It is impossible, I think, to grasp the terrible consequences of Charlie Kirk’s death without understanding who he was in life.

Liberals had a dim view of that track record — focusing on his often-offensive radio broadcasts and contributions to Trump’s authoritarian project (like sending seven buses to the January 6 protest). However, to conservatives, he was something very different: not just an effective political organizer but a living symbol of democratic politics done the right way.

I must admit that this second perspective doesn’t come naturally to me. But I wanted to understand it better, so I reached out to Tanner Greer — a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog The Scholar’s Stage.

In his piece, Greer argues that Kirk was “the indispensable man” on the populist right: Nobody else had his genius for organization or his extensive connections with nearly everyone of note in the MAGA movement. On an ideological level, per Greer, Kirk represented a vision of politics in which the populist right competes on the left’s turf, from universities to elections, and wins in direct political combat. In this, he stood against MAGA’s most radical anti-democratic voices.

So when he was killed, Greer explains, his many friends and allies saw it as proof that the broader left was now incapable of coexisting with even someone as genial and small-d democratic as Kirk — giving rise to the vehement, even authoritarian, response of people like Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance. Now, much of the right believes it’s their turn to seize control of culture, to have a version of the left’s “George Floyd moment” of 2020.

I didn’t agree with much of the thinking Greer described. But I found his explanation of it, to borrow a phrase, “indispensable.”

He helped me understand why leading Republicans blame an ill-defined “they” for Kirk’s killing, rather than a shooter who seemingly acted alone, and just how emotional these conservatives must be in the wake of Kirk’s passing. If we are to keep sharing a country, you need to understand this perspective — perhaps especially if you disagree with it.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Tell me what you think most people who only knew Kirk from his radio broadcasts missed about him.

Second only to Donald Trump himself, Kirk is probably the most important individual in creating the current intellectual and organizational landscape of the MAGA movement. You wouldn’t get any of this at all if all you knew of him was some guy who’s willing to say shocking things on the internet.

In the piece, I suggest there’s [several] aspects of Charlie Kirk that made him a very powerful individual.

First, the size of his audience. His radio show had about 500,000 people who listened to it. His TikTok channel had 7 million followers. He’s had campus debates that had upwards of 2 billion views in total all across the world. Five million Twitter followers on top of that. So he had this giant megaphone. If he wanted to come out and publicly take a position, Republicans would listen.

The second thing that he had was TPUSA and the little organizations that were built off of it. TPUSA is a very large, 850- to 900-chapter organization. This is a mass mobilization machine. This is a mass talent-building machine, as future political leaders often come from people who were TPUSA chapter leaders in their universities. And then on top of that, he builds these other outreach organizations. He has a giant outreach organization for evangelical church leaders.

Then he has a vote-getting machine that is very active in swing states in the 2024 election — most Republicans seem to think that TPUSA’s Turning Point Action Committee might’ve gotten 10 to 20,000 votes in Arizona, which is basically the margin of a [close] election. They had perfected the strategy of basically primarying people for not being MAGA enough in Arizona, which is TPUSA’s organizational home, and they were going to go state to state to state in the near future.

Your third source of power is that he’s this connector.

Donors love him. He’s famously charismatic. Because he himself had kind of raised up this whole generation of new activists, he knew who was the best potential staffers or the best potential state House candidates or congressional candidates. There are several congressional candidates who came from TPUSA and are in Congress right now. And because he was running this podcast where he’s talking to the existing class of staffers, the existing media magnates, the existing politicians, he’s at the center of this network of people. And this is probably one of his most important roles in the right, especially the more MAGA right. He was constantly working to get people from one part or one of these constituencies to meet them with somebody else.

You wrote, “There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf. And this was not only true of the Trump administration, but also across Congress and state governments and in news agencies like Fox News.”

It’s a guesstimate. The........

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