But suddenly, that clarity was gone. And the impact of the most consequential act of political violence in decades was blunted before it had the chance to hit as hard as it should have. 

On Sept. 22, 2025, one day after Kirk’s Turning Point USA held a massive memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Arizona, Candace Owens teased to her massive podcast audience that she had obtained information casting doubt on the official story of Kirk’s death and that she would be conducting an investigation into it. Minutes after playing a clip of Erika Kirk speaking to the stadium about how her husband didn’t suffer at the time of his death because the bullet that tore into his throat took his life so quickly, Owens pivoted to what would ultimately become a fixation for her and an inescapable black hole for the Right.

“I have a lot of questions, and each and every one of them will be answered by the end of this investigation,” she said. “So much more has come to light that I have not yet presented.”

“The first thing that I think I should make abundantly clear is that I am relieved that Erika Kirk is at the head of Turning Point USA.

“Because just like I alluded to last week, and which I will double down on now, I believe that people within that company betrayed Charlie, OK? That’s just what I believe right now, and I want to make sure that I have these facts entirely at my side before I tell you guys more.”

Unfortunately, more facts would not come to her side in the months that followed. What did emerge from the 84 of her podcast episodes that focus on Charlie Kirk’s death since then, however, is a bitter obsession with Erika Kirk, a paranoid delusion about Zionists, and an incomprehensible web connecting the two into a sprawling murder conspiracy that also, somehow, includes “German mystical Jews,” the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.

But the reasons that a battle for the soul of MAGA became particularly fierce in the wake of an event that should have instead been a catalyst for peace go beyond Owens and her Pepe Silvia board of phantoms. Through sheer coincidence — or perhaps, some on the Right would argue, it was no coincidence at all — Kirk’s death preceded a war in Iran that has threatened to tear President Donald Trump’s coalition apart. That coalition was already disgruntled over Trump’s perceived pullback from his deportation promises and his distracted approach to affordability. And the borderline elation conservatives felt through the first few months of Trump’s second presidency — it had done a lot to paper over unresolved differences on the Right — was already naturally wearing off by the fall of last year, like when a night of celebratory drinking bleeds into a hangover before you have a chance to sleep it off.

That created the conditions for an internecine war that Trump’s success had only managed to delay. Rather than put the underlying disagreements into perspective for conservatives who had just watched their ideological opponents celebrate the murder of their brightest rising star, Charlie Kirk’s assassination in some ways made the fighting even dirtier, because now their battle wasn’t just over the ideological direction of the movement. It was also over who would rise up as the perceived successor of a figure who had achieved towering accomplishments in life — and risen to legendary status in death.

Muddying the waters around Kirk’s killer

Authorities in Utah say Charlie Kirk, 31, was killed by a single bullet to the neck while he spoke to a crowd of students at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. That bullet was fired, according to prosecutors, by Tyler Robinson, 23, who had been radicalized online by left-wing rhetoric about fascism and transgender people.

Robinson had carved anti-fascist messages onto his bullets, prosecutors said. He had texted his lover, a biological male who identifies as a female, that he targeted Kirk over what he saw as Kirk’s “hatred.” He left behind a note in which he admitted to planning the murder in advance because he saw it as “necessary.”

But partisans on both the Left and Right worked quickly to cloud the public narrative about Kirk’s assassination. Jimmy Kimmel managed to style himself the victim of his brief suspension from ABC after he said the killer was part of the “MAGA gang,” for example.

By December, according to a poll commissioned by the Media Research Center, only 24% of likely voters could correctly identify the suspect as left-wing.

“What’s especially sinister about what Candace and the rest have done is, they’ve actively obscured who did this and why,” Blake Neff, Charlie Kirk’s producer and co-host of his podcast, told the Washington Examiner. “They took something where a radical leftist, for very legible, specific, left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

Conspiracy theories about how and why Kirk was murdered have mushroomed across the internet, thanks mainly, but not exclusively, to Owens. There’s the theory that Kirk was killed not by a liberal extremist’s bullet but by shrapnel from a bomb in his microphone that was planted by Mossad. There’s the theory that Erika Kirk ordered a hit on her husband to conceal stolen finances at Turning Point USA. One theory even suggested Charlie Kirk never actually died, and that the horrifying footage of his death actually depicts the explosion of a Hollywood-style “blood bag” hidden underneath his shirt to simulate a murder.

