While Charlie Kirk was arguably the most influential political activist since the 1960s, the manner in which he has been memorialized is largely without precedent. There are, evidently, five books penned by Kirk. Having read most of them, I can confirm that there is no “Letter from Scottsdale Jail” nor an Autobiography of Charlie K. There’s no Turning Point of the American Mind, no Turning Point Review, no Collected Speeches of CJK. Kirk does not fit neatly among his antecedents, as there’s no singular opus from which his legacy can be understood. His is not a gravestone that will be found using the Dewey Decimal System. The digital world he came from is not one that is inclined to stand ceremony on the altar of the printed word. 

Instead, what’s most prominently come to memorialize Charlie Kirk’s life are thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of video clips, tweets, and quotes, melted down from their contexts and returned to the discourse in endlessly malleable form:

It’s okay to love your country. Democrats hate this country. Husbands must love their spouses and their children more than their careers. Wives should submit to their husbands. I want to be remembered for my faith. The cost of some gun deaths is worth it. Jesus defeated death so you could live. The separation of church and state is a fabrication, a fiction. If you believe in something, you need to fight for those ideas, not run from them. Just because you are offended doesn’t mean you are right. Prowling Blacks target white people for fun. Courage is a choice. Prove me wrong.

Perhaps it is because of this sepulcher plastered in rage-bait and pasted over with not-of-this-world decals that the epitaph which has come to memorialize Kirk is not one he said or wrote, but instead emerged as a kind of algorithmic summary of the online universe he surfaced from, and captures the peculiar omnipotence, almost Christlike, he has attained in death, becoming capacious almost to the point of vacuity: father, son, leader, servant, soldier, peacemaker, dissident, patriot, lion, lamb, martyr, holy ghost.

WE ARE ALL CHARLIE KIRK read the banner at the entrance to AmericaFest, Turning Point’s annual conference in Phoenix — and we are legion. Forty-thousand strong, twice the previous record, came from all fifty states to Phoenix in December, only three months after Kirk was assassinated at a university in Utah, to get a glimpse of what Turning Point would become without its founder at the helm. In the months since Kirk’s death, his wife Erika had assumed his role as the organization’s CEO and over 140,000 students had applied to join Turning Point USA. Millions had tuned into his livestreamed funeral service, a bill to erect a statue of him at the capitol was filed in Congress, and the shit of a conservative movement he helped build had absolutely hit the fan.

Two years ago, when I reported from AmFest for County Highway, I saw a movement that Kirk had shepherded into a single purpose — returning Donald Trump to the Resolute Desk. This year, I saw something different. Born-again evangelicals, like Kirk, are not called to dwell in the past; fittingly, then, there was only a single relic from Kirk’s life on display at AmFest: the shade canopy under which he famously challenged college students to Prove Me Wrong. There were no signs prohibiting guests from entering the space, but it remained empty each time I passed by. This E-Z Up was a poignant lacuna in an arena otherwise boiling with vendors, grifters, hustlers, gamblers, preachers, and healers, each of whom had at one point been welcomed by Charlie Kirk into his tent, and whom Erika Kirk had invited back to help continue his work. Only this time, there would be no shepherd to separate the lambs from the wolves.

The bloodbath began instantly. After Erika ended her opening remarks with a surprising presidential endorsement of J.D. Vance — surprising in that no matter how long this year has felt, we are still three years away from the next general election — Ben Shapiro took the stage to declare that the conservative movement’s future depends on its adherence to Charlie’s “core mission,” which he defined as “freedom, free markets, limited government, and, most importantly… the truth.” Notably absent from Shapiro’s list was the word “faith.” That is, Christian faith, which mortared the foundation of Kirk’s political ideology — “We must defend the Christian heritage and institutions that gave birth to America. Christianity is the key, irreplaceable element,” Kirk tweeted last May — and which Shapiro, in his dark yarmulke under the bright lights, does not share with (this is a guess) 95 percent of the people then in the room.

But back to the truth, per Shapiro: “Our first duty is the truth. We owe you the truth… That means that if we offer a guest for your viewing, we always should ask the kinds of questions that actually get at the truth… So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist, a Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes… you know, the Nick Fuentes who said that Charlie Kirk is a ‘retarded idiot’; the person who said that he ‘took Turning Point and fucked it, and that’s why it’s filled with Groypers’ — if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.”

The truth: “That is precisely what Tucker Carlson did.”

