Charlie Kirk’s life and death offer a microcosm of the MAGA movement’s shift to the right over the past decade—and of the dynamic factional interplay that has fueled that shift. Regardless of why Kirk was targeted, the right is using his killing as an opportunity to impose a climate of enforced loyalty and gear up for what could be a major political crackdown.
Despite efforts to mythologize him as someone committed to open, principled debate, Charlie Kirk built his political career on punching down. He told women to submit to their husbands, promoted anti-Jewish scapegoating, and demonized trans people. Under the guise of promoting academic freedom, he helped drive a nationwide campaign to harass, threaten, silence, and fire radicals and liberals on college campuses. He used his organization Turning Point USA to mobilize young people behind Donald Trump’s drive toward power and the Trump regime’s drive toward dictatorship.
Because of Kirk’s effectiveness as an organizer and propagandist, his killing represents a significant loss for the MAGA movement and the U.S. right more broadly—but it also offers an opening for both the state and non-state actors to intensify repression against the left and oppressed communities.
Immediately after Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University, rightists started blaming the left and calling for its suppression. “For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” President Trump declared on Truth Social. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in the country today.” People who allegedly celebrated Kirk’s death have been targeted with death threats or campaigns to get them fired. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo called on the U.S. government “to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes urged Trump to “invoke the Insurrection Act” in the wake of the shooting.
“You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States. They’re committing insurrection, they’re aiding and abetting an invasion, and they’re blocking the execution of federal law.”
White nationalist Greg Johnson, editor of Counter-Currents, wrote
“No peace and unity are possible with people who want to kill us for our ideas. First, we must crush the Left: destroy their institutions, imprison the criminals who lead them, and disenfranchise the fools who follow them. Once the knee of order is on the neck of chaos, only then we can talk about unity and peace.”
The Trump regime has the same thought. Earlier today, while hosting a special edition of the Charlie Kirk Show, Vice President JD Vance declared that the administration is “going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence,” singling out the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations as specifically culpable. On the same program Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy, expanded on this theme:
“We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.… And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make American safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Stifling political opposition in the name of combating violence is certainly an apt way to remember Charlie Kirk. But even in this dangerous, frightening moment, it’s worth tracing some of Kirk’s trajectory to help us understand how we got to this point.
Kirk’s Rightward Shift
Charlie Kirk’s politics were always odious, but they actually moved dramatically to the right over the past decade. This reflects a larger pattern within the Trump coalition and the Republican Party, a trend that has been driven by both collaborative synergy and open conflict between different rightist factions.
When Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, he was a fairly conventional conservative whose new organization gave top billing to “the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” In 2016, Kirk saw a “natural fit” between TPUSA and the Atlas Society, which promotes Ayn Rand’s libertarian-adjacent philosophy. Also in 2016, Kirk said he was “not the biggest Donald Trump fan” and that Trump’s candidacy made it harder for TPUSA to recruit college and high school students. Yet he quickly became a Trump loyalist, “played a significant role in helping President Trump’s 2016 campaign” (according to Jared Kushner), and was a key bridge between the administration and young people during Trump’s first term.
Embracing Christian nationalism helped Kirk cement his place as a key player in the MAGA movement. As recently as 2018, Kirk defended the separation of church and state and criticized Christian rightists’ “sanctimonious approach” to homosexuality. But in 2019, Kirk teamed up with Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, to found the “Falkirk Center” at the university. In 2021, Kirk co-founded Turning Point Faith, which does political outreach to pastors, with Rev. Rob McCoy of the Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California. McCoy is an adherent of New Apostolic Reformation, a vast theocratic network that is deeply embedded in the MAGA movement. In a 2020 speech, Kirk endorsed NAR’s Seven Mountains mandate, a doctrine that calls on Christians to seize control of all major areas of society.
“As recently as 2018, Kirk defended the separation of church and state and criticized Christian rightists’ ‘sanctimonious approach’ to homosexuality. But… in a 2020 speech, Kirk endorsed the Seven Mountains mandate, which calls on Christians to seize control of all major areas of society.”
