It is impossible, I think, to grasp the terrible consequences of Charlie Kirk’s death without understanding who he was in life.
Liberals had a dim view of that track record — focusing on his often-offensive radio broadcasts and contributions to Trump’s authoritarian project (like sending seven buses to the January 6 protest). However, to conservatives, he was something very different: not just an effective political organizer but a living symbol of democratic politics done the right way.
I must admit that this second perspective doesn’t come naturally to me. But I wanted to understand it better, so I reached out to Tanner Greer — a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog The Scholar’s Stage.
In his piece, Greer argues that Kirk was “the indispensable man” on the populist right: Nobody else had his genius for organization or his extensive connections with nearly everyone of note in the MAGA movement. On an ideological level, per Greer, Kirk represented a vision of politics in which the populist right competes on the left’s turf, from universities to elections, and wins in direct political combat. In this, he stood against MAGA’s most radical anti-democratic voices.
So when he was killed, Greer explains, his many friends and allies saw it as proof that the broader left was now incapable of coexisting with even someone as genial and small-d democratic as Kirk — giving rise to the vehement, even authoritarian, response of people like Stephen Miller and JD Vance. Now, much of the right believes it’s their turn to seize control of culture, to have a version of the left’s “George Floyd moment” of 2020.
I didn’t agree with much of the thinking Greer described. But I found his explanation of it, to borrow a phrase, “indispensable.”
He helped me understand why leading Republicans blame an ill-defined “they” for Kirk’s killing, rather than a shooter who seemingly acted alone, and just how emotional these conservatives must be in the wake of Kirk’s passing. If we are to keep sharing a country, you need to understand this perspective — perhaps especially if you disagree with it.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Tell me what you think most people who only knew Kirk from his radio broadcasts missed about him.
Second only to Donald Trump himself, Kirk is probably the most important individual in creating the current intellectual and organizational landscape of the MAGA movement. You wouldn’t get any of this at all if all you knew of him was some guy who’s willing to say shocking things on the internet.
In the piece, I suggest there’s [several] aspects of Charlie Kirk that made him a very powerful individual.
First, the size of his audience. His radio show had about 500,000 people who listened to it. His TikTok channel had 7 million followers. He’s had campus debates that had upwards of 2 billion views in total all across the world. 5 million Twitter followers on top of that. So he had this giant megaphone. If he wanted to come out and publicly take a position, Republicans would listen.
The second thing that he had was TPUSA and the little organizations that were built off of it. TPUSA is a very large, 850- to 900-chapter organization. This is a mass mobilization machine. This is a mass talent-building machine, as future political leaders often come from people who were TPUSA chapter leaders in their universities. And then on top of that, he builds these other outreach organizations. He has a giant outreach organization for evangelical church leaders.
Then he has a vote-getting machine that is very active in swing states in the 2024 election — most Republicans seem to think that TPUSA’s Turning Point Action Committee might’ve gotten 10 to 20,000 votes in Arizona, which is basically the margin of a [close] election. They had perfected the strategy of basically primarying people for not being MAGA enough in Arizona, which is TPSUA’s organizational home, and they were going to go state to state to state in the near future.
Your third source of power is that he’s this connector.
Donors love him. He’s famously charismatic. Because he himself had kind of raised up this whole generation of new activists, he knew who was the best potential staffers or the best potential state House candidates or congressional candidates. There are several congressional candidates who came from TPUSA and are in Congress right now. And because he was running this podcast where he’s talking to the existing class of staffers, the existing media magnates, the existing politicians, he’s at the center of this network of people. And this is probably one of his most important roles in the right, especially the more MAGA right. He was constantly working to get people from one part or one of these constituencies to meet them with somebody else.
You wrote, “There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf. And this was not only true of the Trump administration, but also across Congress and state governments and in news agencies like Fox News.“
It’s a guesstimate. The number might be underestimated — because Kirk was involved in a very personal way in vetting for this administration’s appointments.
