Since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the conservative movement has fallen into infighting, with big personalities and institutions at war with one another, with extreme ideas in the mix, and a lot of uncertainty about what the right actually stands for.
So was Kirk himself actually holding conservatism together?
What unites the movement he helped build now? And what does populist conservatism actually want as we enter the waning years of the Trump presidency?
My guest today is Andrew Kolvet, who was Kirk’s close confidant. Since the assassination, he’s taken on many of Kirk’s responsibilities, including hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show.” That’s placed him in the thick of an ongoing struggle to define Kirk’s legacy and the future of American conservatism.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Andrew Kolvet, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Andrew Kolvet: Thank you. Honored to be here.
Douthat: I want to start just by doing a kind of introduction and having you explain your current role as a steward of the organizations that Charlie Kirk built. You’re part of the leadership of Turning Point USA, which is the conservative youth organization that Kirk founded. You’re also — well, you were — the executive producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which Kirk hosted, and now you are hosting.
So just tell me a little bit about how you came to be involved with Charlie Kirk in the first place.
Kolvet: Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the real reason I’m here is because we had originally scheduled Charlie to come sit down with you. But I think what you said is probably accurate. I don’t even describe myself as the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show.” Charlie is the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” and I see our job as being stewards of his mission, of his message.
But yeah, Charlie and I, we started the show in May 2019 — that was our first episode — and we just did one podcast a week.
Douthat: Which is, I should say, a lot ——
Kolvet: Yeah.
Douthat: Now that I have a podcast of my own. But you were working at Turning Point before then?
Kolvet: Yeah, I’ll go back a step. I was actually living and working in Hollywood. I had a job working with Mark Burnett of “The Voice,” “Celebrity Apprentice,” “Survivor” and “Shark Tank.” He was doing those projects, and then at some point he got into faith-based content. I was thrown into the deep end: One day we would be at “Jimmy Kimmel” or we’d be at one of the nightly shows, and then we would go to CNN and then we’d go to Fox, and then we’d be at a church.
Mark’s chief of staff at the time, a guy named Johnnie Moore, started a P.R. company, and he asked me to start it with him. I wanted to write screenplays, actually. Doing the L.A. thing, my head was still very much in that space. I wanted to make content. So I kind of refused and refused. And then he said: Why don’t you just work a couple of days a week? Help me get this thing off the ground, and then you can do your own thing.
Along the way, we started bringing on conservative clients. PragerU was one of those clients. We ended up bringing on The Blaze as a client. And at one point, Charlie came across the path of Johnnie in Southern Florida at some event. And he said: Hey, you should look into this guy. He’s young, but I think he’s got a lot of energy. You should contact him; here’s his email.
So I reached out to him, said: Hey, we’d love to talk about maybe working with you — and he basically ghosted for a while. And eventually he had some news story that he tried to handle on his own that didn’t go so well and kind of blew up, and then he called me.
I got to work with him via the agency for about a year. And then he basically said: Hey, I like you. I’ll hire you. I’ll be your first client. And I also want to start a podcast, and I want you to help me do that.
Douthat: So working for Turning Point, I think that there are a lot of people — maybe especially a lot of people in the audience for The New York Times, for instance — who have just a very hazy idea of what Turning Point is or what Charlie built it into. Is it a campus conservative group? Maybe it’s an alternative to the Young Republicans?
Can you just give a description of, in its full mid-2020s form, what Turning Point is or became?
Kolvet: Yeah, Turning Point at its core is campus activism. Because there is a felt need for conservatives on campus that are contending with, whether that be professors or other student groups, they feel isolated, they feel alone. So we have chapters on campuses all across the country. These become convening points for conservative, like-minded, curious, libertarians, whatever, to come meet, get together and discuss ideas.
So there’s programming that we push out throughout all of the campuses. There are speakers that they are then able to book. We help them become a registered student organization on campus so that they can access student body funds and security and get venues on campus. That’s the beating heart of what Turning Point is.
Now, around that, there’s a production team that’s producing a lot of content — documentaries.
We also have a social media team. Social media has obviously been a huge part of Turning Point’s growth.
Douthat: When I think about the beginning of Turning Point, I was a conservative at a predominantly liberal campus, and there have always been these various groups that are doing outreach or providing community for conservatives. My sense is that as much as that is at the heart of what Turning Point does, it has become a much bigger thing than any purely campus conservative — it has a religious dimension, and it has obviously a legally separate political organization dimension.
And I think before Charlie was assassinated, a lot of people on the outside maybe didn’t quite realize ——
Kolvet: No.
Douthat: How big a part of conservatism and conservative Christianity in America your infrastructure had become.
Kolvet: No, the infrastructure is huge. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of students across the country at these campuses. A whole social media wing, a whole reporting wing, a whole political arm, plus we had “The Charlie Kirk Show” that became this drumbeat every day.
