overt celebration.
Already aggrieved following left-wing abuses of power in the Covid-19 era, elements of the right, including in Congress and possibly the administration itself, may flirt with a broader crackdown that could descend into a redux of the Global War on Terrorism, only here at home. Much ink was spilled in the wake of January 6, 2021 on the need for a domestic war on extremism, before momentum thankfully sputtered out. But the temptation, and risk (as after 9/11), is that Republicans now might actually do it.
Or as the writer Chris Hedges observed in his seminal War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, “The tyranny that Athens imposed on the outer reaches of empire, it eventually imposed on itself.”
The case for prudent and careful reaction though is hard to make when the human impulse in crisis is generally to “do something.” (And reaction to an assassination of course once set off world war). Kirk’s career and unacceptable slaying is a weathervane: for the pessimism and frustration of his generation, and for a country that no longer believes in the American dream.