Radio Free America: The lessons Democrats can learn from Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk evolved from an internet joke into a political opportunist who recognized that proximity to power was all that mattered.
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Image by: Nikos Michals
By now, you probably know Charlie Kirk’s story: A right-wing demagogue is rejected from his top pick for higher education, and he decides that he wants to destroy liberal democracy. Not the first time that’s happened!
It’s the anniversary of his assassination, and in the year since, he’s become a meme instead of a martyr. His movement looks rudderless.
But we shouldn’t ignore the success he had while he was still alive. Because there are some lessons in there, even for people that he thought were subhuman (liberals, Democrats, basically anyone who wasn’t a white guy with a Black Rifle Coffee shirt).
Like many people, I first learned about Charlie Kirk because he was wearing a diaper around. We all started calling him “Diaper Boy” after that one. His group, Turning Point USA, was supposed to fight liberalism on college campuses, but was instead an internet joke that did nothing to get millennials to start voting Republican.
He was a clown, but clowns are good at getting attention. As Chris Hayes has written, it may be the critical skill in modern politics. Kirk’s right-wing donors saw him the way an NBA team looks at a seven-foot-tall European teenager who needs to add some muscle. Maybe most of those bets won’t pay out, but every now and then, you get Nikola Jokić.
It helped that Kirk was a top notch opportunist. For example, he was originally a Trump-skeptical secular libertarian, but he brown-nosed his way into Trump’s orbit after the 2016 Republican convention. All that mattered to him was proximity to power. Which is why he (savvily) glommed onto Christian Nationalism during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he saw religion as a useful cudgel to fight against public health restrictions. It helped him gain cultural power, which is why so many celebrities eulogized him after he died.
And where Kirk truly excelled, what set him apart from other MAGA influencers, was that he figured out how political power worked. He participated in the failed coup on Jan. 6, and his takeaway was that he needed to focus more on winning power over administering elections. Soon after the election, Turning Point announced that recruiting precinct chairs (a position that in many states helps administer elections) was their top priority.
But like many other political activists who valorize the power of local offices, they soon ran into an undeniable fact: Local power is totally at the whim of the state government. And with one law, a state can render every single precinct chair powerless. While recruiting precinct chairs is still ostensibly a Turning Point project, it seems like less of a priority now than it did back then.
By 2024, Diaper Boy had figured out that state governments were key to his Carl Schmitt-inspired crusade to end liberal democracy. So that year, he tried to force Nebraska state lawmakers to change how they allocated electoral votes just months before the election. The attempt failed, but only barely. Kirk had cracked the code: Combine a carnival barker sensibility, cultural power and a knowledge of state governments, and you can move elections.
Indeed, Kirk’s most obvious legacy is the gerrymandered congressional maps that this year’s elections will be conducted on. After all, the month before he died, he was using his national platform to push for maximalist gerrymanders. Indiana Republicans asked their state lawmakers to make it impossible for Democrats to win a congressional seat in the state in Kirk’s honor.
So there are some important lessons for anyone here trying to replicate his success.
- Don’t give up on your youngest influencers too easily. Treat them like prospects. Anyone who can get attention has potential. Give them chances until it’s obvious that they have to high-tail it to corporate America.
- Talk about stuff other than politics. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Anthony Bourdain-sized hole in our culture; liberal influencers should try filling it! If you’re going to limit yourself to yelling at political obsessives, then you might as well just stay on Bluesky all day.
- Focus on state-level politics. Kirk was never more powerful than when he was bulldozing state lawmakers to try and get his way. With the hollowing out of local media and nationalization of elections, they’ve never received less scrutiny, which means giving them attention has an outsized impact.
Charlie Kirk was basically evil, a dimwitted brute who’d turn America into a dictatorship if given the chance. But Ezra Klein did get one thing right about him: He was trying to win at the same political contest that we all are. Ignore the lessons of his rise at your own peril, because right-wingers have a system to generate Diaper Boys, and liberals don’t.
AROUND AMERICA
- State Rep. Josh Turek has gotten a reputation of being less exciting than some of the other Democratic Senate recruits, but I never had a dull moment while shotgunning beers.
- Meanwhile, the Iowa Republican lieutenant gubernatorial nominee is allegedly a pig rustler. Between that, the tariffs and the war in Iran, I’m beginning to think Republicans don’t actually care about farmers!t have missed.
- I’m sorry, but what is going on with Vivek Ramaswamy’s swing here? Even Jonah Ryan’s looked more convincing.
- To bring you up to speed on MIssouri’s redistricting drama
- The legislature passed a gerrymander that cracked Kansas City into three separate seats.
- The state allows you to block the implementation of a law if you get enough signatures to put it up for a referendum, which pro-democracy organizers did.
- The right-wing secretary of state refused to certify the petition, dragging his feet until the day of the primary to decide whether to let the state vote on the new map and block its implementation.
- The state Supreme Court unanimously stood up for the rule of law and said his bad faith actions couldn’t be countenanced and required the state to use the previous map.
- Republicans appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied the petition. But a single Trump-appointed judge is trying to force the state to use the new gerrymander in a different lawsuit, even though he lacks the jurisdiction to do so and misspelled “August” in his ruling.
- In other words, Republicans seem to be trying to provoke some type of constitutional crisis instead of trying to retain control of the House by doing popular things.
- A few months ago, I wrote about how Spencer Pratt and his gormless fans in right-wing media ignored the actual issues behind Los Angeles’ recovery from the January 2025 wildfires, which mostly arose from the state’s insurance market. If they actually cared about the issue, then they should be shouting from the rooftops about how Ben Allen is far superior to Jane Kim in the state insurance commissioner election. Instead, Pratt’s latest Instagram video is about Lindsay Clancy.
INTERNET STUFF I LIKED THIS WEEK
As a politics nerd and someone who’s owned multiple Mighty Mighty Bosstones CDs (from before Dicky Barrett went insane), I’m just mad that I didn’t think of this first.
BOOK CLUB
When you grow up east of the 100th meridian, you don’t have to think about water that much. That makes “Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner a critical read for anyone who didn’t get to watch “60 Minutes” immediately after football. The book thoroughly makes the case that water is the defining issue to the modern West, and that agriculture in those states is as dependent on government largesse as any Soviet collective farm. While it was written nearly 40 years ago, its lessons still apply. And as we plunge deeper into the Western water crisis, the solution is painfully obvious: Make Big Ag pay fair rates for water, and demolish the Glen Canyon Dam.
HELP US OUT
Thanks to everyone for the fantasy football advice, I hope Hooterville Junction does you all proud.
As for this week, I’m not sure if you saw, but I found Republicans’ vision for the future by looking at the laws they’re actually proposing. Because I want as many people as possible to know about this I’ll be doing videos about each issue area. I’ve already cut one on vaccines; what should I do next? Email me and tell me what you think!
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