Thousands attend a memorial service for Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here. Six weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, University of Mississippi junior Lesley Lachman was standing in a campus parking lot near her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, scanning the calendar on her phone. She had interviews coming up with PBS, a local radio station, and *Fox & Friends, *before which she needed to redo her nails. I asked her why, and she looked at me like I was insane. “This is red. I’m doing Funny Bunny,” she said. The red wouldn’t look right on TV. Other members of her team had been getting interviewed too, and she worried they were being banal. “I’m like, ‘This is a brand, guys. Stop saying sentences like ‘We’re a conservative organization on campus.’ Say, ‘We are a true America-loving college!’” Lachman, 20, is the president of Ole Miss’s TPUSA chapter. This was the most eventful week of her adult life, when she was set to introduce Kirk’s widow, Erika, and Vice-President J. D. Vance onstage at the Sandy and John Black Pavilion in front of roughly 10,000 students. After Kirk was killed, TPUSA’s leadership decided to keep alive the group’s ongoing campus tour, which was to pass through Oxford in late October. It was rechristened the “This Is the Turning Point” tour and populated with conservative A-listers who would debate students in the take-all-comers manner that made the 31-year-old Kirk an icon on the right and MAGA’s youth leader. Lachman had lobbied for Kirk to come to campus after she heard him name-check her university during TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit near Dallas last June. “He said, ‘If you have the intent to find a husband at Ole Miss, it’s just going to happen,’’’ she recited. Lachman had just begun her fall term when Kirk was killed, a before-and-after moment for young conservatives across the country. At Kirk’s September memorial, which was held at an NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona, I had met a 20-year-old Cal State, Chico, student named Aaron Berman. He said he had been in his apartment when he saw the video of a bullet tearing through Kirk’s neck as he was debating students at Utah Valley University on September 10. “I instantly stood up, walked outside, and I started calling just, like, my brother, my parents,” he said. Within days, Berman had filed to start a TPUSA chapter on his campus. Like countless others around the country, Ole Miss’s TPUSA chapter has surged in popularity since Kirk’s death. At least in Lachman’s enthusiastic telling, it has become the biggest student organization on campus, judging by Instagram followers (about 17,000) and GroupMe members (about 1,800). Competition to sit at TPUSA’s table outside the student union is fierce and managed via spreadsheet. Lachman has appointed 13 members to her executive board and untold deputies below them who are eager for official responsibilities. The logistics of the Vance event were eating her alive. “I hate it when they ask the president stupid questions. I wonder if Trump deals with this,” she said, looking at an email. “Why do you ask the most important person in the organization where to park? Not my job, okay!” Lachman is a highly motivated individual, a Tracy Flick or Cher Horowitz for the right. She speaks at 2x speed, often in breezy malapropisms and endless run-on sentences. A public-policy-leadership major at Ole Miss’s Trent Lott Leadership Institute, she is also a harpist and the former president of a campus ballet club. Her roommate swears she has only ever seen her go to sleep once: “She gets everything done, she doesn’t forget anything, she’s very nice to everybody. She always sits in front of the union, and she has all her pins” (SOCIALISM SUCKS; POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DESTROYS DIALOGUE). Lachman says her social standing has soared since she became the TPUSA chapter president. “It’s like free rizz. No, like, honestly. My ex-boyfriend baked me a pie. He wants me back.” Lachman’s celebrity status in Oxford reflects a seeming paradigm shift in post-Kirk America. At least since William F. Buckley published *God and Man at Yale *in 1951, the conservative movement has regarded the university as a uniquely hostile and fallen place — and therefore a vital site for counterprogramming. When Kirk founded TPUSA as an 18-year-old in 2012, it was as a dynamic update of Young Americans for Freedom, the youth organization Buckley helped create in 1960. Kirk, who grew up outside Chicago and didn’t graduate from college, started out as a tea-party-supporting political wunderkind before shrewdly hitching TPUSA’s wagon to Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Kirk essentially worked as Donald Trump Jr.’s assistant. After the election, TPUSA’s status as the de facto White House youth organ allowed it to outpace PragerU, Young Americans for Liberty, and other rival groups. The organization’s clout is evident everywhere in Kirk country. At dinner one night in Oxford, Lachman was chatting noisily, irritating a nearby couple. “Are we too loud? I’m your Turning Point USA president! I’m the reason J. D. Vance is here!” she cheerfully told an older man at the bar. A wealthy alumnus, he was all too happy to buy her next round and secure a commitment from the men from his fraternity to attend her TPUSA “Freedom Formal.” On the other end of the spectrum, Ole Miss had fired an administrator in its development office after she shared someone’s Instagram post calling Kirk a “reimagined Klan” member, part of a crackdown on those violating the compulsory piety that followed his death. The burgeoning campus counter-revolution brimmed with the same spirit of revival that had imbued Kirk’s September memorial, attended by a staggering 90,000 people, where jocks in white FREEDOM shirts prayed alongside young fathers cradling sleeping infants in noise-canceling headphones. The spiritual tenor of the event sprang not only from Kirk’s overt religiosity — his abstention from alcohol, the Sabbath he observed on Saturdays, the Bible verses he texted to friends and