Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen.
I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk, and I saw him close his eyes and slump. I am a reporter for the Deseret News, based out of Salt Lake City. I was sent down to Utah Valley University yesterday morning to cover Charlie Kirk’s Prove Me Wrong tour. At around 11a.m., my friend and fellow reporter Emma Pitts and I walked from the campus library to the outdoor amphitheater with tickets in hand, but there was no need. There was no one scanning tickets; there were no bag-checkers – we just walked in with the other 3,000 people who attended. We were later informed that only six officers total had been assigned to the event. The atmosphere was rowdy.
In this week’s South Park, the second episode since Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone eleventy billion dollars to make content, Parker and Stone absolutely and brilliantly rip the Trump administration to shreds. Unlike our late-night comedy hosts, who don’t have the chops for anything other than name-calling and juvenile slap fights with the President, South Park gets to the heart of darkness of the Trump administration, and also to what’s so funny about our new political age. Not only does the episode feature a savage attack on Trump, depicting him as Mr. Roarke at Mar-a-Lago as Fantasy Island, it also shows J.D. Vance as a tiny Tattoo, who Trump literally kicks out of the way when he gets annoying.
Trash talk Who gets to call themselves MAGA these days, anyway? Politico Playbook declared this weekend that “MAGA is whatever Trump decides it will be” – the administration’s go-to defense when the President does something the further-right side of his base doesn’t care for, such as dispatching military support to Ukraine, say, or running interference for the Ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Heading into the midterms – and we’re past the halfway point of 2025, so we are heading into the midterms – Republican candidates up and down the country are already attempting to bill themselves as the most “MAGA” in the field, in hope of garnering a Trump endorsement that could see them win office.
In May, Charlie Kirk, who died today from a gunshot wound, visited the United Kingdom to debate the students of Oxford and Cambridge, Britain’s two most prestigious universities. The Spectator asked him to write about the experience. The result was this well-observed, funny and now strangely prophetic-sounding piece about the condition of England. Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died speaking freely. RIP. Oxford and Cambridge When I was growing up, people often said British politics were where America’s would be in five, ten or 20 years. What this meant was that Britain was more to the left of America: more secular, more socially liberal, more environmentalist, more globalized.
President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States after a historic political comeback and complete annihilation of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called Trump to concede this afternoon after failing to appear at the campaign’s planned victory party at her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington, DC. Instead, she delivered her concession speech there this afternoon. More on that below the fold. Biden is also said to have called Trump to congratulate him and express his desire for a smooth transition. It was a relatively short night compared to most predictions, with Trump sealing victory a couple of hours after midnight (although the result seemed obvious by that point).
A Pennsylvania order of nuns is threatening legal action over false voter fraud claims from a political operative with a scandalous history in Republican politics. The founder of a “ballot chasing” operation was seemingly unable to identify a very-online monastery of Benedictine sisters. With two weeks to go until the presidential election, a Republican door-knocking initiative claimed to have uncovered startling fraud in the up-for-grabs swing state: “BREAKING: A member of PA Chase discovered an address in Erie, PA today where 53 voters are registered,” Pennsylvania Chase founder Cliff Maroney wrote on X Tuesday evening. “Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there. We knocked on the door because a Republican mail-in ballot is unreturned.
In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies. Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.
Morgan Ariel booted by Turning Point USA for consistent antisemitism Turning Point USA cut ties with one of its controversial ambassadors following her latest antisemitic tirade, in which she claimed that the “Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiIes who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity.” Morgan Ariel, who previously claimed that she “work[s] for Jesus,” has previously drawn criticism for other shocking statements, including calling for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce for promoting the Covid-19 vaccine, comparing American Christians to dogs being walked by Israel and promoting notorious far-right extremist Nick Fuentes. Her thoughts this week proved to be the final straw.
A year after getting its clock cleaned thanks in large part due to abdicating mail-in ballots, everyone in the Republican Party is getting in on the ballot harvesting action. One of the latest entrants is Turning Point USA, which, through its Turning Point Action 501c4 plans to build the “first ever conservative ballot-chasing army,” according to plans obtained by The Spectator — and it won’t come cheap; Turning Point Action estimates that the total cost of its operation will be $108.6 million.
Two years ago, I went to a megachurch service at Liberty University. Its guest speaker was Ben Shapiro. I asked some conservative students in the crowd what they thought of him. ‘He’s stupid smart,’ one said, ‘way smarter than me.’ The words have stuck with me ever since. ‘Stupid-smart’, a progression from ‘super-smart’, is the kind of compound modifier we’ve needed for years. How better to describe the small army of commentators, authors, critics and activists who now comprise the majority of the pundit class? Thanks to the internet, intellectual debate has been made dim, and we’re living in in the age of stupid smartness. Across the media landscape, professional megabrains pop up like big mushrooms.