The truth: “If Candance Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting dispersions at TPUSA and the people who work here… to imply or outright claim a complicity in a cover-up of Charlie’s murder… implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

The truth: “When Candance Owens says I don’t know… but I know, that is retarded.”

The truth: “When Steve Bannon accuses his foreign-policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not making an argument based in evidence.”

The truth: “If Tucker wants answers to his questions about Jeffrey Epstein, he should call the Vice President of the United States. He’s quite close with him.”

The truth, sitting in front of me in the bleachers, 15 years old: “Is he a Christian?”

The truth, sitting next to him, shaking his head and mouthing one word: Jewish.

The truth was suddenly up for grabs, and in the vacuum left by Kirk’s absence, the tenuous unity of his coalition began to implode. In response to Shapiro’s speech, Steve Bannon called him a “cancer.” Tucker Carlson described watching the speech backstage as like watching “your dog start doing your taxes.” Then, things that I would’ve thought unthinkable just two years ago started happening. The conservative commentator Steve Deace was booed for speaking favorably about US assistance to Israel. The born-again celebrity Russell Brand was cheered after criticizing Donald Trump’s cruel words after Rob Reiner’s death. And Vivek Ramaswamy, who made his case at AmFest 2023 for the presidency, stood on the same stage in 2025 and pleaded to simply be considered a worthy citizen.

Good postmodernists know that truth in politics is relative. The truth of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and Jeffrey Epstein’s connections, if any, to the Mossad and the number of dead in Gaza should be matters of fact, ascertainable through some objective and transparent process; but the truth as it relates to gaining followers and winning elections is a standard measured, in this crowd, solely by applause. And by that metric, the truth at the end of AmFest 2025’s first day sounded like Tucker Carlson saying this:

“Things could change, but right now, [J.D. Vance] is the one person who buys the core idea of the Trump coalition. Now what is that idea, ladies and gentlemen? Anyone know? It’s America First. It’s really simple. Some people are pretty anxious to retire that phrase. Remember when they told us: ‘That’s a bigoted phrase! … ‘Well, that sounds like America Only.’ No, it’s not. It’s America First, simple … [and] like probably 95 percent of Trump voters would be for that.”

I’m quoting everything out of context because — as Charlie Kirk well understood — it is not the lay text, or the context, but rather the subtext that has most effectively cohered the conservative coalition since 2016. I went searching for that subtext in AmFest’s crowd as explosive rhetoric was lobbed on stage. One of the more revealing subtextual exchanges I heard happened before any of the viral responses to Shapiro’s speech I quoted above. 

After Shapiro concluded his remarks, a Q&A line moderated by TPUSA staffers formed not far from me. The front of the queue was full of young men in black Make America Catholic Again hats, Hawaiian shirts, and awkward-fitting suit jackets, some with a lapel pin that had the initials “AF” — an acronym for “America First,” the white-nationalist movement congealing around Nicholas J. Fuentes, the 27-year-old host of the “America First” show on Rumble. It was Carlson’s decision to host Fuentes on his podcast, ​and to pointedly voice little concern about Fuentes’s most racist and antisemitic claims — among them Holocaust denial and support for Jim Crow — that brought the conservative civil war ​into the public eye. For some on the right, Fuentes has gone beyond the pale and must be rebuked; but for many others, condemning his “fringe” ideas may risk their future standing in the America First coalition — a risk that some of conservatism’s most prominent voices have been unwilling to take.

Fuentes was prohibited from speaking at AmFest while Kirk was alive, and while his widow has continued that policy, his followers were not hard to find. They are often called “Groypers,” a reference to a deviant caricature of the Pepe the Frog reaction meme which was popularized by alt-right profiles on the message board 4chan. The etymology of the word Groyper is unknown to me; looking into any of this stuff is a bit like parsing the Permian-Triassic boundary, when the greatest mass extinction event in Earth’s history melted all the world’s beauty into a raging ooze. What can be said generally is that the Groypers are young, overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) male, and often wear things like the “AF” lapel pin and other merch from Fuentes’s online store as signifiers of their allegiance to a common social media-driven sensibility.

Following a softball question from a Turning Point chapter president, one of these young men asked Shapiro why he called the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which killed 34 Americans and was later deemed a tragic case of friendly fire by military investigators, “irrelevant” in a recent podcast episode. Shapiro handily defended his position, but the young man had felt the teeth of his question sink into the audience and refused to let go.

“The American flag was flying on that ship,” he exclaimed, letting the crowd’s applause grow to a roar behind him. “You do not mistake an American ship for a foreign one when our flag was flying!”