family — but from the sheer spectacle of the pilgrimage people had made to be there. Many of them had come across the desert literally on foot: When the traffic jammed, people started getting out of their cars to walk the final mile or two to State Farm Stadium. The consensus in Glendale, where Kirk was eulogized by Trump and prominent members of his Cabinet, was that the assassination would set the Manichaean terms for who stood for right and wrong in America. The alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, espoused left-wing positions and fit the image of the internet-dwelling radical; one of his unfired bullets was engraved with the words: HEY FASCIST, CATCH! Daxton Van Duren, then a freshman at Sierra College, predicted Kirk would be “immortalized in his beliefs.” He and Berman were wearing hats that read MAKE AMERICA CHARLIE KIRK, suggesting a new, posthumous figurehead for the MAGA faithful. When Erika Kirk took the stage and forgave her husband’s killer, the rapture felt complete. Practically overnight, a successor politics to Trumpism seemed emergent, locking in the right-wing drift of young voters and casting conservatism in the mold of Kirk and his vision of a civilizational war to save the Judeo-Christian “West.” “Trump voters, young men, they want family, children, and legacy,” he said on Fox News two days before his death. “Young women who voted for Kamala Harris, they want careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” A eulogy in the Claremont Institute’s publication The American Mind, drawing on the persecution of Socrates, captured the depth of feeling on the right. “The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans,” it read. “Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics.” The more time I spent in the subsequent weeks with conservative undergrads on campus, where Kirk had sought to plant his flag, the more his importance became evident — but not exactly in the way his followers might have predicted. Just before she forgave Robinson, Erika Kirk, now the CEO of TPUSA, had said her late husband’s true vocation extended beyond politics. “Charlie passionately wanted to reach and save the lost boys of the West,” she said. “Men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live. The men wasting their lives on distractions and the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate.” He had wanted “to save young men just like the one who took his life.” Her broader meaning would come to seem prescient, as threats to her late husband’s legacy came from within the big conservative tent Trump had built. For many young conservatives, Kirk’s assassination was bitter confirmation of left-wing intolerance and a spur to deeper radicalization. Staring into an abyss of leadership, some of Kirk’s mourners flocked toward Jesus Christ; others were seduced by quite different forces, as antisemitism and conspiracism engulfed the right. In time, the armies of Charlie Kirk looked as if they might not come at all. A political moment that started with an overwhelming show of unity devolved day by day into something more like civil war, ensnaring everyone from the vice-president down to TPUSA’s campus leaders. “Who is going to be the next Charlie?” Lachman wondered. “Is there going to be one?” Lesley Lachman, center, mans the Turning Point USA tent at an Ole Miss tailgate in November. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine Growing up in a moderately conservative household in Westchester County, Lachman had wanted all along to end up on a fun-loving patriotic campus. Her mother, Jacqueline, works in marketing for the City of New York. When Lachman was younger, her parents owned a bakery and wineshop in Bronxville; her father now works in auto sales. When I asked how she became immersed in right-wing politics, she found the question hard to answer, as though nothing could have been more natural for a popular, well-adjusted girl like herself. She eventually said she did not want to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a teenager and preferred the values of her Catholic-middle-school classmates to those of her public-high-school classmates. (One of her close friends from Catholic school is now president of Baylor University’s TPUSA chapter.) Mostly, it seems, she regarded liberals as depressing and wanted to be far away from them. Her time in Mississippi has only fortified those impressions. A friend at a college in the Northeast told her their campus set up a crisis hotline after Trump’s election in 2024, which Lachman found pitiful: “They’re offering helplines, and we’re wearing red, white, and blue and MAGA hats.” The Ole Miss College Democrats exist but are not a proud campus presence. “Look at their Instagram, look at ours,” Lachman said. “We’re going to the rodeo. They’re, like, you know, planting seeds.” To Lachman, the University of Mississippi is an uncomplicated place. She did not come to Oxford to bury herself in its Faulknerian literary mystique, nor is she versed in the history of the school’s infamous 1962 desegregation battle, when undergraduate James Meredith broke Ole Miss’s color barrier. If anything, she finds all this ancient lore irrelevant. In 2003, the school’s mascot, Colonel Reb, was retired from service for obvious reasons. The campaign to revive him, which entails wearing a Colonel Reb suit, is led by a member of her TPUSA board who is Black. “That’s called progressive,” Lachman said, beaming. She is wary of turning off new recruits with too hard-core a message, even on Kirkian issues like abortion. “I would never bring up abortion, ever. Because that’s ‘Republican,’ not ‘conservative,’” Lachman said. “Gen Z is scared of the word Republican.” Instead, students “want to hear about free speech. Second Amendment rights is a big one. They love MAHA; they eat up the seed-oil stuff. Anytime we do DOGE things, they’re like, *Hell yeah. *The finance bros eat that up.” In this way, she sees her own identity as a brand asset. Lachman’s TPUSA presidency is an update on an archetype that has informed modern conservatism since Phyllis Schlafly: the anti-feminist female powerhouse. Kirk’s notion of a woman’s path to fulfillment — to get married and have children — raises interesting questions for a dynamic leader like Lachman. And not just her. At their chapter’s weekly general-body meeting, I counted 56 women and 17 men in the section I was sitting in. Across the country, many chapter presidents and executive board members are women too. Those women are there partly because of two Rileys: Riley Gaines and Laken Riley. These are extremely important names at state schools and in greater Kirk country. Gaines competed against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas while attending the University of Kentucky and now advocates to keep trans athletes out of amateur women’s sports. Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was murdered in 2024 while jogging on the University of Georgia campus by a Venezuelan man who entered the country illegally during the Biden administration. Many TPUSA women feel liberals have sold them out. It was after a Gaines event at Ole Miss in 2024 that Lachman, then a sophomore, decided to throw herself into TPUSA. “She gets to the podium, and the man, who’s six feet, standing over her, takes the medal,” Lachman said. “And my gut — soul, politics aside — told me that that is wrong.” At the same time, Lachman sometimes struggles to conform to the gender norms of her new milieu. She says her sorority has reprimanded her several times for acting in a manner unbecoming to Pi Phi, starting with a bout of table dancing in her freshman year. “Do I talk shit in the nail salon? Call me in, you know. Sometimes I do stand on a table.” At her latest disciplinary hearing, a sister asked what changes she was willing to make. “I go, ‘What change am I willing to make? I’m changing the face of politics in America.’ She goes, ‘I meant the sorority.’ I go, ‘Oh.’” At one point, we were chatting in the student union and Lachman sheepishly pulled out a book she had been reading: Why Men Love Bitches, a cheeky 2002 female-empowerment manual recommended by a sorority sister. Yet she insisted, “I’m not one of those libbies who are like, ‘Oh, I don’t need no man. I can hang my own painting.’ That’s, like, we’ve gone so far backward. Like, can people start letting men hang the painting again? Erika used to say, ‘It’s your partner, and he’s out there on the front lines like a soldier, and you’re here at home because you’re guarding the palace.’” Her friend Aidan Thomas walked up. He’s a New Yorker too, the son of an NYPD cop from Marine Park. “Zohran sucks,” he said. “Zohran sucks,” Lachman agreed. Thomas is also a member of TPUSA’s executive board, where Lachman has him on AV duty. I asked what he’ll be doing at the Vance event in two days’ time. “Whatever she tells me,” he said, smiling. TPUSA rose to prominence in the era of trigger warnings and safe spaces, with Kirk’s “prove me wrong” campus debates embodying an ethos of free discourse that many felt was absent from academia’s liberal monoculture. Through the Biden years, college campuses took on greater significance on the right, both as progenitors of hated concepts like critical race theory and as active sites of their implementation via the proliferation of DEI bureaucracies and hiring practices. But at universities with right-leaning student bodies, the act of starting a TPUSA chapter is not a lonely countercultural endeavor; rather, it is a Trump-endorsed fulfillment of Kirk’s mission to take back higher education from the left. At Ole Miss, the monoculture is conservative, not liberal. “Let’s be honest: Everyone here agrees,” Lachman said. TPUSA has an electoral wing, Turning Point Action, but in a deep-red state in an off-election year, there isn’t much to do. Like any institution in power, TPUSA faces the threat of decadence setting in, as restless students search not just for a new leader but for new enemies and transgressions. After Kirk died, his old friend and former TPUSA personality Candace Owens embarked on a reputation-making new career as an assassination truther, covering his killing like a serialized true-crime podcast. According to her ever-mutating theory, Kirk’s assassin was merely a patsy in a larger scheme orchestrated by or somehow linked to the State of Israel. Over the fall, her podcast hit Spotify’s top-ten ranking, its listenership not far behind that of The Daily, from the New York Times, and of Tucker Carlson, another conspiracy-curious Israel critic. While discussing her lineage, I learned Lachman’s father is Jewish, and she jokily shushed me whenever it came up. “I don’t need this! I hear it from everyone!” she said. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being Jewish. I just am Catholic, 100 percent. I go to church. I haven’t missed church on a Sunday in four years.” Besides, “he didn’t even practice it. First of all, he didn’t even have a bar mitzvah or anything.” Her mother’s roots are Croatian, and she doesn’t identify as that, either: “I was just growing up, like, watching football. I’m American!” Lachman told me she was “staying away from Candace right now” but is also a conspiracy buff who had just recently embraced a conservative political culture in which the thirst for conspiracism is bottomless. She was open to the possibility of a wider plot against Kirk. She was up to speed on the latest lines of inquiry, including footage from Utah Valley University involving hand signals, a pair of sunglasses, an “overhead guy,” a “guy in camo,” and more. “They wanted the guy who was controlling our minds to be dead,” she said. “He had so much power over our generation.” When I asked who “they” were, she breezily suggested I do my own research. “We know who’s running the game,” she went on, glancing at her phone. I couldn’t tell how serious she was being. “You know, it’s a bigger picture. 9/11. MLK. JFK. Charlie Kirk.” At the Glendale memorial service, where Erika Kirk spoke of her husband’s attempts to “save the lost boys of the West.” Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine The absence of Kirk was already being felt at other colleges, where imitators and detractors alike were rushing to fill the void. While Lachman was preparing for J. D. Vance and Erika Kirk’s arrival in Oxford, a parallel speaking tour was coursing through SEC and ACC campuses across the South. Called “One Conversation at a Time,” it was a one-man show organized by 19-year-old Auburn University freshman Brilyn Hollyhand, an Evangelical Christian with a gentle drawl and choirboy manner. Hollyhand had met Kirk at the age of 11 and modeled himself in his image, writing a book and logging media appearances as a teen Republican. Announced eight days after Kirk’s death, the tour was framed as a tribute to his legacy of open discourse and organized in partnership with TPUSA chapters. As word got around, suspicion of Hollyhand began to mount. Some felt it was in poor taste for him to appear on Fox News the day of Kirk’s killing, then later to post a photo of himself on a private jet during the tour. Online, people said he was grifting off Kirk’s death — that he was trying to replace Kirk while his body was barely cold. A few days before arriving at Ole Miss, I checked out Hollyhand’s appearance at Clemson University in South Carolina, a STEM-centric public institution of 30,000. This is the land of the synthetic performance polo and the football cathedral, in this case the 82,000-seat “Death Valley” that the 2016 and 2018 NCAA champion Tigers call home. The event took place at the university’s business school. The emcee was Clemson TPUSA president Charlie Clontz, an athletically built senior from Bucks County, Pennsylvania — another refugee from bluish America. Hollyhand spoke for about 20 minutes, then opened the floor for questions. It was an ambush. The students and recent graduates in the room were interested in calling out not his opportunism but his politics, for not being right wing enough. The first questioner said he was an unemployed tech worker who couldn’t compete with foreign talent. He wanted to know if Hollyhand would call to slash America’s H-1B visa program and restrict pathways to high-skilled immigration. A few minutes later, Hollyhand got roughly the same question from a recent Clemson grad who said his ancestors had been in South Carolina for generations. After that, another version of the question from a civil-engineering major and member of the Clemson College Republicans named Evan Howard. Hollyhand insisted he stood against illegal immigration and even H-1Bs but defended immigrants who hoped to enjoy the American Dream by the book. “Who’s going to be the person to stand at the wall and say, ‘You look like you can come in, but you can’t?’” Hollyhand asked. “I could do that. You want me to do that?” Howard replied. He kept pushing Hollyhand: Did legal immigration not “disadvantage the Americans who are already here, whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, who fought in the Revolutionary War?” How would Hollyhand feel if America became “less than 50 percent white”? In this room, the H-1B and legal immigration were litmus tests, and you failed by not denouncing them. The other litmus test was Gaza, which has colored Israel’s moral status among not just liberal college students but those on the right, too. Here, Hollyhand was held to account for having declared the U.S.-Israel relationship sacred. This audience was “America First” in all ways, and that extended to its desire to sever the U.S. alliance with the Jewish state. The hostility on the tour baffled Hollyhand, as if the whole world had shifted underneath his feet in the few weeks since Kirk’s death. “I didn’t think this was controversial until this month,” Hollyhand told me, referring to his worldview. After the event ended, I debriefed with 22-year-old Jack Lyle, chairman of the Clemson College Republicans, and 18-year-old Jackson Heaberlin, the club’s outreach chair. If the Q&A looked like a coordinated attack, it’s because it was one, plotted by Lyle and the CCR. “Some inside baseball: We had a number of people who were selected to ask the questions we felt were most important,” Lyle said. Heaberlin and Lyle have an odd-couple dynamic. Heaberlin is chilled out and sardonic and has a mess of shaggy hair and a preference for vintage T-shirts. He was raised in West Virginia by a doctor father and a stay-at-home mother, both liberals. He cycled through an identity as a teenage progressive and aspiring hyperpop artist before embracing conservatism and Christianity. He is now building a brand as a political influencer, conducting Kirk-like tabling events at nearby campuses. Lyle, from Greenville, South Carolina, is a member of a campus action-shooting team and often wears a backward hat, cutting the more typical picture of the Trump bro. He tolerates Heaberlin like a younger brother. Like many on the edgier precincts of the right, they are Catholics, as well as political-theory junkies. Applying Platonic societal hierarchies to their dynamic, Heaberlin told Lyle, “I’m a philosopher-king. You’re maybe an auxiliary.” Before traveling to campuses last fall, I had assumed College Republicans would be buttoned up and cautious, while TPUSA kids might be more engaged in a bare-knuckle culture war. Turns out it’s often the opposite. Perhaps because of Kirk’s loyalty to Trump, TPUSA ends up holding the line and acting like a pep squad for team MAGA, with chapters answerable to the organization’s Phoenix headquarters and overseen by regional field representatives. College Republicans chapters belong to competing umbrella groups, none of them governed by the national party. When we met, Heaberlin and Lyle were preparing to campaign for Paul Dans, the Project 2025 architect who is mounting a primary challenge to incumbent South Carolina senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham. Dans’s attacks on Graham might as well have been ghostwritten by the Clemson College Republicans. “Students are losing job prospects to AI and H-1B and Illegal Aliens,” he posted on X recently. “Meanwhile this 70-year old childless WARMONGER is obsessed with renaming a 4 acre park in IRELAND to appease … Israel.” The Clemson crew are genuine Kirk fans. Heaberlin said Kirk is a main reason he became a Christian, and Lyle traveled to the