After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, Christian nationalists were expected to unite for their martyr. Indeed, the global right wept. Argentinian President Javier Milei, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Hungarian P.M. Viktor Orbán, and an Afrikaner lobbying group all sent condolences.
Netanyahu called Kirk a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” Right-wingers variously blamed the “progressive-liberal left” (Milei) and “radical Islamists” (Netanyahu) for his death. Donations poured in to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s right-wing youth organization. The small-donor support excited MAGA leadership. For 13 years, only elite megadonors—libertarians, Birchers, the Heritage Foundation—had kept TPUSA in business. Finally it had popular support from young conservatives, whom it purported to speak for and who, now, would surely support Trump.
In The New York Times, Ezra Klein helped canonize Kirk for a more moderate audience, admitting to having “envied” him as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
On it went. Flags were hung at half-mast. First Amendment protections were even suspended in Kirk’s honor. Hundreds of enemies of Kirk’s Christian nationalism, including Jimmy Kimmel, were censored, suspended, or fired for telling jokes or for grieving insufficiently.
And there was that moving pop dirge: We are Charlie Kirk, his courage our own / Together unbroken, we’ll make Heaven known.
But privately MAGA wasn’t together, and it wasn’t unbroken. And today, Turning Point is not what it once was. Its events, featuring charmless pundits like Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff, are lackluster.
What’s more, as Trump’s star has fallen with the young, Kirk’s MAGA-aligned organization is struggling to hold onto its power over young hearts and minds. “Young voters are conflicted over the war in Iran and how the Epstein files were handled,” Andrew Sypher, Turning Point’s chief field officer, admitted to the Times in April. “The headwinds we’re facing now are anti-Trump.”
But it’s not just the young. The right is broadly a wreck.
Essentially, “e pluribus Charlie Kirk” gave way to MAGA struggle sessions over Kirk’s legacy. Would Kirk, the poster boy of Christian nationalism, have stuck with Trump as he backed Israel right up to the current war with Iran? This has been hotly debated among right-wing influencers all year.
Ben Shapiro seems to believe Kirk was a thoroughgoing Christian Zionist who would have supported, as Shapiro does, Trump’s war in Iran. Right-wing podcasters Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have said otherwise—that Kirk was killed just as he was standing up to neocon Turning Point donors who thought his support for Israel was waning.
The isolationist MAGA splinter group America First, which broadly includes Owens and Carlson, now saturates the right-wing airwaves. On any given day, you can now hear former Trump stalwarts, many of them close friends of Kirk, shivving the president. Megyn Kelly called Trump “grifty.” Carlson called him a “disloyal to the United States.” Theo Von called the Trump administration “fucking terrorists.” Owens called him a “genocidal maniac.”
Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz, who once plumped for Trump on their popular podcasts, now regularly disparage him. And of course MAGA booster Greene left Congress and MAGA, and then, just last month, quit the Republican Party altogether.
Finally, on Wednesday, maximalist MAGA zealot Alex Jones called for Trump’s immediate impeachment. At the time of Kirk’s assassination, 93 percent of Republicans approved of Trump. Today, 78 percent do. Only one in five is “enthusiastic” about the rest of Trump’s final term.
And then there’s Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and Kirk’s longtime rival from the far far right. With Trump’s strength diminished, and Kirk gone, “young people right now are looking for someone to follow, like they followed Charlie,” Jonathan Coon, a TPUSA chapter president, told the Times. “Fuentes [is] enticing to some of them.”
If that’s so, the midterms might get weird. Fuentes is urging his culty followers, the Groypers, to sit out the election or vote for Democrats. (“The liberals were right,” he has said.)
The mudslinging has left few reputations unsullied. Owens, Shapiro, and Erika Kirk are all deeply disliked by voters, according to a recent poll by Overton Insights.
Owens, who has regularly attacked both Shapiro and Erika Kirk, is the least unpopular. She’s at -23 percent. Erika Kirk (-26 percent) and Ben Shapiro (-27 percent) are doing even worse. Within the GOP, according to the same poll, Republicans dislike both the pro-war Shapiro and the antiwar Owens.
Erika Kirk gets positive marks with Republicans (+41 percent), but, after its autumn heyday, TPUSA has quietly struggled under her leadership. Some Turning Point leaders have resigned. One said the organization’s “mission and purpose have been lost.” TPUSA’s All-American Halftime Show at the Super Bowl, at which Erika was a no-show, was widely considered a bust.
Ben Shapiro’s media empire is doing even worse. The media company he co-founded, The Daily Wire, has “irrevocably collapsed,” as The Washington Post summarized popular opinion. Reduced traffic, massive layoffs, and expensive gambles in the entertainment business now threaten to put it out of business.
The terrible truth is that assassinations of charismatic leaders enfeeble political movements at least as often as they galvanize them.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, ties between civil rights groups and organized labor frayed, which stymied economic reform. After the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the peace process in Israel essentially ground to a halt.
It’s not just losing the leader that hurts. It’s the Game of Thrones aspect of it all, the squabbling among apostles. Maybe the Christian nationalists need a new verse to their battle hymn. We were Charlie Kirk, his courage was our own / But how can we, divided, now make Heaven known?