Shapiro again took the kid to task, citing naval reports and flight logs, but it quickly became clear that he would not win the room. In frustration, he asked to move on to the next question. Then something remarkable happened. A young TPUSA moderator hurriedly snuck a young woman into the front of the Q&A line, ahead of the mithraic young men. When the young woman reached the mic, she introduced herself by name and identified the Turning Point chapter she belonged to, then asked a totally benign question about how young people can bring conservatism to college campuses.

This became a theme of the entire weekend, and a startling counterpoint to the endless claims we heard about how Charlie Kirk always invited his opponents to the front of the line. Discussions which might have revealed conservative conflicts — particularly during the “Prove Me Wrong” events, which were once a signature of Charlie’s campus crusades — were instead derailed by truckling questions from Turning Point chapter presidents, nearly all of whom were young women.

It turns out the newly feminine face of Turning Point does not belong solely to Erika Kirk, nor is it a result of her sudden ascension to CEO; rather, it is the natural evolution of gender expectations that are baked into Turning Point’s culture, which I first wrote about here two years ago. Namely, that grassroots activist leadership represents the height of ambition for young conservative women who are limited from other pursuits because of the ultimate expectation that they marry and have, as Kirk was fond of saying, “more babies than you can afford.”

Starting a Turning Point chapter is, of course, a natural outlet for ambitious conservative girls. It is more glamorous than volunteering at church, more accessible than competing in a beauty pageant, and more stimulating than nannying at home. And with Erika Kirk now la jefa, the culture of Turning Point is undeniably more attractive than ever before to young women, many of whom are no doubt wise to the fact that being CEO of a grassroots conservative organization — like being a popular podcast host or television personality — is a kind of loophole through which they, too, might one day subvert conservative gender norms about male leadership. Erika insists that she has taken Charlie’s job as an act of duty to her husband and her family, but what likely motivated Charlie to designate Erika as his replacement in the case of his death was not solely a sense of duty to his wife and kids. His choice was probably made for the sake of his coalition as well. And he was smart to do so: When Erika walked onstage in her gold-sequined pantsuit, it was hard to deny that she was the image of what Turning Point’s most avid members aspire to become.

Obviously, the same cannot be said for young men. They’re the ones who are supposed to make enough money to afford all those unaffordable kids. And the young men who have a shot at ambitious careers are doing just that: on football fields, in investment-banking internships, at law schools — and not at Turning Point itself, for which they presumably don’t have the time. In this way, Turning Point has effectively stud-proofed itself, and results of that gelding are now showing. While he was alive, Kirk himself was a distraction from this reality. In his absence, the imbalance in the conservative movement’s youngest generation has never been starker: on one side, kick-ass babes bursting with potential; and on the other side, second-string squibs seething with resentment.

But here’s the thing: Unlike their alpha male counterparts, these squibs vote in droves. This is, after all, the true legacy of Charlie Kirk, who did more than anyone to organize thousands of 18-year-olds, who might’ve otherwise been busy blowing their dicks off with M-80s, to care a hell of a lot about electoral politics, and to get their education in politics from a certain information stream. And thus returns our subtext, the reason why the coldly calculating types like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and even J.D. Vance wouldn’t denounce the squibs by name. The Vice President spelled out the strategy with surprising candor during his own speech at AmFest: “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

Once Shapiro’s inquisitor stepped away from the Q&A, I followed him into the exhibitor hall towards a pair of tables set up by Generation Zion — a pro-Israel student group. He joined a large crowd that had gathered around to watch another young white man in a cheap suit debate two Generation Zion students. A middle-aged woman in a bedazzled Make America Great Again shirt passed by shaking her head.

“That poor boy needs love,” she said.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“A lot of hateful things,” she replied, looking up at the ceiling to blink an eyelash out of her left eye. “And it’s like he really means them.”

That poor boy was Ryley Niemi, a 21-year-old from Temecula, California. Two of his interlocutors, Karys Rhea and Dimas Guaico, later told me that Niemi is one of many “bad-faith actors” at these events, “experts of the eight-second clip” who can maneuver swiftly between discussing AIPAC, the USS Liberty, the Iraq War, and Gaza — all while remaining conscious of the everpresent videocameras. I wound up spending a lot of time around Niemi over the weekend, and once was even asked by an aspiring right-wing influencer to film the two of them as they discussed Niemi’s “hottest takes” on Israel. Staring through a handicam, I saw Niemi as representative of his ilk: His slim-fit blue suit and red tie emphasized his awkward boyishness, while patches of acne and facial hair belied a preternatural talent for being on camera.