memorial in Glendale. The CCR led the charge to pressure Clemson to fire two faculty members and an asbestos-program manager who had appeared to cheer Kirk’s death online. But Kirk’s flirtations with xenophobia, which were run of the mill in MAGA politics, were seen as moderate by the movement’s young right flank. Even before his death, it was growing more nationalistic, especially regarding immigration and Israel’s influence on U.S. foreign policy. “He played the rift. He tried to be reasonable,” Lyle said. “They shot that guy? Okay, I’m going over here, then.” I repeatedly heard a version of this sentiment. Before I traveled to Clemson, I met with the president of New York University’s College Republicans chapter, a senior named Ryan Leonard. “To have who we consider a moderate, who is not too crazy, who debates everyone, and who’s open to different ideas,” he said, “to have this guy be the one who gets assassinated? A lot of people are like, ‘Okay, why are we even trying to reason with these people anymore?’” The day after the Hollyhand event, I grabbed quesadillas with Lyle and Heaberlin at a campus sports bar. We were joined by junior Jane Kihne, a self-described “token Republican” since about the fourth grade who served as CCR president last spring as a rare female member of the group. (“The College Republicans are like, ‘Dude, how do you get so many girls at your meetings?’” said TPUSA’s Clontz.) If all three saw Kirk as center-right, they regarded the students who populate his organization as even more basic. “The last TPUSA meeting, they’re talking about, like, Wi-Fi outages,” said Heaberlin. Lyle nodded: “Their exclusive focus is essentially, I would say, low-hanging fruit and contemporary happenings in politics.” Kihne provided an example: “Here’s an issue that they like to touch — transgenders and women’s sports. We don’t really care. We think there are more pressing issues.” These young Republicans share a hardcore vision of populist nationalism that puts them to the right of not just Kirk and Hollyhand but Trump, whose second term some of them are already deeming a disappointment. “The numbers are massively, massively insufficient,” Lyle said about the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Kihne thinks the expulsions are “smoke and mirrors” goosed by self-deportations and sensational images of ICE raids. Trump has imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas. He has also defended their necessity to corporate America, which has incensed many on the young right. On foreign policy, the group was wary of the administration’s June strikes on Iran but less bothered by Trump’s extrajudicial strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean. “I actually think we should control our own hemisphere,” said Lyle, previewing the “Donroe Doctrine” of hemispheric influence Trump touted in the wake of the January raids that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Vance, Trump’s heir apparent, was also suspect, thanks in part to his Never Trumper past and backing from tech elites such as Peter Thiel. Last summer, Vance gave a speech in California in which he offered a reading of American identity that moved away from the “creedal” principles of the founding documents and toward the ancestral claims made by so-called heritage Americans. “It’s weird to me that he is essentially flirting with the concept of blood-and-soil nationalism while also having a wife who’s from halfway across the world,” Lyle said. (Usha Vance was born near San Diego, unless that’s what he meant.) If you were a real heritage American, Heaberlin added, “why would you name your kid Vivek, rather than, like, John?” Their cohort’s fixation on curbing legal immigration, Lyle theorized, stems from a fear of losing more than just their jobs. “It is essentially the question that will determine what it means to be an American: Is it just holding a piece of paper? Is it just being here under the correct legal status?” Lyle asked. “The answer we often find is that there is something further. You know, there is certainly a religious element. Obviously, an ethnic element. I mean, you ask a Japanese person what it means to be Japanese and they’ll start by describing themselves physically. I mean, you ask an American and they go … I don’t know. I don’t want to get in trouble.” It does not take a great deal of internet research to deduce whose rhetoric all this echoes. The day after Kirk’s murder, a Christian-nationalist pastor named Joel Webbon posted on X, “You killed Charlie. Now you get Nick. Enjoy.” The Glendale memorial service seemed to augur a post-Kirk conservative movement based on Christian piety. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine In 2019, Nick Fuentes, the then-21-year-old white-nationalist broadcaster, staged what became known as the “Groyper War.” During the Q&A portion of Kirk’s campus appearances, collegiate Groypers — those who subscribe to Fuentes’s brand of edgelord-flavored antisemitism — would mob the microphone lines and grill Kirk for being too moderate. The ambush I saw at Clemson six years later was a rerun of the Groyper War dynamic with Hollyhand unwittingly playing the Kirk role. Fuentes and Kirk were enemies. In August, someone called in to Kirk’s podcast to ask why he wouldn’t debate Fuentes. “We succeed. We win. They blame the Jews,” he replied. “Charlie Kirk wouldn’t say his name, like he was Voldemort,” said Clontz. Fuentes, by force of youth and dark charisma and a transgressive sense of humor, is probably the last figure from the original alt-right to have maintained his staying power. His podcast, America First, is a nightly catalogue of invective toward women (he has called himself a “proud incel”), Black people, Indians, and other minorities. His true passion, though, is denouncing “world Jewry” and “perfidious Jews” for their supposed subversive dual loyalty to Israel and the U.S. Fuentes didn’t vote for Trump in 2024 because he was “owned by the Jews” and would “bring us to war in Iran.” Kirk he saw as an Establishment shill, dubbing his group “Talking Points USA.” The consensus among students I interviewed