One Year Without Charlie Kirk: Has Anything Changed?

One year ago today, on September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk sat beneath a tent at Utah Valley University doing what had made him famous: namely, inviting those whom he disagreed with to engage in open dialogue, arguing points back and forth. He had once put it in words that now seem simultaneously prophetic, ironic, and tragic: “When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.” Those words would later prove terribly prophetic when Kirk himself was brutally murdered, cutting short his earthly life and public witness.

I remember that day vividly. I was sitting in front of my computer, writing an article about the murder of Iryna Zarutska on August 22, 2025. A headline suddenly appeared saying that Kirk had been shot. As the footage and reports began circulating, a friend remarked, “I don’t think Charlie survived that.” Tragically, he was right.

I finished the article while the enormity of what had happened was still sinking in and sent it to Crisis editor Eric Sammons, telling him that I had written it rather quickly while following the developments surrounding Kirk’s death. Eric replied that he was publishing his own immediate response the next day and wanted mine to run as the lead article on that Friday. Two days after Kirk’s assassination, “Witnesses of a Captive West: Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk” appeared here at Crisis.

In that essay, I argued that the murders of Zarutska and Kirk revealed something larger than two isolated acts of violence. More specifically, I argued that something deeply tragic and disturbing was surfacing within the very fabric of Western civilization. As a whole, regardless of what you may conclude about Charlie’s death, we have become increasingly incapable of defending the moral and cultural inheritance upon which the West was built. In the weeks that followed, I wrote several pieces honoring his legacy, one of which was a response to the various vicious and inhumane attempts to reduce a complicated human being to a litany of psychopathic cruelties and vulgarities.

Many of these attacks clearly revealed that their authors and commentators had never carefully listened to his words. Although Kirk was imperfect, as we all are, and at times unnecessarily sharp, he possessed many valuable qualities. He was also noble in his pursuit of defending the unborn, proclaiming Christ, challenging relativism and cultural and economic Marxism, and he possessed an extraordinary willingness to meet his opponents face-to-face for a civil exchange.

A year later, the situation has changed. But how much? It turns out, quite a lot. The most remarkable development is that many of the political disputes that Kirk was wrestling with during the final months of his life have become defining fractures within the American Right.

The Charlie the World Was Still Discovering

One of the inevitable consequences of death is that it freezes a person in time. For many supporters, Kirk became a Christian conservative martyr. In one of my pieces, I even drew some parallels with the martyrdom of St. Stephen. However, many of his enemies celebrated his death, continuing their hatred of a truth-teller.

There were also indications that Kirk himself feared for his life. Frank Turek, his friend and Christian mentor, later recalled that Kirk had asked him for prayer because he was “under the gun”; and in a subsequent account, he said Kirk told him that he had increased his security because “I know they want me dead.” Whatever Kirk meant by “they,” the exchange shows that the possibility of serious violence was not entirely absent from his mind before his assassination.

Nevertheless, a year later we know more about Kirk’s final months. Although he remained a defender of Israel, Kirk had become highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and about further American entanglements in yet another war in the Middle East. Prior to Israel’s June 2025 strikes on Iran, Kirk joined Tucker Carlson and others in publicly warning against direct American involvement. Kirk even brought these concerns personally to President Trump.

The landscape of the disagreement within what has been known as MAGA looks significantly different today. The tension between an older interventionist conservatism, comprised predominantly of the boomer generation and neoconservatives, and the emerging America First Right has widened drastically. The Iran war has moved from being a discussion held primarily by podcasters and political commentators into the Republican administration itself.

Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former Green Beret, resigned his position in protest over the war, and Tucker Carlson emerged as one of its fiercest critics. Other prominent figures associated with the populist Right, including Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have likewise broken sharply with Trump over foreign policy and the prospect of further American involvement in Middle Eastern wars. The split became even more concrete this summer when Kent, Massie, and Greene met with Carlson at his home in Maine to discuss building a broader anti-war “America First” movement, potentially even outside the Republican Party, while urging Carlson to consider a 2028 presidential run.

The divide was put on public display again just days ago in the two-part “Great MAGA Divide Debate: MAGA vs America First,” which explicitly pitted an America First camp, comprised of Alex Jones, Joe Kent, Joel Webbon, and Kai Schwemmer against a MAGA camp consisting of Andrew Wilson (who recently debated Candace Owens), Will Chamberlain, Gerald Morgan Jr., and John Doyle. Moderated by Brandon Straka, the debate ranged across Iran, Israel, foreign influence, immigration, surveillance, Trump’s second term, and the future of the movement after Trump. Although Kirk remained a vigorous defender of MAGA during his lifetime—he even wrote The MAGA Doctrine in 2020—the trajectory of his final months leads me to suspect that, had he lived to see these developments, he would have found himself increasingly aligned with the America First side of this divide.

I have encountered some of the vitriol surrounding this divide firsthand in reactions to my own “A Tale of Two Forms of TDS.” The divide is also generational: polling has shown considerably less enthusiasm for the Iran war among younger Republicans than among their older counterparts, even if younger MAGA voters are by no means uniformly noninterventionist. In one Pew survey, only 49 percent of Republicans aged 18 to 29 approved of Trump’s handling of the conflict, compared with 84 percent of Republicans 65 and older.

Among young voters more broadly, opposition is even more pronounced when Democratic-leaning and independent voters are included; Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents disapproved of Trump’s handling of the conflict by 90 percent overall, a level Pew found largely consistent across age groups. Although Kirk never got to see the direction this splinter would take, he was astute enough to recognize it as a logical consequence of Trump’s broken promise of no more “endless wars.”