When I sat down with Niemi after his Generation Zion debate, the first thing he said, without my prompting, was, “I still live with my parents, but not for economical reasons. It’s out of choice. I moved out on my own for six months and I realized that’s just kind of depressing.” This became a motif of our conversation: Niemi anticipating a negative assumption about himself and roundaboutly confirming the stereotype in an attempt to transcend it, all without my saying anything. His life seemed like one long stand taken against the world with his back to the wall. 

He told me his parents are “nominally conservative, Republican voters” who aren’t Christian and aren’t strong in their conservative beliefs. He credits his elementary and middle school teachers for inadvertently making him politically active because they were “talking feminist bullshit,” i.e., claiming things in class like it was “illegal to offend someone.” 

“She was very nice, but she was liberal, and she lied,” he said of an early teacher. As he grew older (12) he got more confidence: “I looked at my teacher straight in the face and I called her a dumb liberal.” 

He had begun watching people like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder on YouTube in his free time, which his adolescence provided in abundance. In fact, he could sum up the entirety of his secondary education in a brief aside. As he explained it, “I only went to high school for six months, by the way, because COVID happened, and then I graduated early; then I went to college at 16 years old; then I dropped out two months later because they required the vaccine. I don’t count online [school]. Technically I was online for a year and a half… I remember playing, like, Star Wars: Battlefield, or whatever it’s called.” Nonetheless, he “always aced his tests,” especially math and science. 

Not English, though: He says I’ll see a report in “like ten years from now” when he’s in Congress that “Congressman Niemi can’t spell, some crap like that.”

In Texas, Niemi got his first taste of internet fame when a clip of a transgender man throwing a cup of water at him while he held a sign protesting gay marriage found its way to Libs of TikTok, where it got three-million views. His stock has been rising ever since. Sure, some people say he only has 6,300 followers, he tells me, “But they’re fresh, you know. This isn’t some bullshit, old followers. These are fresh. I get a million views a month on Instagram. I get a million views a month on Facebook. Like, I get a lot of views.” 

It was not uncommon for people to recognize him while we were talking. A man known around the MAGA circuit for wearing a suit screen-printed with the border wall recognized him from a Trump rally, where Niemi had heckled California Congressman Ken Calvert. A twentysomething Groyper-type came up to him and asked him to do his uncanny impression of Fuentes, saying, “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, and blacks for the most part should be in prison, and we would live in fucking paradise.” Niemi told me people are attracted to him because he’s not afraid to have “exact claims.” Meaning, he’s not afraid to tell people birth control should be banned, to tell his girlfriend she shouldn’t wear a bikini, to tell Turning Point ladies it’s not conservative to work 60 hours a week as a Republican staffer instead of having kids. And above all, that he’s willing to challenge US support for Israel.

“This is going to be a good quote, ready? I don’t think America should be sending billions of dollars to Israel because the American government should not have billions of dollars sitting in a bank account,” he told me. “I actually support Israel over Gaza. I think Gaza is an aggressor. My main thing is that the whole point of Judaism today is that they have rejected Christ. I don’t even know how there’s a dispute about this. I don’t know if you’re personally familiar, but that’s what Jews today are saying. ‘Yeah, Jesus wasn’t the Messiah. We’re still waiting for the Messiah. So Jesus Christ is lying.’”

Niemi has seen his following swell since Kirk’s death, which in retrospect had marked the moment that much Groyper-discourse about Israel, and Jews generally, entered the conservative mainstream. He was thriving in the subtext, even if it might have been a little awkward when, during our interview, a piece of that subtext approached us in the form of some kid who recognized Niemi from the Generation Zion debate. 

“Ryley, right?” 

“Yeah,” Niemi said, instinctively thrusting his arm out for a Congressional-style handshake.

Instead of shaking his hand, the kid turned and faced us, snapped both his heels together, stuck his chin up, and shot his right arm out in a crisp Sieg heil.Of course, Niemi does not “fully” agree with the kid — who was obviously just joking around. “I mean, after the Elon Musk Nazi-salute shenanigans, I think everybody kind of does it as a joke, right?” he explained. “I mean, you know it’s a joke, right?”