is that Fuentes is in everybody’s feed and there is no point in denying his influence. “I know a ton of guys who love Nick to death,” said Clontz. “Some of them are incels. But some of them are normal frat guys.” Some are in the Clemson College Republicans. “I’m going to say, at the very least, Fuentes obviously makes a lot of good points; otherwise, he wouldn’t be so popular,” Lyle told me. “He also makes a lot of very bad points; otherwise, he wouldn’t be terribly controversial.” Nobody wants to be labeled a Groyper, but as a matter of description, Lyle said, “the Groypers are, you know, I mean, they’re a lot like me. They’re a lot like any number of folks in our age group. They go into positions of power. They become leaders in chapters of the College Republicans.” As much as Kirk sought to pretend Fuentes didn’t exist, he also managed to neutralize his appeal by gradually drifting in his direction. In Trump’s first term, Kirk was about as supportive of open borders as was possible in the MAGA movement, advocating to “staple green cards” to college diplomas and boost immigration to stem urban population loss. By last year, Kirk was calling for moratoriums on all “third world” immigration and supporting Trump’s bid to eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. In this way, Kirk played a version of William F. Buckley’s old double game: at once expelling and co-opting the hard-right fringe of the conservative movement, whether that was the paranoid anti-communism of the John Birch Society in the 1960s or the antisemitic strains of Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatism in the early 1990s. Gaza is the issue where Gen-Z conservatives draw the sharpest distinction between Kirk’s millennial sensibility and their own. “That was one of the places where I vehemently disagreed with Charlie for two, three years,” said Clontz, referring to Kirk’s support of Israel and its war against the Palestinians. “We don’t want to be involved in these foreign wars. Hamas is wrong, obviously. People getting shot in the head waiting for aid is also wrong.” But these humanitarian impulses on the right are often indistinguishable from bigotry: An October survey by the Manhattan Institute showed that a quarter of Republicans under 50 reported that “they themselves openly express” antisemitic views. Kirk was desperate to ward off Fuentes-style anti-Zionism in the months before his death. He considered Israel’s territorial claims biblically ordained along classic Evangelical Christian lines. As Israel’s obliteration of Gaza proceeded, he too began to criticize the war — though largely from a place of allyship, as he exhorted Israel to repair its reputation. Last May, he wrote a letter to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In it, Kirk tried to convey the extent of Israel’s PR problem on the young American right. He stressed that his campus tours were “rock concert” events of 4,000 to 5,000 “conservative patriots.” Yet “half the questions I get are about Israel, and they’re all negative.” Kirk relayed some of what he was hearing: “Israel is an apartheid state”; “Why is America subsidizing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people?”; “Israel and the Jews are responsible for 9/11.” “Sometimes it feels like I’m defending Israel in public more than your own government,” he wrote to Netanyahu. “I’m trying to convey to you that Israel is losing support even in conservative circles. This should be a 5 alarm fire.” Such advocacy later birthed wild speculation by Candace Owens and others that by offering tepid criticism of Israel or hosting anti-Israel pundits like Tucker Carlson at his events, Kirk fatefully raised the Jewish state’s ire. By November, Fuentes had fully escaped containment after Carlson hosted him on his podcast for a two-hour interview, launching a GOP free-for-all that nearly cost the head of the Heritage Foundation, MAGA’s de facto think tank, his job after he defended Carlson. Few I talked to on the campus right were particularly scandalized by Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes. Heaberlin said that during his past life as a teen Israel supporter, he got accused of antisemitism for even minute criticism of the Israeli regime: “ ‘Oh, well, that Nick Fuentes guywho you saw a clip of on Instagram, well, he’s an antisemite.’ It’s like, ‘Okay, yeah, so is everyone else ever,’apparently.” Besides, young right-wingers like them had all grown up on the internet, and their capacity for outrage was dulled by half a lifetime’s exposure to dark content. In real life, said Kihne, “we don’t see gas chambers. We don’t see Hitler Youth walking around. But we did witness Charlie Kirk get shot, killed in the neck by a left-wing extremist.” Now was not the time to tone-police the movement. “No Enemies to the Right,” as the saying went. Two days after the Carlson-Fuentes interview aired, it was pouring rain in Oxford. The deluge did not visibly affect Lesley Lachman, who was still living in a world where TPUSA was the hegemon of conservative-youth politics. Tickets to the Pavilion, where the Ole Miss Rebels play basketball, were first come, first served, prioritized for anybody with a student ID from the State of Mississippi. Enthusiasm was high, and nearly all the seats were filled by students, the first 500 of whom received Trump hats. Inside, Lachman was bouncing around in a red dress with a big blue bow on the back. Most of Mississippi’s political Establishment had shown up for the J. D. Vance–Erika Kirk event, including Governor Tate Reeves, whom Lachman refers to as “Tater Tot.” Lachman’s mother, Jacqui, had flown down from New York to give her a hand. Lachman has her drolly saved in her phone as “Manager,” like she’s Kris Jenner. TPUSA was now a key selling point of Lachman’s résumé as she contemplated a career in law or politics. The governor of Mississippi, the chancellor of the university, the vice-president of the United States: These were people she was mingling with in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing. I sat with Jacqui by the stage, waiting for the show to begin. “I wonder what it’s going to be like the day after?” she said, thinking about her daughter’s moment at the center of the universe. “You type it up into the application, but will anybody believe it happened? Will anyone look it up?” Lachman came running over. Benny Johnson, the TPUSA-aligned content creator, was in the house, hyping people up. “Benny hugged me! He goes, ‘You’re the president!’ I go, ‘Oh!’ He knows me!” she said. Jacqui asked, “Can he write you a letter for law school?” The program began with a video tribute to Kirk, followed by a rendition of the national anthem by country singer Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel. A chair with one of the white FREEDOM T-shirts Kirk popularized was left onstage to mark his absence. Lachman then introduced Erika Kirk, who urged young conservatives to announce their presence on campus in a “spiritual reclaiming of territory.” After her, Vance began with an unscripted remembrance of Kirk before getting to the part everyone was waiting for, the audience questions. I’m not sure there is a modern equivalent for what followed: a government official as high ranking as Vance facing an hour of unvetted interrogation by college-age questioners before a theoretically limitless audience (it was being livestreamed). In the wider world, one question got everyone’s attention as clips were passed around. A woman asked Vance how he reconciled his staunch Christianity with his marriage to a Hindu woman. When he replied that he and Usha were raising their kids Christian and that he hoped she might one day convert, many watching at home felt he had thrown his wife under the bus, stoking the pervasive internet speculation that their marriage is on the rocks. But in the arena, where virtually everyone was conservative, it felt as if Vance risked losing the crowd when he defended Usha’s freedom of religion. It was hard not to think of Fuentes — who has called Vance a “race traitor” and his in-laws “Uber drivers and call-center scammers” — or of the puzzlement I heard at Clemson about the name of their son. In Groyper War style, almost all of Vance’s other questioners came at him from the right. One guy challenged him on the Trump administration’s decision to send the National Guard to address Memphis’s gun-violence problem on Second Amendment grounds. Another woman found it disloyal that Trump was encouraging a primary challenge to the dissident Republican congressman Thomas Massie, a staunch anti-interventionist who has been leading the charge to release the Epstein files. And then there were the Israel questions. One person asked Vance if the administration’s support for the war in Gaza is compromised by the fact that Israeli billionaire Miriam Adelson is a major Trump donor. Another man in a MAGA hat and a waxed Barbour jacket said, “I’m a Christian man, and I’m confused about this notion that we owe Israel something.” He added, without elaboration, that “their religion openly supports the prosecution of ours.” Vance, who has done more to champion populist nationalism than anyone in the current GOP and is fluent in the idioms of the online right, was now being cast as the discredited Establishment. After the event, Fuentes claimed victory on X: “We run this.” A couple of days later, Lachman called me. It was a football game day, and she was on her way to the Grove, the campus’s tailgating mecca. TPUSA would have a tent in prime position. I asked if she had seen any of the theorizing that Vance and Erika Kirk were an item, launched by the way she momentarily placed her hand on the back of his head when they hugged onstage. (An offshoot of the J. D.-Usha divorce fantasy.) Lachman said she hadn’t seen much of it. Our algorithms had been showing us different conspiracy theories: “Mine is Israel, Palestine, the Illuminati. And yours is J. D. Vance and Erika Kirk.” Later, I asked if she had seen the Carlson-Fuentes interview. Lachman said she had watched it three times. When Charlie Kirk died, liberals could scarcely imagine a more malign figure being sanctified. During the “They’re eating the cats” phase of the 2024 election, Kirk had warned of Haitian migrants “raping your women” and becoming “your masters.” Perturbed by the prospect of a Muslim mayor of New York City, he declared Islam “not compatible with western civilization” — Muslims being the preferred bête noire of the contemporary right before the sudden recent switch to Jews. But in a country as divided as this one, it’s all a matter of perspective. “The manner in which he fit into the right-wing Zeitgeist was as a bookend for the center,” said Clemson’s Kihne. “If you were to the left of Charlie, even if you were conservative, you weren’t really conservative in the eyes of the youth.” “That’s why it hurt to lose a figure like Charlie who could channel masculinity into something virtuous,” said Clontz. “It’s like you can live a fulfilling life with a happy family and a wife you love very much; or you could be, like, an OnlyFans pimp like Andrew Tate.” In mid-December, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy published a New York Times op-ed urging Republicans to publicly denounce Groyper-esque ethnonationalism before it infected the whole party; by that point, it had reared its head in institutions ranging from a conservative magazine at Harvard University to the New York State chapter of the Young Republicans. “This pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, even though most Democratic voters clearly never believed that math is racist, or that hard work and the written tradition are hallmarks of whiteness,” he wrote, forecasting the dissolution of the multiracial coalition Trump rode to the White House. “If the post-Trump GOP makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe, we will meet a similar fate.” Until recently, the wokeism Ramaswamy was writing about served as a unifying enemy for the warring strains of the right the way communism had for previous generations. But in the wake of Trump’s bullying of academia and legacy media, wokeism looks like a spent force, and a classically liberal ideal like race blindness doesn’t seem so exciting to the