You have to understand the right has a problem: We have a much smaller talent pool than the left. And if you are restricting it even further, if you need to restrict your talent pool to people who are more MAGA — people [who] can pass a Laura Loomer test — then you have an even smaller number of potential people. And so Kirk basically spends all the months of November and December and January, every day, meeting with [then-White House personnel director] Sergio Gor, talking about, “Here’s somebody who might be good for this position, here’s somebody who shouldn’t be in that position.” And he wasn’t the only one doing that, but he was a big part of getting people in the door and keeping some people out.
But this isn’t just true for little [roles]. This is true for Cabinet members. JD Vance is there because of Charlie Kirk.
During 2024, Charlie Kirk took a three-month break from TPUSA to basically be Don Jr.‘s manager. And Kirk sends a text to Don and says [something like], “I know that this guy [Vance] said these things about how Trump was Hitler back in the time, but he’s had a conversion. He’s one of us now. You need to meet with him. You need to take him seriously. You need to introduce him to your dad.”
That’s how JD Vance got in with cahoots with Trump in the first place, just because of Charlie Kirk. If you listen to the Charlie Kirk radio show that JD Vance hosted, he mentions this story. And almost every single person they had from the administration come on has a very similar story. There’s half a dozen Cabinet-level or people just below that who can say, “Kirk advocated for me to have this position, and that helped tip the balance.”
You can hear that not just in what they said, but the way in which they said it, in the obvious pathos and emotionality that came across in the discussions of Kirk during that radio broadcast or during the funeral on Sunday night. They all say that they genuinely cared for Kirk.
Part of me thinks, “Well, everybody on the right wants to have been close to him now.” But listening to you talk and listening to some of the stories people tell, I think this is just actually true: that he really did mean a lot to a lot of the people that are in power right now. And so part of this vehement political reaction to Kirk’s death is born out of this deep emotional and personal connection with him.
I think that’s correct. If you look at the MAGA movement as a whole, Kirk was a lot of people’s friend. That’s why all these donors are able to give him so much money. He was very good at being very optimistic and being like, “We’re going to win, we can do this,” cheering people up.
This position at the center of the MAGA world network — in addition to these kind of institutional things that he built up, the big megaphone he had, his ability to basically leverage all of that into helping other people make connections — made him sort of an indispensable pillar of the movement.
So when he was shot, that was really not just an attack on somebody who says very controversial things. This is a person who helped pioneer [not only] the message, but also the institutions and the organizational networks of the current version of the right. And he did it by the time he was 31. An immensely talented individual.
One thing that’s also struck me in the responses and the way that these figures talk about Kirk’s death is the omnipresence of the word “they. It’s “they” killed Charlie, “they” took Charlie from us, even though there’s no evidence that the shooter was in any kind of conspiracy.
So what do people on the right mean by “they?”
When George Floyd died in 2020, there was not a sense that this was the action of a single policeman, and if we put him in jail, then the problem’s over. There was rather a sense that you could only have a person like this policeman, who’s willing to stand on the neck of a Black man he’s just arrested until he dies — this could only happen if you have a larger systemic problem in America.
I think many, many people on the right want to have their own version of the 2020 moment, partially because their analysis is very structurally similar to how leftists thought about racism in 2020. They think there’s larger structural problems — that [the shooter] only can exist because of a larger culture that supports his conduct, excuses it, and allows it to happen.
All these people went through 2020 and they want to have a similar reckoning, because that was experienced by the right as a very harrowing event — where essentially every single institution in the United States, every university, every provost, most corporations all gave out statements talking about how what happened was an act of evil and we need to nationally atone for the sin. If you didn’t agree with that stuff, this felt very oppressive to you, like you were being chased out of the public sphere.
And I think this is the easiest way to make sense of why some people on the right feel very strongly that we need to do things like, say, take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
They remember 2020, and they feel like if Jimmy Kimmel had gone against Black Lives Matter, he would’ve been taken off the air without the state. And we don’t have that same activist network [as the left], but we do have the state. And so we should try to create the same sort of structural cultural change that was imposed upon us in the Great Awokening.