Israel, Influence, the Limits of Debate

Other things emerged after Kirk’s death. There were leaked messages that confirmed that he was experiencing substantial donor pressure over his refusal to exclude Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens from Turning Point events. In one message, Kirk lamented that he had lost a donor because he refused to “cancel Tucker.”

The interesting thing is that Kirk’s concerns, however, extended way beyond Israel itself. He had also criticized secular Jewish donors and organizations for financially propping up many progressive causes and institutions, ranging from open border policies and DEI to cultural Marxism. He believed these were not only hostile to traditional American values but also to many Jews themselves. Despite its provocativeness, his argument served as a warning that such radical ideological movements functioned against Americans in general, including Jewish conservatives. 

This was not an argument against Jews as such but against the political and cultural agendas Kirk believed were being financed by certain wealthy secular Jewish donors and organizations. George Soros provides perhaps the most prominent example: through his Open Society Foundations, he has directed billions of dollars toward progressive causes involving immigration, racial justice, criminal-justice reform, LGBTQ+ rights, and other social and political initiatives that traditional conservatives have strongly opposed.

First, there is nothing anti-Semitic about examining the influence of donors, lobbying organizations, foundations, governments, or advocacy groups on American policy. Although controversial among some myopic, hardcore Zionist supporters, Israel can be criticized and so can AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Under regular circumstances, it should be uncontroversial to see that military intervention can be opposed and that donors attempting to influence political organizations can be investigated. Sadly, some individuals have interpreted criticism of specific institutions as a collective accusation against all Jews. There is, however, a deeper problem when legitimate criticism of particular institutions gives way to sweeping theories about “the Jews,” which can be both morally objectionable and intellectually lazy.

What is worth pointing out is that Kirk himself was trying to navigate these treacherous waters by maintaining a strong friendship with Israel while fostering what he has long maintained about the importance of free speech and the ability to criticize the Israeli government—and any government for that matter—while also refusing to exclude certain voices from the conservative debate. This balancing act seems even more difficult a year later. Consider Vice President J.D. Vance, who, when recently speaking to Jewish Republicans, acknowledged the growing suspicion of Israel among Americans under 40 while defending the alliance and, also, refusing to disassociate himself from Carlson.

A Generation with Nothing to Conserve?

Kirk was deeply concerned about the economic disenfranchisement of the young. Just a couple of months before his assassination, in July of 2025, in a conversation with Tucker Carlson, he warned that homeownership, meaningful employment, marriage, and raising a family were becoming increasingly unattainable for Gen Z. He also feared that a generation with little prospect of owning property or the ability to build a stable family would make many youth susceptible to socialism and even revolutionary politics. As Kirk said in the interview, “If you own nothing, you get radical politics, and you get very unhappy people.”

I believe this concern helps situate Kirk’s broader political evolution. He observed that the growing distrust of institutions and foreign wars was part of a larger problem: young people had little stake in the society they were being asked to defend. Kirk believed in reform, not revolution. He saw the deep value in attempting to show young people that there was something worth conserving by giving arguments in favor of capitalism, family, and social stability. 

A Movement That Continues Without Its Founder

Although Kirk’s earthly life was ended, the movement he built was not. More than 63,000 people attended his memorial in Arizona, while TPUSA reported over 32,000 inquiries to start new campus chapters within just 48 hours of his death, clear evidence of the extraordinary surge of interest in Kirk and his legacy immediately following the assassination. TPUSA remains a major national conservative organization, now led by Erika Kirk as CEO and chair, with longtime Kirk associate and spokesman Andrew Kolvet remaining one of its most prominent public voices. However, signs of uneven youth enthusiasm suggest that Charlie’s extraordinary personal connection with young people has not simply transferred to the institution that survived him. A major TPUSA event in Phoenix this April, for instance, drew an older audience and left many seats empty despite being aimed, in part, at younger voters.

But Kirk’s deeper legacy extends far beyond TPUSA. When asked only months before his death how he wished to be remembered, he answered simply: “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.” His Christian faith came first, but inseparable from his public witness was his commitment to free speech and his conviction that disagreements should be settled through argument rather than coercion. Whether TPUSA grows or declines, those principles provide a better measure of his legacy than the number of chapters bearing its name.

The Conversation Continues

Perhaps one encouraging development, both before and since Kirk’s death, has been the willingness of some prominent figures to cross old political battle lines and engage one another directly. Hunter Biden has sat down with both Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, while Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks have engaged figures associated with the emerging America First Right, including Carlson, Kent, Greene, and others. These conversations do not erase profound disagreements, but they suggest that old partisan boundaries are becoming more porous and that people once regarded simply as enemies are again willing to sit across from one another and talk.

Today, TPUSA will return to Utah Valley University for a memorial marking the first-year anniversary of Kirk’s assassination. Last year, I argued that his murder exposed something incredibly disordered within the West and in the hearts of many. I have not changed my mind since then. Although Kirk did not live to see the future debates over the war, Israel, economic insecurity, and the direction of the America First movement, he did provide several warnings.

But I believe the most enduring lesson is that we must continue talking even when it seems impossible. He died doing precisely that. As our society continues to fracture politically and culturally, we must preserve human connection and love for our neighbors—including those who persecute us—which, as our Lord has taught us, is more important than winning any argument.