So, yeah, it was lots of tentacles. And that’s not even to speak of the work that Charlie was doing behind the scenes. I mean, the guy was an avid texter and emailer and phone caller, and so he was also working relationships behind the scenes constantly and ironing out differences or bridging divides.
Douthat: Yeah, and I want to get into that role, because I think it’s important to understand what’s happening in conservatism since his murder. But if you don’t mind, so, you were traveling with him a lot?
Kolvet: Yeah.
Douthat: You would go to campuses with him for his tours?
Kolvet: Yeah. So I didn’t go to all the campus stops — I wasn’t there the day he was killed. And I’m truly grateful for that, actually, because I’m just so glad I didn’t see it. I saw the video in the immediate aftermath because I wanted to know if he could survive.
Douthat: Yeah, I saw the video and immediately regretted seeing it.
Kolvet: Yeah. Truly. And the whole team actively works very hard to make sure that anything we share with Erika, because she has not seen the video and she never wants to see it, and I want to make sure that I do my part to make sure she doesn’t.
I mean, I was traveling with him a lot ——
Douthat: Did it feel dangerous to you, the public work? Do you feel like you had anticipations or premonitions of what happened?
Kolvet: No. I mean, everybody plays this mind game after the fact. Did we have premonitions about it? You have these thoughts that run through your head and you kind of try and put them down because you don’t want to live in fear.
And you’re watching Charlie, who’s absolutely refusing to live in fear. And we had a full security detail around him all the time. I mean, by the time he was killed, the security system and mechanisms and the team members that we had around him were very robust, and we spent a lot of money on it as an organization. We took it very seriously.
What I became aware of after the fact was that a lot of what we had to do on these campus stops was rely on local P.D., whether that’s campus P.D. or local P.D. And so much of the, I guess, safety — or lack thereof — is contingent on the precautions that they put in place and the plan that they have in place.
And some of that is beyond the control of the — because Charlie’s security detail covers his immediate proximity. They have like a 30-yard jurisdiction, if you will. And then the perimeter and the ingress/egress is all controlled by local campus P.D. And if you want to do an event on campus, those are the rules.
So was I scared? No, genuinely, I wasn’t. Was I aware that Charlie was becoming increasingly famous? Yes. I’ll never forget, he came and visited me probably a month or month and a half before it happened, and he just got mobbed. Selfie, selfie, selfie, selfie. It was kind of this moment where it was like: You’re really famous now.
Douthat: If you don’t mind, can you just say something about what the day itself was like for you?
Kolvet: Yeah. Um.
So the day before, actually, I had booked an interview for him that he was not super pleased that I booked for him, but it was a good reason for doing it. But he was like: You know what, I’m tired now and I want to focus on the tour tomorrow, so you’re going to guest-host the show tomorrow.
So I guest-hosted the show that morning. It was uneventful. And we had a prerecord for hour two, actually — it’s probably too in the weeds. But he’s texting me on his way, and he’s going over talking points about polygamy because he is going to Utah, and why is monogamy important?
And we’re just rapid-fire — these are our thoughts on why monogamy is advanced societal tech and ——
Douthat: The killer app of Western civilization.
Kolvet: Exactly. It directs male energies in the right direction, societal building — all these things. That was about, I think, 33 minutes before he was killed.
And I’m sitting there at my desk, I’m answering a couple of calls, emails, and I got a call from a girl on our team. She was in this desperate — you could hear it in her voice. And she said: They shot Charlie. They shot Charlie.
I was like: Who shot Charlie? What? Like, what? Is he OK? Is he going to live? Like, instantly, that’s what I’m like.
And she just said: I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
I was like: How bad was it?
And she was like: Well, it looked pretty bad, but I don’t know. It was quick.
And immediately, I’m just shellshocked, completely shellshocked. And I kind of immediately thought: I have to do something. People are going to look to me for direction and answers, and I just … I got nothing. I got nothing.
So I log on to X to see if anybody’s talking about it yet. And then I see it, that it’s being just initially reported — no videos.
Next thing I know, my phone — this is the part I’ll never forget — my phone starts to just [buzz, buzz, buzz]. Just text, text, text, text, phone call, phone call, phone call. The next day, my phone literally stopped working. I had gotten so many phone calls and so many texts.
And it was, I mean, I can’t even tell you, it was thousands upon thousands of texts. Some people saying: I’m so sorry. Or like: Tell me it’s not true. Or: Is he all right? And then just a lot, a lot of reporters going: Can you confirm that Charlie Kirk has been shot? Just these heartless: This is from such-and-such outlet. And like, we’re trying to confirm ——
And I’m just thinking: This is one of my best friends in the world. Like, my brother and my business partner. What are you supposed to do in this moment when they want to know if they can confirm it, and you’re like: I don’t even know what the truth is?
Douthat: How long did it take before you knew he had died?
Kolvet: There was, I want to say, probably 30 or 40 minutes.
Douthat: OK. So, fast.