Help me understand that comparison a little bit more. In the George Floyd scenario, it’s pretty easy to see what the structural roots of Derek Chauvin’s actions are — a policing sector, and a society more broadly, shot through with racism.
But in the Kirk case, what’s the equivalent force that created Kirk’s killer? Is it left-wing animosity toward conservatism? Is it mainstream liberal ideology? What is the thing that the violence against Kirk is supposed to be an outgrowth of? Who specifically are “they” that embody whatever the structure is?
This “they” will differ from person to person. I don’t think there’s a consensus. The possible options for “they” range from, at the narrowest, the kind of antifa people who are willing to use or at least endorse violence on the left. [At the broadest], it’s all the way to a [liberal] culture that sees Trump as inherently illegitimate and un-American and [as someone who] should be deplatformed.
Just to give you an example: Somebody was making a big deal out of a tweet that Vice President Harris had written in 2019, saying how basically, if we’re being honest with ourselves, Trump should be kicked off Twitter by now because of his bad comments. That was cited as an example of the left’s inherent desire to kick us out of public spaces. Very similar to when Hillary Clinton says, “[Half of] Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables.”
If you’re dehumanizing us, if you’re calling us deplorable, you’re basically saying we’re outside of the pale of American politics — then you are part of the “they” who basically dehumanizes someone like Kirk enough that he should be killed. I think that’s how they would say it.
I’m not trying to weigh in with my own opinions on this. I just want to understand better what is this “they”? Because to me, it seems analytically incoherent. JD Vance, for example, has brought up the Open Society Foundation, which in no plausible world had anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s death. But it was one of Vance’s political enemies.
Many actors on the right have for many years believed — and I have a lot of sympathies with this set of beliefs — that a lot of what the left has been about for the last decade, since the Great Awokening started, is basically making it difficult for conservatives to be part of the public sphere in a safe and confident way.
And that word “safe” is interesting because when you start talking about safety, you can start roping in several different streams, which I don’t think liberals would necessarily associate with each other, into one system. This allows you to say, okay, people being deplatformed on campuses, that’s one version of us not being able to participate publicly. All the way to the riots in 2020, which a lot of conservatives felt Democratic cities and the sitting government allowed — which made it impossible for a person like me to be in these urban spaces for X amount of time. They made these cities too dangerous for us to be in.
And that’s where people will do this kind of mining, where, okay, Soros funded this Black Lives Matter-adjacent organization, which was making excuses for rioters here. That’s where they’ll kind of all connect that together.
Someone like you, you’ll look at that and say, “Well, what does that have to do with Charlie Kirk being assassinated by this [lone wolf]?” And I think a lot of people on the right will say, “No, no, no, this is a large systemic thing. All you guys excused the violence in 2020, excused antifa, excused taking over CHAZ, excused all this stuff because you normatively agreed with it and thought that Trump was bad enough that that this sort of violence was okay. And that’s the same attitude, that’s the same world that creates young guys who want to go and shoot one of our most prominent leaders.”
I think that’s how they would connect those dots.
Now, how does that attitude relate to something you talk about in the article at length, which is Kirk’s role in giving young conservatives permission to be themselves publicly in places like a university?
This question of what he meant to the young conservatives is quite relevant to this larger question: What is the “they”?
The way I explain it in this piece — this is really hard for liberals to believe — is that, if you were a young conservative on campus from 2013 to 2022, you felt afraid. Even when Trump was in power, a lot of these conservatives felt afraid. And this fear is really core to a lot of what has happened, I mean, really in this administration as well as people’s reactions to Kirk’s death.
If you were a young person on the right — you believe something like transgenderism is a lie or a mental disease, which is a pretty standard belief on the right — you were afraid to say what you believed because you felt like you would be socially ostracized, people on campus would bully you, harass you, treat you differently, you would have professors who might grade you differently, you wouldn’t have good job prospects, you would be afraid of becoming a viral example.
This is the environment in which TPUSA begins its giant rise. And Kirk’s campus tours, the sort of thing he was doing when he was shot, this is actually what they’re designed to combat. Yes, they created some viral clips, but that really was not their main purpose. Because Kirk was a campus activist first, a media figure second.