Kirk’s relationship with white nationalism was more contentious. TPUSA has a long history of fostering “an atmosphere that is hostile to minorities,” as Jane Mayer put it in a 2017 New Yorker article. Like many mainstream conservatives, Kirk promoted an ideology of colorblindness, which protects racial oppression by denying that it exists, and attacked as “racist” any efforts to name and confront that oppressive system. Colorblind ideology put Kirk at odds with white nationalists, who want a society that doesn’t just privilege white people in practice but explicitly excludes people of color in the name of protecting the white race. A Charlie Kirk speech in Fort Collins in February 2018 attracted protests by both antiracists and neonazis associated with the Traditionalist Worker Party, allowing Kirk to present himself as a moderate equidistant from both extremes:
“Got heated today after my speech today at Colorado State University
“Had ANTIFA, disgusting white-nationalists, and hundreds of protestors outside event
“Why free speech is awesome: these handful of radicals screamed at each other while hundreds of students filled our event!”
In 2019, the white nationalist Groyper Army, led by Nick Fuentes, launched a campaign attacking Kirk and TPUSA as fake conservatives—and piggybacking on TPUSA’s recruitment drive. As David Neiwert reported,
“Kirk’s long-planned ‘Culture War’ speaking tour ran into a blizzard of white nationalist, paleo-conservative, and homophobic trolls on Tuesday on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus. During a question-and-answer session featuring Kirk and black gay conservative Rob Smith, those trolls plagued their hosts with relentless questions about immigration, gay rights, and white nationalism that clearly demonstrated that Kirk’s attempts to separate his would-be youth movement from the alt-right are not working.
“One questioner asked: ‘How does anal sex help us win the culture war?’ Another asked: ‘Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?’
“One young man, wearing a red MAGA ball cap and a pro-Israel button, mocked Kirk in classic alt-right fashion by ironically speaking as though he were an ardent supporter of TPUSA’s philo-Semitic positions, and then concluded by urging everyone to Google a notoriously anti-Semitic white-nationalist meme about ‘dancing Israelis.’”
Kirk denounced his Groyper attackers as racists and antisemites. But over the following years, his discussion of race and ethnicity became more openly bigoted and closer to white nationalism. In 2015, Kirk called Martin Luther King Jr. a “hero,” but in 2023 he described him as “awful” and “not a good person,” as part of an effort by Kirk to discredit the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Also in the 2020s, Kirk said that he worried when he saw a Black pilot on his plane, called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” endorsed the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and criticized “Jewish dollars,” declaring that “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years.”
“Kirk denounced his Groyper attackers [in 2019] as racists and antisemites. But over the following years, his discussion of race and ethnicity became more openly bigoted and closer to white nationalism.”
Although Kirk had previously advocated large-scale legal immigration, in June 2025 he called for a ban on all “Third World” immigration, whether “legal” or “illegal.” Fuentes—noting that Kirk had previously labeled such a position as racist and un-American—proclaimed “the Groypers have won.”
Kirk’s Killing: Motive and Response
The “Groyper Wars” against Charlie Kirk and TPUSA are part of the background to Kirk’s killing and how it has been discussed. Police arrested a suspect two days after the shooting, a 22-year-old white man named Tyler Robinson, and said he was believed to have acted alone. Speculation about the motives behind the killing have centered largely on the messages inscribed on bullet casings found at the scene, which include a hodge-podge of internet memes and video game references. Early published reports said that ATF or police believed the bullet inscriptions represented “transgender ideology.” This interpretation was quickly abandoned and, as Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas commented in the newsletter Garbage Day, showed “exactly how unprepared for this current moment both law enforcement and the mainstream media are.”
However, a lot of other people have speculated that Kirk’s shooter was a Groyper, based partly on one of the bullet casings that quoted the Italian antifascist song “Bella Ciao” (which has been ironically repurposed by Groypers) as well as online claims that Robinson admired Nick Fuentes. Fuentes (who had expressed sorrow at Kirk’s death) himself responded by tweeting
“The Left is now shamelessly trying to blame the Right for the murder of Charlie Kirk which they have been openly celebrating & justifying for days. They have no charity, love, or humanity for any of us or our families. We must take power for our own survival. We win or we die.”
While Kirk’s shooter might turn out to be a Groyper supporter, the bullet casing messages may just reflect somebody steeped in the online culture of irony and in-jokes, where political memes are just one more tool to be deployed without any substantive commitment, as analyses in both Wired and Vanity Fair have argued. Similarly, online photos of a high-school-age Robinson wearing Pepe the Frog costumes, Broderick and Bumas argue, might demonstrate “that Robinson was a far-right extremist radicalized online by 4chan posts, [but] it’s just as likely that he was a teenage boy dressing up as memes he saw online. This kind of content is basically the water young people swim in now.”