right anymore. When Ramaswamy sent out a post calling to “End identity politics,” he elicited a response from the son of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the moderate Republican of Indian ancestry. “End H-1B Visas,” replied Nalin Haley, a 24-year-old who works in finance. At least among right-wing zoomers, it can feel as if the only debate going is whether to interview racists and that the only policies in the world involve Israel and H-1B visas. As Ramaswamy’s op-ed made the rounds, the MAGA Establishment gathered again in Arizona for TPUSA’s annual AmericaFest confab. Thirty-thousand people attended, just under one-third of whom were students, including Clontz and 15 of his TPUSA Clemson members. Lyle, Heaberlin, and Kihne were there too. But the specter of the uninvited guests Fuentes and Owens hung over the proceedings, and the tense atmosphere at the Phoenix Convention Center couldn’t have been more removed from the unity on display at Kirk’s memorial three months earlier. The conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish and a frequent target of Fuentes, was booked to speak on the same night as Tucker Carlson. In a blistering speech, Shapiro rattled off one of Fuentes’s racist quotes about Usha Vance, reminded the audience he had called Kirk a “retarded idiot,” laid into Owens’s conspiracies, and condemned Carlson for interviewing not just Fuentes but figures such as Tate and the Nazi revisionist Darryl Cooper. Carlson invoked Kirk’s legacy of free expression to argue for the right to platform whomever he wanted. Steve Bannon followed in kind, declaring that “Ben Shapiro is a cancer.” Days earlier, Erika Kirk had met with Owens in an unsuccessful bid to get her to stop spreading conspiracy theories about her husband’s death. “Every time Ben speaks I feel more certain Israel is involved in 9/10,” Owens posted after Shapiro’s speech. The students I spoke to felt Team Tucker carried the day, with private debates among them mirroring the ones taking place onstage. “It was definitely an interesting event with everybody, um, basically taking the opportunity to piss on one another,” Clontz told me. “It’s kind of cliché, but you really didn’t realize how big of an influence Charlie had till he was gone. I mean, everybody immediately started going after one another.” At AmFest, Erika Kirk gave Vance TPUSA’s official endorsement for president in 2028, implicitly refocusing the conference’s energy on defeating Democrats. In an interview with the British publication UnHerd that week, Vance denounced Fuentes by name. Onstage, he didn’t, delivering a keynote speech that tried to appease virtually every constituency of the emergent young right and in which he confessed that he too had spent sleepless nights researching conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination. Rather than fight one another, Vance urged the audience members to remember their and Kirk’s true enemy: “The left is still there, my friends, and they are still very powerful. Don’t delude yourselves. It’s the activist groups who want to poison your kids with hormone-replacement therapy and toxins in your water supply. It’s the corporate boardrooms pushing diversity quotas.” He added, “I know some of you are discouraged by the infighting over any number of issues. Don’t be discouraged. Wouldn’t you rather lead a movement of freethinkers who sometimes disagree than a bunch of drones who take their orders from George Soros?” Before Christmas, I took a Metro-North train to Mount Kisco, where I met Lachman for lunch at a British pub near the station. She ordered a shepherd’s pie and a coffee, her third of the day. In a couple of weeks, she would head to Spain for a few weeks of study abroad in Málaga. She had exciting plans lined up for TPUSA upon her return to Oxford. In addition to a trip to the gun range and classes on self-defense and “how to be a gentleman,” she had scheduled a screening of Brett Ratner’s new Melania Trump documentary. She hoped to take Introduction to Gender Studies in the spring. “I kind of want to be the spy in the classroom. I want to hear what they’re feeding our kids,” she said. Aiming to cash in on her new connections to the administration, Lachman had submitted an application for a White House summer internship. She hadn’t been able to attend AmFest but sent a dozen or so of her TPUSA colleagues. Watching from afar, she was put off by Shapiro’s speech: “We have midterms coming up. I don’t know if now is the time to jump onstage and slam Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace.” Arguably more exciting to Lachman was the fresh content Owens was putting out on Kirk’s assassination. When Owens introduced a Hanukkah episode with the words “Shabbat shalom” and did a little dance to “Hava Nagila,” Lachman thought it was hilarious: “The fact of people turning away from Candace is a thing of two months ago. We’re in the future now.” Lachman is not particularly invested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and when it comes to immigration, she thinks if you come to the U.S. legally, you deserve to stay. But setting aside the policy aspects of Groyperism, she said the rise of Fuentes has been undeniable. “Everybody I know watches Nick. He’s funny,” she told me by phone a couple of days before our lunch. Lachman tried to explain that he serves a different purpose than Kirk did. “Charlie, I take notes and apply to my life.” Fuentes “is a character; he likes to humor people.” She offered an analogy: “Charlie wants to help the family in a way, take care of the kids. And Nick Fuentes has younger-brother syndrome. He just wants attention.” And once in a blue moon, he said something she agreed with. “I think you’re right, I could stop girlbossing so hard; I could let someone in.” When I asked if watching Kirk’s enemy is an act of disloyalty, Lachman acknowledged that her generation was struggling to fill the void he left behind. She wasn’t always sure where to turn herself. “Sometimes when I’m sad and in bed and want to watch Charlie,” she said, “I just watch Nick instead.”

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