Charlie Kirk

The past year has turned out to be the most important of Donald Trump’s political life. It loosened the ties that had constrained his character – and Trump’s character is the key to his political project. There is no sillier exercise than trying to sum Trump up in ideological terms – calling him a conservative, say, or a fascist. Whatever you think conservatism is, it does not involve using the South Lawn of the White House for mixed-martial-arts fights, as Trump did in June. As for fascism, none of the conditions that made it possible a century ago exist today: there is no rising communist movement, no large pool of recently demobilized soldiers, no military humiliation, no manufacturing sector organized on military lines.

A year ago, on the afternoon of September 10, 2025, I was 20 feet away when my friend Charlie Kirk was murdered, shot dead for holding a public debate on whatever topics the students of Utah Valley University wanted to talk about. I spent the rest of the day in the waiting room of Timpanogos Hospital, first hoping for a miracle and then coming to grips with the miracle that did not come. I had little to do except reply to the dozens of messages pouring in, asking how I was holding up. Over and over, I shared how I honestly felt: I was heartbroken, but beyond that, I felt ill, sick to my stomach not just over the friend I had lost in the most horrible way imaginable, but over what it meant for the country Charlie loved so dearly. America's freedom of speech is nigh-absolute.

September has become a murderous month. This year it marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And as this month began, the trial of Lindsay Clancy was under way in Massachusetts, a trial notable not only for the appalling character of the crime – Clancy strangled each of her three children – but for the appalling degree of sympathy some women have expressed for the defendant. When Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus last year, many left-wing Americans rejoiced – and his killing is still a cause for levity at Hasan Piker rallies today. The leftist podcaster enjoys leading crowds in an off-key, mocking rendition of an AI-written song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.

Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.

Over the past several months, various news outlets have been prognosticating the flight of young conservative women from the Republican Party. In March, New York magazine focused on what it called “the young women leaving the new right.” Now Politico has suggested that a Turning Point USA conference in San Antonio, Texas this past weekend shows that “bubbling under the surface are divisions within the GOP that have enveloped the online voices of the young right and a budding disillusionment among young women with the second Trump administration. It’s all part of a growing divide between being “MAGA” in 2026 and being “America First.” But that’s not what I saw at the very same conference.

As a human type Hunter Biden is familiar enough. Like George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, he is a wayward member of a political dynasty with a strange knack for slaloming his way out of trouble. Before the internet it was much easier for such figures to go about their business. It is hard to see how the goings-on at Chappaquiddick could be covered up now, in the age of X and camera phones. It was Hunter’s misfortune to be born too late.  Dynasties are self-interested and adopt ideas based on the needs of the moment. The Habsburgs placed themselves at the head of the Counter-Reformation, and the Bushes, who were once liberal Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller mold, later became the spokesmen of the evangelical revival. Hunter Biden is now going along in a similar vein.

In the financial world, most frauds are short-lived. Ponzi schemes such as Bernie Madoff’s eventually run out of new suckers to provide enough funds to pay the phony “returns” promised to earlier investors. When the cash flow dries up, the scam collapses. The con artists at the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center have a different racket, and a different problem. Instead of swindling the public with promises of unrealistic, too-good-to-be-true investment returns, the fear-mongering SPLC sold “paranoia porn” to credulous donors, convincing them – falsely – that the country is full of dangerous right-wing extremists who need to be identified and brought to heel.

Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook summit, sponsored by the New York Times, made a lot of news yesterday, though it felt more like 1975 than 2025, particularly when it came to “women’s issues”. We were one degree of separation from participants arguing over galleys of Ms. Magazine or getting into shouting matches with Norman Mailer. In the role of Phyllis Schlafly, the beautiful right-wing career woman leading a charge for a return to traditional values, was Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA and recent widow of Charlie Kirk. She claimed it was “ironic” that women in New York City had voted for Zohran Mamdani, given that many of them are childless but voiced support for his promise to provide free childcare for children under six years old.

In the year since his triumphant reelection, Donald Trump has racked up an enormous list of accomplishments, both foreign and domestic. His sweeping, “move fast and break things” approach to governance has generated a form of accepted normalcy which his first administration never experienced. His White House staff and cabinet, once full of leaks and disloyalty, has turned out to be incredibly faithful. On the international scene, he has credibly been suggested as deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. And at home, according to polling averages from RealClearPolitics, Trump is more popular at this point in his second term than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama was. Yet within the movement that made all this possible, it seems everyone is at each other’s throats.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Democratic lawmakers and commentators found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, most of them loathed Kirk. On the other, many felt that they should try to hold the line condemning the shooting through the throat of a young husband and father at an American university. These so-called ‘anti-fascists’ started behaving like nothing so much as the fascists they were searching for The New York Times’s Ezra Klein was among those who dipped his toe into the water, writing a piece within the day titled “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

October 14 will mark the birthday of two very different American martyrs. On that day in 1973, George Floyd was born. And, as everyone knows only too well, he died in 2020 after being placed under arrest by a Minneapolis police officer. Twenty years later Charlie Kirk was born on the same October day. The nation is still coming to terms with his assassination while speaking to students on the Utah Valley University campus two weeks ago. Floyd’s death was the result of a tragic mistake; officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, but on the basis that he killed Floyd unintentionally. Kirk was struck down by an assassin with an explicitly political motive.