Niemi is one of the many young men I spoke with at this year’s AmFest who were gaining followers by expressing hostility towards Jews and Israel. I met most of them at a booth for a production company called Off the Record USA, which was started by Carson Carpenter, a 20-year-old from Prescott, Arizona. Carpenter told me that he and his cofounder Stryder Bigler scout for “microinfluencers” — like Niemi — who might want to set up a revenue-sharing system in exchange for equipment and marketing. Many of these influencers, Carpenter explained, share the ideals of the America First movement, which Carpenter summed up as “actually putting your citizens first” so that “we can move our country back to how it was: a majority white, Christian nation.” 

Their talking points often departed significantly from MAGA dogma; all of the Off the Record USA contributors I spoke with had no problem agreeing that Israel’s actions in Gaza qualify as genocide — and on this point they are closer kin with their peers on the left than their elders on the right. “It’s definitely ethnic cleansing,” Faith Merrill, a 19-year-old influencer told me. “I mean, they’ve literally said it. If you sit and watch IDF soldiers talking to Palestinians online, or just social media, or even just TikTok, they’re making fun of it. They’re saying they like to step on dead children’s bodies. They like to spit on their bodies. These are children. Children aren’t terrorists.” 

I hesitate to describe this group as “Groypers” because for me the term is rooted in an online culture that’s traditionally been saturated in nihilism and irony, whereas these influencers operate in a nearly irony-free mode. Like Niemi, most of them earnestly believe that they will one day become politicians. (Merrill said she really liked politics, but that she would “definitely be happier married and baking cookies.”) Likewise, most seemed to hold their convictions truly, in large part, I suspect, because they were undergirded by a Christian pragmatism that was indistinguishable from Charlie Kirk’s. These kids are not teenage nihilists happy to watch the world burn; their beliefs have an objective, which is the reshaping of American laws to reflect Christian scripture. Carpenter drew the distinction between his peers and the trolls succinctly. “I’m not going to say that I agree with everything Fuentes says, because the only person in human history who I would agree with everything he said was Jesus Christ.”

It may be that the maturation of the Groypers has brought many who were once teenage trolls into the realm of adult politics, as foot soldiers of the America First movement — which seems, at least rhetorically, to have replaced MAGA as the rallying cry of Gen Z. What these America First kids share with their MAGA elders is a bone-deep aversion to institutional media; this is, again, one of the ultimate legacies of Charlie Kirk, who made sure to condemn traditional media outlets every time I saw him speak. But this aversion has led the youngest voting generation to pivot from one of the core policy positions of the old Trump coalition. In short, the same red flags that Kirk and his peers trained kids to see in mainstream media sources, particularly during the pandemic, have begun attaching themselves to conservative narratives, particularly about Israel. 

“When you look at Israel, and you look at COVID, the same method of propaganda surrounds both,” Carpenter explained to me. He spelled out the language that signals bullshit for his generation. “Things like: a lot of studies were done and conducted. A lot of different stats. A lot of different data. And the thing that’s in common is, when you look back at the last 30 or 40 years of our country, so many of these scientific data studies, and things done by universities and professors, and things done by independent orgs, are being funded by big private companies so that they can skew the results.” 

The language of rational explanation and objective reporting is the language of authority, which, whether martialed in support of free trade, the Iraq War, or Israel, indicates for Carpenter and his cohort that it is not to be trusted. “It’s done the exact same way. You see it with these talking points: ‘We need military standing in the Middle East. Not that many children died in Gaza. Netanyahu is coming to America and brokering deals for us in the region,’” he said. “It’s the same type of stuff, and it’s being backed by a lot of these companies, a lot of these data studies, a lot of what it felt like to have information presented to us during COVID.”

Carpenter told me about a “Christmas Crusade” party that was happening off-site on the last night of AmFest. I bought a ticket and it came with a drink, so I sat at the bar and watched the kids filter in, wearing their slim-fit suits and America First lapel pins. Some of the boys had black MAGA hats on with Nicholas J. Fuentes’s initials stitched into the back, and the few girls in the bar wore cocktail dresses and the boys took turns going up to these girls and shaking their hands, like it was a duty expected of them. When a rumor spread that the bartenders were not checking for age, the boys began to creep up to the bar. The one next to me said that he wanted a whiskey, and when the bartender asked if he wanted just a whiskey, the kid said he wanted a whiskey with soda, and the bartender asked what kind of soda, and the kid said Sprite. And I would say all of it was indeed like watching a dog try to do your taxes. 

