One year ago, a left-wing assassin murdered one of the greatest conservative leaders in American history. Since then, we’ve seen the coalition that returned President Trump to the White House in 2024 fracture and flounder, and it seems hard to know where we go from here.
I wasn’t always a fan of Charlie Kirk. In the mid-2010s, I saw him and TP USA as spokesmen for the same dying breed of Republican talking points as John McCain, Paul Ryan, and Mitt Romney. Yet something happened after 2016: Charlie adapted. He recognized that unchecked immigration, Christless conservatism, and a slavish devotion to the free market above all else threatened to erase the America we knew and loved. He adapted and became one of the strongest spokesmen for truly making America great again.
Charlie Kirk wasn’t just an influencer or a podcaster. He didn’t just talk about politics; he did politics. He turned TP USA into perhaps the strongest get-out-the-vote engine in Republican history. His tireless work helped Donald Trump win Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2024, which means that few people deserve more credit for that victory than Charlie.
Charlie Kirk visited Idaho numerous times, but I only saw him once in person, when he spoke at a We the Patriots event in the summer of 2023. I remember thinking he was taller in person than he looked on the screen. He spoke confidently and earnestly about the challenges we faced at that time, and it was obvious he truly believed in what he was doing. He was not a typical politician, but he had become more influential than most politicians could ever hope to be.
On September 10, 2025, I was at my desk writing an article about municipal elections—the very sort of mundane-yet-important thing that Charlie understood was key to saving America. As always, I had Twitter open on another screen, keeping up with the day’s developments. I saw that there had been a shooting at the TP USA event in Utah. Not good, but rumors always fly in situations like this, so I’ll wait for more information. It soon became clear that not only was the victim Charlie himself, but that he was already dead.
In the year since Charlie’s death, the right-wing movement in America has fractured. Some have veered off into truly fringe territory, including those who have concocted fantastical theories about how and why Charlie Kirk was killed. Others have become fixated on increasingly abstract issues like the Epstein files or America’s relationship with Israel. The looming 2028 presidential primary has already seen its battle lines drawn, and much of the discourse on the right is a proxy war in anticipation of that fight. Charlie’s unique ability to bring people together to form a strong and victorious coalition is needed now more than ever.
On the other side, the left has become more brazen in its desire to see its political opponents destroyed by any means necessary. Even before Kirk’s death, leftists had already made a martyr out of the murderer of healthcare executive Brian Thompson. Today, online progressives and socialists are brazenly joking about Charlie’s death, mocking him, his family, and anyone who supported him. While there was a wave of firings in the days after his murder last year, many of those who were fired ended up being reinstated, and the energy on the right to establish consequences for such speech has faded.
It often feels like we entered an alternate timeline on September 10, 2025, and now everything is all wrong. But there’s no going back. We must live in the world that Charlie’s death created. We have to find a path forward. That means understanding what Charlie understood: that politics is the art of the possible, that winning elections means getting voters to the polls every which way we can, that coalitions must be built around imperfect human beings, and that the work never ends.
Charlie Kirk was the best of us, and his loss has left an incalculable hole in the fabric of our society. But we must persevere. It’s up to we the living to continue doing what we were made to do, to preserve this last best hope of mankind for our children and their children.