Less than six months ago, Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a university campus in the most-watched public assassination of a Christian activist in history. It feels more like a decade. In the aftermath of his murder, the conservative movement he helped hold together—far more than anyone realized while he was alive—has collapsed into factional warfare. We collectively witnessed the end of Charlie Kirk; we are now seeing the end of what might be called the “Charlie Kirk Moment.”
For a brief time, it seemed like the opposite might be true; that the killing of Kirk might, as many conservative influencers promised, spawn thousands of new activists radicalized by his murder and made in his image. Just nine days later, TPUSA had received over 62,000 new student signups. Kirk’s memorial was attended by 90,000 people; TPUSA claims 100 million people watched the memorial worldwide. The service itself featured America’s leaders defending the Christian faith, and Erika Kirk forgiving her husband’s killer.
The response to the memorial and the outpouring of support for TPUSA and Kirk’s widow was overwhelming, and the sight of major political figures such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and others proclaiming the truths of Christianity gave rise to the sense that in the uneasy relationship between the populist MAGA movement and the moral views of the old Religious Right—personified in many ways by Kirk himself—Christian values might win precedence.
That unity vanished overnight. If blame can be assigned to a single person, podcaster Candace Owens is the primary candidate; by the end of September, Owens began a viral YouTube “investigation” in which she by turn implicated Israel, France (even accusing the French Foreign Legion of trying to assassinate her before swiftly moving on from this ludicrous claim), the Macrons, the U.S. government/military, Kirk’s head of security, and TPUSA itself. In December, she took aim directly at Kirk’s legacy:
I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA am making a personal plea to every well-meaning person who donated to this Godforsaken organization to request a refund. You were lied to. And leadership knew.
Owens also turned her fire on Kirk’s widow, targeting Erika in multiple episodes; after Erika flew to Nashville to provide Owens with evidence debunking her claims, Owens promptly returned to bashing TPUSA and Charlie’s widow. She has now indicated that she is planning to do a series of episodes on Erika, and the widow faces daily waves of vitriolic hatred and accusations of complicity in her husband’s murder on social media. When a Muslim activist guest suggested that Erika killed her husband recently, Owens roared with laughter.
She is single-handedly attempting to destroy everything Charlie Kirk loved: His organization, his movement, his friends, and even his beloved wife.
There are many aspects to this, of course. Charlie Kirk, as it turns out, was not just the greatest right-wing political organizer in a generation; he was also personally holding much of the Trump coalition together. In a conversation with TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet (who has faced accusations from Owens after she dreamed about him), Ross Douthat compared Kirk to William F. Buckley, the great coalition-builder who laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan’s rise. Like Buckley, Douthat noted, Kirk “sat at the center of a network of people who didn’t always like each other, but all liked him.” Now, that center is gone.
Many influencers now instead seek to use his corpse like a ventriloquist using a dummy in order to utilize his martyr status to promote their own views. Some, Owens among them, have claimed that Kirk was a secret Catholic or on the verge of becoming so, despite Kirk’s unequivocal statement, at the very event at which he was killed, that “I’m an evangelical Christian.” Private text messages, second-hand conversations, and debunked or disputed mischaracterizations of meetings are peddled by the influencer ventriloquists who demand that Kirk’s public statements be ignored in favor of the muck they are raking.
Kirk, like any public commentator, discussed a range of current issues behind the scenes with people that he (in some cases mistakenly) believed he could trust. Every writer I know does the same—it is how we test arguments, the strength of our positions, and our own biases. But to believe, as many of the ventriloquists would have it, that Kirk was secretly and conveniently coming around to all of their positions despite his public statements to the contrary is to render him a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool. These ventriloquists, it is worth noting, are smooth and untrustworthy liars—and they are either facilitating (Owens) or tolerating (Carlson, Kelly, et al) the daily torture of Charlie Kirk’s widow, the mother of his little son and daughter. If that isn’t a credibility test, nothing is.
In the meantime, the movement Charlie Kirk built is not only under fire from the outside, but from the inside. Nick Fuentes, the wildly popular internet edgelord, has long been Kirk’s archnemesis—but with Kirk’s murder, he sensed an opportunity to move in on the fallen figurehead’s leaderless audience. Fuentes’ mantra, which many of his followers recite verbatim, sums up his worldview: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the f—k up, Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise. It’s that simple.” When challenged on the mantra by Piers Morgan, Fuentes stood by it.
Fuentes is getting plenty of help in his attempt to move in on TPUSA’s territory; Tucker Carlson hosted him for a chatty interview last October. Tucker is more than capable of nailing his interview targets to the wall when he wants to—see his interview with Ted Cruz—and the fact that he allowed Fuentes to present himself as a maligned but largely moderate figure was a deliberate choice. The interview was viewed over 25 million times; a recent profile of TPUSA’s campus leaders in New York Magazinerevealed that in the absence of Kirk, his archenemy is beginning to fill the void.
As Michael Doran wrote in his must-read analysis of why the Trump coalition is cracking up, the ongoing collapse of the movement Kirk built will be JD Vance’s problem sooner rather than later. Erika Kirk endorsed Vance at AmFest, but Erika is not Charlie—she cannot hold this movement together, and Tucker Carlson, the most prominent influencer in the MAGA movement, is close friends with her primary tormenter (in December, well into her crusade against Erika and TPUSA, he said he “loves” Candace Owens) and deliberately decided to elevate her husband’s most prominent antagonist.
Charlie Kirk was an essential figure not just because he was politically effective, but because he was a good man and a committed Christian. He sought to build rather than tear down. He kept legions of young men away from the deranged conspiracism that now defines much of the Right. He warned others not to amplify the influence of dark figures like Fuentes; he sought to combat the dark forces that Owens embodies and Carlson enables. We would like to believe that assassins merely create martyrs and amplify their influence, but assassinations are often extraordinarily effective ways of decapitating movements.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could allow Kirk to speak for himself and refuse to permit the ventriloquist influencers to pervert his words to their own ends. His friends could speak up in defense of his beloved widow and mother of his children against those subjecting her to daily antagonism and accusation. His friends could carry on his legacy by seeking to fight and contain the same forces Kirk opposed. That, unfortunately, is not happening—and that is why the Charlie Kirk Moment died with him. We did not realize what forces Charlie Kirk was holding back. It is up to those who actually care about what he stood for to do that essential work now.
