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Charlie Kirk, who was killed on Wednesday during a political event on a Utah college campus at the age of 31, was good at his job. It takes skill, after all, to tour the nation’s college campuses and hold court with lefty undergraduates, dialing up an array of canned responses for the issues pumping through the news cycle: immigration, gender identity, Israel, even gun violence, a subject that, according to the video footage, he was discussing when he was shot. The same goes for his acumen as a politico. Kirk indeed turned Turning Point USA from a rinky-dink right-wing nonprofit founded before he was 20 into a gargantuan policy-altering machine, famous for raking in oodles of capital from eager right-wing donors. And he was personally tapped for help by Donald Trump, a move that paid off in spades during the 2024 election. Kirk correctly identified that young, disaffected men could be marbled into the MAGA project. The success of that strategy became the story of the cycle.

All of this is to say that Kirk, despite his fame, persona, and gadfly tendencies, was always a bit shrewder than the average hyperconservative partisan. He was fluent in both the primordial muck of politics and its necessary showman duties, a man capable of sweet-talking octogenarian donors and 19-year-old groypers alike. It’s a quality that made him indispensable to MAGAdom, and it is........

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