I came mainly to talk to one of these kids, a 19-year-old from North Dakota who I first encountered two days prior while he argued outside the Generation Zion booth. His name is Jeb Baugh. He first gained attention within the America First community after he challenged the conservative commentator Glenn Beck on American support for Israel during one of his live events, and in just the two months since, his Instagram following jumped from six or seven hundred to 78,000. His dialed-down, Great Plains farm-boy appearance stood out at the Christmas Crusade. He wore an Orvis T-shirt, jeans, and wide-toed cowboy boots. He had a quick mind, a baby face, and a quiet ego. 

Like several prominent conservative writers, he was obsessed with characterizing America as a modern-day Weimar Republic, a perspective that he credits to a short lifetime of observing the differences between the small town in North Dakota where he was born and the multiethnic city in East Texas where he went to middle and high school. His hometown, he said, is all white: “a high-trust society.” Texas, he said, “was very different.” “Much more crime, much more multicultural identity.” Trust is a big deal to Baugh. Trust in your family, trust in your neighbors, trust in your politicians. He had little faith in Trump — who he described as a “Band-Aid on America’s bleeding wounds” — nor in any political solution to the status quo.

“To be honest, we’re very much disenfranchised young men,” Baugh said, reflectively. “Our grandparents had been able to come out of high school and get a well-paid job and buy a house, but that isn’t there for us. For us — maybe, maybe you’ll find a wife who isn’t super promiscuous. And maybe you’ll own a home with a 50-year mortgage.”

Baugh held most of the same beliefs as the Off the Record USA kids I had spoken to (he had recorded an interview in their booth earlier in the weekend), albeit with more open racism. He hated that the pure Scandinavian soil of the American North had been tainted by Somali immigrants. Several times he reminded me, with clear resentment, that “the Jews always win.” By far his greatest concern, however, was maintaining the sanctity and innocence of his hometown. He would not tell me its name on the record for fear of “doxing it,” and, after he later let it slip off the record, he sent me a panicked text that said, “Pls don’t dox my home town.”

That fear seemed derived from a recent crisis of trust, from which he had not totally recovered. “My parents divorced when I was 17 and that… that kind of messed me a bit,” he said. This bit of personal history came out almost half an hour into our conversation, and, like my interviews with many of these kids, it surfaced totally unbidden. He was talking about something that happened a little over a year before his viral moment with Glenn Beck. It reminded me, starkly and suddenly, of just how young these boys are. 

“I was very sad about that,” he continued. “I think that also has something to do with my political ideology.” I asked him how so. 

“Man, well… my mom kind of left my dad. I think that was a product of modern-day society, and it made me more obsessed with politics,” he explained. “That was the moment I came a lot more to the right. Before that I would say I was already reading into stuff. I mean, I watched Europa: The Last Battle when I was a sophomore in high school — which was the year before my parents, you know… But yeah, it was crucial.”

When I eventually wrote all this down, I hesitated to use Baugh’s actual name. Although we spoke on the record, which he had no problem with even after I explained what that meant, I still had serious concerns about the informed agency of some of these kids, whose role models have a lot of 18- and 19-year-old boys thinking it is perfectly okay to tell a journalist for a national magazine that they think Hitler is a misjudged figure in history.

But Baugh’s digital footprint has already been cast. So I think it’s important to write down what otherwise exists only as subtext: that Baugh returned to the topic of his parents’ divorce several times, telling me he hadn’t thought too much about the connection between it and his political views. That his mom wishes he hadn’t gone to that Glenn Beck event. That he texts her to say he loves her every day. That he doesn’t talk to his dad that much. That he thanked me for talking to him about all of this. That he thought it was a good conversation.

So what is actually the subtext here — the political or the personal? Baugh probably isn’t old enough to know. He hasn’t lived enough to know why adults do what they do, and what it means to be one.

Conversely, the adults who insinuate themselves into the personal worlds of boys like Baugh through podcasts and YouTube clips, and who speak to them from the podium in loco parentis, and retweet their content on socials, know just how malleable these kids are. They understand what it feels like to be young and in need of guidance from an adult. The power balance between adults and the young people who look up to them has always been enormous, but for young men it has perhaps never been so enormous as it is now. 

Whether Kirk’s successors will succeed or not in the larger political program for which they hope to use these kids as ground troops is an open question. Maybe they will. Wittingly or not, the plentiful subtextual fodder that Kirk left behind did help lay the foundation for the Groypers and their viewpoints to rise, regardless of whether they ever received his explicit endorsement. But what’s obvious to any sane outsider is that exploiting the parenting and education gaps in the lives of this neglected generation for political purposes is a pretty low thing for grown-ups to do. Because for the Jeb Baughs of the world, the resentments that slick their handlers’ paths to victory will never just be subtext.