The cumulative effect of all these theories, aside from the IQ points they shave from the minds of the people who indulge in them, is that the mission for conservatives fell too quickly out of focus. Was it to purge the movement of activists too supportive or too skeptical of Israel? Was it to engage more earnestly with liberals, or to treat them more openly as enemies? The answers were harder to discern without a clear verdict in the court of public opinion as to what killed Charlie Kirk.

Not only did that lead to conservatives directing their anger inward, it also relieved the legacy media and the Left of the pressure to confront their roles in spreading the kind of rhetoric that radicalized Charlie Kirk’s accused killer.

They had equated conservative social values with hatred, and then conflated hatred with physical violence, for years, and were doing so even in the hours after his death. Before authorities had identified Robinson as their suspect, for example, Matthew Dowd, then a political analyst at MSNBC, said Charlie Kirk should not have said “these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.”

Through unimaginable tragedy, conservatives had the opportunity to force the Left to eat so many of its own words about the dangers lurking in its own fringe. But instead, they took the fight to each other on X.

“The clear lesson of Charlie’s life and death is that the Right needs to work really hard to be unified so we can concentrate our firepower on the collective threat that the Left poses to our country,” said one conservative personality who declined to be named. “Maybe there’s not enough people who understand the stakes.”

Fighting to replace an irreplaceable figure

The battle for supremacy in conservative podcasting has gotten so ugly that the president felt compelled to weigh in last week. Labeling Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Owens, and Alex Jones as “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS,” Trump specifically took offense to their criticism of the war with Iran.

But the divisions run deeper than a single military conflict and have become bitterly personal, as the united front the top personalities displayed in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder gave way to an unspoken competition to replace him.

“I think on the conservative side of things, yeah, we’ve had the podcast wars,” David Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “There are a lot of people seeing opportunities to edge their way in to be the leader in that space and then there’s been nonstop fighting about not just his assassination, but obviously, continuing all the way through the war in Iran and disagreements in between, and it doesn’t bode well for … Charlie’s memory when everyone is just fighting with each other.”

Few issues have split the conservative movement like Israel. And few debates have stoked more speculation about what Kirk would have wanted when he was alive than the debate over when criticism of U.S.-Israeli relations crosses into antisemitic territory and what level of tolerance the party ought to have for views that do.

That debate rocked one of the Right’s most prominent organizations, the Heritage Foundation, late last year when its president, Kevin Roberts, put out a video defending Carlson from criticism over Carlson’s decision to host Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his show. The backlash to Roberts’s video highlighted the limits of a big-tent approach to an issue for which the boundaries of acceptability had not been set, and it amplified the absence of one of the figures most capable of setting them.

“At Heritage, we are honoring Charlie’s legacy by working to bring the movement together to take action on the things that really matter,” Roberts said in a statement for this story.

But conservatives generally agree that the battle to become the Right’s authority on Israel and on the ideological direction of the movement was inevitable.

“They might not want to admit it, but most of us, we knew he was going to be president, like, he had that air about him,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner.

“I wasn’t threatened by it. I loved it. I thought, ‘Oh, I have a friend who’s going to be president.’ But there were people that, for whatever reason, because, you know, they’re jealous or whatever, I just think all of that would’ve happened regardless of whether Charlie was around.”

When Joe Kent, who resigned in protest of the Iran war from his role as director at the National Counterterrorism Center, said on Carlson’s podcast recently that the last words Kirk ever spoke to him were, “Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran,” he was certainly not the first conservative to cite private conversations with Kirk as evidence that he would have supported their views if he were alive. But Kent also questioned why he wasn’t allowed to investigate whether Israel played a role in Kirk’s assassination, leaning into conspiracies that have sapped the sense of unity Kirk’s death first sparked.

Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, likened the battle over who best represents Kirk posthumously to something similar that unfolded after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

“You can look at Martin Luther King, and the issue there, I think, was that he achieved some of his major goals with the two big Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the mid 1960’s,” Lipson told the Washington Examiner. “And then after that, you had people who said that what his real goals were were not these universalistic goals, but the more particularistic goals of helping African Americans, and so you got DEI and quotas and other kinds of programs that came out of that. But they were all claiming to be legatees of Martin Luther King.

“And I think what happens when you have an important figure like Charlie Kirk is that the different parts of his coalition struggle to say, ‘We represent what mattered most to him,’ and since he spoke a lot over many years, you can find different things.”

Kirk had built a massive following for his podcast and on social media after creating a multimillion-dollar political operation that redefined conservative youth outreach. Some conservative personalities are battling more over replicating Kirk’s influence and audience than over who is his purest ideological successor.

But those personalities misunderstand why Kirk reached the heights he did, his friends say.

“There’s a lot of people who swoop in, and they want to be this talking head like Charlie, or they want to be this campus voice like Charlie, but what made Charlie so exceptional wasn’t that he was any one of those things, it’s that he was about five different things,” Neff said. “He was a guy who could do the campus events, and he could build a get-out-the-vote operation, and he could advise the president and the president would listen to him, and he cared a lot about policy outcomes such that he cared who was getting nominated for things.

“That’s why losing him was so bad. It’s that there really is nobody who is comparable to that.”

Vice President JD Vance, who attended a Turning Point USA event last week at the University of Georgia, acknowledged that “part of the division [in the party] is Charlie’s death” and that no single person is likely capable of taking his place.

“Charlie’s absence is a huge thing,” Vance said. “Who replaces Charlie Kirk? I think it’s going to be a combination of people.”

Erika Kirk pulled out of the event due to security threats. Owens publicly attacked her for doing so.

The Trump factor

Trump spoke at a Turning Point USA event Friday in Arizona in a noteworthy show of support for Kirk’s operation.

But some conservatives wonder if the president should have done more to ensure Kirk’s death remained a galvanizing force. They say his relative silence on it is one reason it faded so quickly as a unifier.

“If there was one reason for me to rule them all, that’s President Trump, and I don’t mean this to blame him, but I’ve noticed when he talks about his own family — his brother, his father, or other people who have died around him — he doesn’t dwell,” Bozell said. “He doesn’t dwell on death. Even his assassination attempt in Butler, he said publicly, ‘I’m going to talk about this once and once only,’ and so his attempted death, he won’t even discuss.

“So I think a lot of people within the movement, and within the conservative media ecosystem, maybe they didn’t realize it, but they’ve kind of taken their cues from the president.”

Vance, who was close personally with Charlie Kirk, has spent more time focusing on the assassination in the seven months since it happened. He stepped in as a guest host for Charlie Kirk’s podcast the week after his death. He spoke at a stop on Turning Point’s campus tour after it resumed in October. Appearing at the Turning Point event last week in Georgia, he defended Erika Kirk for withdrawing from it.

But Trump’s pivot toward a series of increasingly controversial decisions since September has both taken the focus off of Charlie Kirk and intensified his party’s clash over what comes after the Trump era.

Trump’s approval ratings were already beginning to dip at the time of the murder. His allies were beginning to grapple with the reality that they were entering the final few years of Trump’s run in power and that someone would need to take up his mantle. The time to start hashing out who that should be and what they should stand for had arrived — right at the moment when a historic assassination should have been pulling conservatives together.

TYLER ROBINSON’S LAWYERS PRESS FOR CAMERA BAN FOR MURDER TRIAL

“You know, one thing that makes people in politics sort of divide against each other is just being in power,” Vance said at the Turning Point event last week. “When you have the House, the Senate, the White House, and there’s not an election around the horizon, it’s very easy to forget what your goal is.

“Well, starting in a few months, we’re going to have primaries that are over. We’re going to have candidates on the ballot. And we’re all going to need to get out there and work hard, because the people who want to kill Donald Trump, the people who want to throw Donald Trump in prison, the people who murdered our friend, and then the people who celebrated it afterwards, those people are trying to achieve political power, and we cannot let them.”