“While Kirk’s shooter might turn out to be a Groyper, the bullet casing messages may just reflect somebody steeped in the online culture of irony and in-jokes, where political memes are just one more tool to be deployed without any substantive commitment.”
Kirk’s death has not only put renewed attention on the conflict between white nationalists and conservatives, it has also highlighted tensions among white nationalists themselves. In the two days following Kirk’s shooting, several white nationalists wrote on the Counter-Currents website that, although they disagreed with a lot of Charlie Kirk’s positions, they regarded him as “if not a brother, then a close cousin,” someone who “continued to gain nuance, continued to move further to the Right.” As Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson put it,
“I still disagreed with [Kirk] on Israel and Ukraine, but just since the beginning of this year, Kirk repeatedly stood against anti-whiteness, opposed H1Bs, discussed the Mossad-Epstein connection, attacked the myths about Martin Luther King, and even questioned the Civil Rights Act.”
Writing on the same white nationalist platform, Richard Houck alleged that “A handful of antisocial types are celebrating the assassination because Kirk was not far-Right enough”:
“There is a small group who believes Kirk was a ‘gatekeeper’ and far too friendly to Israel, thus worthy of being killed. The concept of a gatekeeper implies there is nobody with legitimately held views that are more moderate than the person claiming they are a gatekeeper. I do not have reason to believe Kirk was purposefully keeping anybody from becoming more right-wing; if anything, much of his advocacy was to move the American youth further right.”
Houck is clearly talking about Groypers although he doesn’t mention them by name, as “gatekeeper “ was a standard Groyper charge against Kirk.
* * *
The dispute between Counter-Currents writers and Groypers over how to remember Charlie Kirk echoes tensions within the alt-right, which was the most important iteration of white nationalism at the beginning of the first Trump administration eight years ago. With the alt-right gaining numbers and visibility thanks to its role in helping Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, some conservatives, who became known as the “alt-lite,” adopted part of the alt-right’s message and tactics without embracing its goal of a full-fledged ethnostate. As I wrote at the time, “Alt Rightists have relied on the Alt Lite to help bring its ideas to a mass, mainstream audience, but to varying degrees they have also regarded Alt Lite figures with resentment, as ideologically untrustworthy opportunists.” Similarly now, some white nationalists regarded Kirk and TPUSA as political obstacles, while other white nationalists saw them as “close cousins”—less advanced but moving in the same direction.
But if the dynamics then and now are related, the overall situation is quite different. Compared with the first Trump administration, the second administration is much more unified and subservient to the president, and has already advanced much farther in transforming the state along authoritarian lines. In 2017, the alt-right and other far rightists outside the Republican Party provided Trump with an important counterweight to the establishment conservatives he had been forced to include in his own administration. But in 2025, the U.S. government’s entire executive branch serves at Trump’s pleasure, and by forcibly imposing far right politics on the Republican Party as a whole, Trump has returned far rightists outside the party to a more marginal status. They can still play an ugly and dangerous role, but they have no hope of declaring “We the vanguard now” as Richard Spencer proclaimed the alt-right to be after Trump’s first election.
Regardless of the Groyper Wars and the intricacies of meme culture, the right is going to use Charlie Kirk’s killing for political purposes. As of this writing, Utah Governor Spencer Cox is saying that Tyler Robinson was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology” and that Robinson’s partner is currently “transitioning from male to female.” In addition, as Jeff Sharlet has commented,
“Regardless, structurally, it is going to be interpreted as a left attack. The reason is, even if it’s coming from the Groypers, the ‘left’ and ‘right’ language we’re still using doesn’t make any sense…. [E]ven if it turns out to be a Groyper, in the MAGA world, there’s MAGA and not-MAGA. And everything that is not MAGA — you could be a leftist, a mentally ill person, an extreme right-winger — it’s all the bad guys, the non-MAGA versus MAGA.”
Photo credits
1. Charlie Kirk speaking with attendees at the 2021 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, 18 December 2021. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Colors enhanced. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2. Signs at the Minnesota State University, Mankato tour stop of the 2021 Turning Point USA college tour at the Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center in Mankato, Minnesota. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.