The purpose of these was for Kirk to go into these universities and say, “Hey, guys, look, we can be part of the public sphere. There are more of you than it seems. You guys are all afraid to stand up and show you’re conservative. I’m going to come here, I’m going to organize a TPUSA chapter, and you’re going to see that you’re not alone. Second, I’m going to go and debate all these people around you, anyone who wants to come up. A professor, a student, anyone who wants to can come and debate me. And I can show you guys that these beliefs we have are defendable. We can stand up, we can be part of the public sphere.”
And so there’s a lot of young conservatives who basically say, “Charlie Kirk made me unafraid to be an activist. Charlie Kirk is the one who made me unafraid to stand up for what I believed.”
Without someone like Charlie, the only people who would stand up for their conservative beliefs tended to be either extremely principled people or they were just assholes who like to be disagreeable. I’m sure you’ve probably met both of those sorts when you were in college. If you want to have a movement that isn’t just people like that, you have to find some way to inspire people to stand up. And that’s what Kirk was doing. He’s modeling to all these kids, look, you guys can do this too.
And that’s who was murdered. And so when the guy whose whole message is “you don’t have to be afraid” is shot, then it makes some sense why people might be feeling afraid.
That’s where I wanted to bring us to at the end: how both sides should feel about their enemies.
I have this fear, given Kirk’s personal significance, that the right’s authoritarian reaction to his death is not going to be a short-lived thing — you may disagree. But if Charlie Kirk was trying to create a politics where people who disagree could engage, the aftermath of his death is destroying that possibility. It’s making it very, very, very difficult for people across partisan lines to view each other with anything but mistrust and suspicion.
So what are we supposed to do about that?
I think there’s a little bit of a crossroads here. I think the right has to decide whether Kirk’s life or his death is the thing that should be remembered.
I think that Kirk’s life, although many aspects of it are very repellent to people on the left, is an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular. I personally am on the side of saying, “Guys, look, Kirk actually showed us the path for how to make this work, and we’d be stupid if we left it for something that we don’t know if it will work.”
What I’ve been telling people on the right is, if you seriously believe you’re going to have a 2020 moment, you guys are somewhat deluding yourselves. Because 2020 had very many special things that led up to it.
Obviously, you had a pandemic, everyone was cooped in their house and wanted to get out and be out. But in addition to that, you had years of activism. Black Lives Matter started seven years before 2020. And the New York Times had basically doubled its reporting on racism and racial problems in America in the three years that preceded 2020.
You had a huge amount of intellectual work being done. You had a huge amount of activism being done. And in many ways, 2020 was the culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and activism and changing public opinion. So I don’t think this attempt to use the state to have a 2020 moment is going to work. I just don’t think the public is there: I think it’s going to backfire.
And I understand, too, that certain people have a bad opinion of Kirk. But I do think that the impulse of some on the left to take this moment to say, “Well, Charlie Kirk was just this terrible person in all these ways, he said this terrible and that terrible thing, and we’re being censored if we don’t see otherwise” — to put it very frankly, lots of people on the [more radical] right are very happy to see those takes.
The debate the right has been having for a long time is “Do we think that the other side can live with us? How much of a threat really are they to us?” And so when the reaction of some people is to condemn the violence, but then talk about how actually it’s good that he’s gone, which is more or less what these people do, it sounds more like you are part of this structure of ideas that makes it acceptable for right-wing people to be killed.
A lot of people, a lot of politicians, understand this and have gone out of their way not to be inflammatory on all this. I think clearly this is what [former Vox co-founder and now New York Times columnist] Ezra Klein was thinking when he wrote that editorial. But he got dragged through the mud for that, and he really had to justify himself showing up, talking to people on the right.
Maybe it’s helpful if folks on the left don’t just discount Kirk as that terrible racist who says all these terrible things. If that’s the message you took away from all this, I think you’ll really misunderstand both what Kirk meant to the movement, but also what his death means to the movement as well.
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