Always give it three days. This is a golden rule of journalism that requires reporters and commentators to wait when speculating on big salacious stories. It's a rule that works, but not when it's ignored, as it has been by both sides of the political spectrum in the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House. Democrats pounced, as usual, on their claims of MAGA extremism; meanwhile, too many on the right have indulged in disgusting conspiracy theories about the assault. On Sunday morning, less than two days after the news of the assault broke, the new Twitter head honcho Elon Musk weighed in. Responding to a tweet by Hillary Clinton alleging a political motive, Musk tweeted that there was a tiny chance that something else had prompted the violence.
They’re being called the Groypers — named after Pepe the Frog’s more sinister, overweight toad cousin — and they’re making life hell for Charlie Kirk and his campus conservative organization Turning Point USA. Following eyebrow-raising comments from Kirk recently that have been interpreted as elevating Israel above the United States, advocating automatic green cards for foreign exchange students, and one incident where a TPUSA leader was terminated after she posed in a group photograph with ‘fringe’ figures, the Groypers, led by 22-year-old shitlord Nick Fuentes, have been infiltrating TPUSA events to launch a barrage of uncomfortable questions at Kirk.
Porn star Brandi Love made waves at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa this weekend after the group revoked her VIP pass. Love — whose real name is Tracey Lynn Livermore — ticked off social conservatives on Twitter when she posted photos at the event with the caption, ‘It's good to be around so many young conservatives. Gives me some hope!’ https://twitter.com/brandi_love/status/1416489638592659459?s=20 Hours later, Turning Point sent Love an email notifying her that her pass had been ‘revoked’ but said she is welcome to apply for other conferences ‘in the future’. Love responded by accusing the organization of being a ‘cult’ and a ‘Trojan horse’ for organized religion.
Conservatives are starting to vote with their wallets when it comes to countering the leftist bent of college campuses.Turning Point USA, the student-focused conservative nonprofit, recently announced its new project, ‘DivestU’, which encourages conservative Americans to stop donating to their alma maters. The idea? To show that left-wing bias will no longer be tolerated. The move comes at a time when universities anticipate financial struggles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump even threatened earlier this month to reconsider the federal funding and tax-exempt status of universities that ‘are about Radical Left Indoctrination’. Do conservatives finally have the attention of the liberal elite that run the nation’s colleges?
'Sometimes the most vicious opposition to me,' writes Charlie Kirk in his new book The MAGA Doctrine, 'has come from the right, not the left.' Kirk thinks this is because 'older, established “conservative” publications' think his 'Turning Point' organization is 'a nuisance, an upstart'. Another explanation is that he is a hack. To be fair, The MAGA Doctrine contains some cheering passages. Kirk is right, in his introduction, that Trump has shattered the complacent Republican paradigm of Wall Street and foreign wars. He is right to bash the reckless adventurism of neoconservatives (he rightly details American military and financial losses, though he does not spare a mention for dead Afghans and Iraqis).
Aren’t the groypers great? Isn’t it so envelope-pushingly exciting of their ‘leader’ Nick Fuentes to say that Jim Crow was ‘better for them…better for us’, so free-speechingly naughty to say that only ‘200,000 or 3,000 Jews’ were murdered in the Holocaust, so vigorously uncucked to say that immigration into the United States, rather than being uncontrolled because the people who run the country can barely control their own bowels, is being driven by a conspiracy to ‘replace’ white Christians?
Last month, two 17-year-olds were arrested in New Jersey for harassing and urinating on four black middle school girls. The boys allegedly called the girls the n-word and now face charges of bias discrimination and lewdness. When the story broke, if you happened to be standing on Eight Avenue in Manhattan, the faint sound of rapturous panting you heard was probably coming from the New York Times building. However, there was one small problem, the ‘racist’ boys were of Indian descent, not white. Don’t worry, the Times has a fix for such meddlesome fiddle-faddle. Bring in some stately-looking quack with lots of degrees, in this case a historian and activist named Nell Irvin Painter, to write about how race is a social construct and ‘whiteness’ evolves.
The left, Charlie Kirk is fond of saying, hates the idea that there are other ideas. This is the kind of phrase that is extremely fashionable on the mainstream pro-Trump right. Comedian and political commentator Steven Crowder hosts debates under the slogan ‘change my mind’. Ben Shapiro, who is less pro-Trump, drones ‘facts don't care about your feelings’. We are reasonable and open-minded, such men have signaled, while our opponents are dogmatic and intolerant.Sometimes, though, your greatest weapon can be your greatest weakness. More nationalistic and reactionary right-wingers have grasped their chance to insert themselves into mainstream discourse: beating commentators like Kirk, Crowder and Shapiro at their own game.
‘I have loyalty to ideas,’ said Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a network of young conservatives that has seen liftoff in the Trump era. ‘Of course I love the Grand Canyon. I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston. And I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared, if all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America. That’s Israel.’ ‘And that’s what people have to realize,’ Kirk continued. ‘America’s just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with, oh, the specific place, and all this...that’s not what it is.’ For good measure, Kirk added: ‘Israel would be the exception. There is a holy connection to this land.’ You heard the man.
