One year ago this week, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. In the twelve months since, the battle over what that assassination means has never really stopped.
There's the sanctified, quasi-martyr version of Kirk promoted on Fox News and at Turning Point USA events. There's a mocking, AI-generated "Kirkification" of his image that has spread across every corner of the internet. And there's Candace Owens, who has built a conspiracy-fueled following largely by attacking Turning Point's own account of what happened. While in Provo, the case against Tyler Robinson, the man charged with firing the shot, is grinding through Utah's courts toward a trial that will unfold largely independent of whatever cable news and group chats have already decided is true.
To help make sense of where all of that actually stands a year later, I sat down with Jared Holt, a journalist and researcher who specializes in hate and extremist movements in the United States. Holt is currently a senior researcher at Open Measures, an open-source social intelligence platform, and co-hosts the podcast Posting Through It, one of the most essential shows for understanding far-right and extremist movements in the U.S.
Watch or listen to the full conversation above. A few highlights.
Holt says Kirk's death is being used exactly how Kirk would have wanted. "I think taking his death, immediately politicizing it and using it to attack the left in this country is precisely what Charlie Kirk would have wanted to happen," Holt told me. He pointed to the wave of firings and public pressure campaigns aimed at anyone who didn't sufficiently mourn Kirk.
The MAGA movement has lost the battle over Kirk's public memory, Holt argues. A year on, he says the internet has settled into treating Kirk as "more meme than man," with AI-generated songs, memes and a whole slang vocabulary—"Kirkified" and "Kirkuanly"—eclipsing any serious engagement with what Kirk actually said or believed.
Nobody has stepped in to fill the void Kirk left. Holt doesn't see a clear successor to the role Kirk played holding together often-warring factions of the online right—not Turning Point USA's Jack Posobiec, and not Nick Fuentes, despite Fuentes' ambitions. "My read of the MAGA movement today is that it is just completely lost," Holt said. "It does not have a center of gravity."
The Tyler Robinson trial means different things to different audiences. For Turning Point USA and its allies, Holt says, the trial represents a chance to finally put a year of conspiracy theories to rest. For Candace Owens' audience, it's simply more fuel for the fire.
We also talked about what to expect from Thursday's memorial event at UVU, emceed by Glenn Beck, and why Holt thinks the people closest to Kirk may actually have an incentive to stay quiet as the case moves toward trial.