Kolvet: There was a report — yeah, I knew before Trump put the Truth Social out. I remember feeling grateful that he put that out because I had my computer up because I’m supposed to message this. And it was literally like one of those scenes in the movies where you have the first sentence and you don’t know what to say next, and I kept deleting it, kept deleting it. So I was extraordinarily grateful.
It was funny, because I got a call from some reporter. I think he was trying to take a swipe at the president for sending off that. He was like: Did he coordinate that with you? And I was like: Well, no. I’m so glad he just ripped the Band-Aid and said it.
But yeah, I had heard that he was pronounced dead in the hospital and that Erika had gotten the call, basically. Then I flew straight to Provo, just to — I just felt like I needed to go and be there. And yeah, so I was there.
Douthat: At what point did it become clear to you that you were going to, at least temporarily, not fill Charlie’s shoes, but take over part of his role? Because obviously, since then, you have been not alone, but you have been running “The Charlie Kirk Show.” You are, for the moment, the voice of Charlie Kirk in the aftermath. When did that become clear that that was something you were going to undertake?
Kolvet: Yeah, and I just want to be very clear that I don’t see myself as that. I worked with Charlie just about every day for eight years, and I feel like I have a CharlieGPT or something in the back of my head. I mean, truly, I hear ——
Douthat: As long as you don’t do the weird A.I. thing ——
Kolvet: We are not going to do the weird A.I. thing. We’ve been pitched on that multiple times. I’m just like: Guys, no, not at all.
It was in the immediate aftermath. It was the day or two after, I remember Erika looked at me and said: They will not silence my husband’s voice. You have to keep the show going.
And JD Vance had flown to Utah to pick us up, so we were all in Phoenix. And by the way, JD Vance — I can’t say enough good things about him and Usha and the way they’ve comported themselves and the support they’ve been to us and to Erika in this time. And that transfer, I can’t tell you how much that meant to us. It truly was just an amazing gesture to see Air Force Two fly down into Utah, pick up Charlie and take him back home. It was really amazing.
So we’re all in Phoenix that Friday, and we decide we’re going to host the show. And I remember, as the seconds tick down before we go live and just going: I have no idea what I’m going to say — and I still don’t really remember. I’ve never gone back and watched it.
We just knew we had to keep it going. When Erika Kirk looks at you and says: They won’t silence my husband’s voice. You have to keep speaking — you do it.
Douthat: Let’s talk a little bit about that mission and the role that he played that you already talked about having a front seat for, watching him play.
When Charlie was scheduled to come on this show, one of the things I wanted to talk to him about was my own sense that he was maybe more important to conservative politics than people realized. And some of that had to do with the incredible infrastructure of Turning Point that we’ve already been talking about. But some of it had to do with this relational dynamic that you were describing. Not just the show, but texts, phone calls, friendships and so on.
There’s a lot of talk with current divisions on the right about the idea of a William F. Buckley Jr. figure: someone who’s figuring out what is and what isn’t conservatism, and who’s in and who’s out. That’s my understanding of Buckley’s role, as someone who came on the scene late in his career but had some exposure; it was much more relational than intellectual. He sat at the center of a network of people who didn’t always like each other, but all liked him.
I felt, as a distant observer, that some of that was there with Charlie. I’ve felt it much more strongly, honestly, since his death. Because one of the things that has obviously happened is that there is just a lot of infighting in the activist-podcast-influencer space on the right.
So I’m curious, generally, what you think about that. Maybe, specifically, you could talk about the most intense version of this that I know you’ve had to deal with, which is just the incredible proliferation of conspiracy theories since his death, almost J.F.K.-level stuff.
Kolvet: Do you want me to go conspiracy theories first or ——
Douthat: Yeah, let’s start with the conspiracy theories, actually, and then get bigger from there.
Kolvet: You know, I think that you’re right, though. I think they are connected.
Obviously, people want to know what happened, and I don’t begrudge them wanting to get to the bottom of it. I also don’t begrudge them having a distrust for authority and a distrust for institutional authority and governmental authority, because we have been lied to about things. So I understand it on some level. I genuinely don’t begrudge people that.
I think it’s, in a weird way, a testament to Charlie’s impact and his importance. So I have trained myself to see the conspiracy theories as a testament to the love for Charlie.
Douthat: For people who don’t know all the conspiracy theories, you’re referencing the fact that some of the theories are basically: Obviously, someone on Charlie’s team must have set him up —
Kolvet: Sure. Or he was betrayed. And I do my best, and this is why I’m so grateful that I have faith, because I’m able to pray for people that are taking that energy and directing it at people Charlie loved, his closest friends. That gives me, I think, an anchor in a pretty tumultuous storm otherwise.
I also watched Charlie deal with so many lies about him. And I watched him over the years learn when to stay silent, when to speak into things, when to correct, when to be strategically absent on a conversation.
This is where the two subjects bleed a little bit together, where you have a lot of people that are now part of canonizing Charlie Kirk, but in life they were either not particularly friendly or they were outright hostile.
Douthat: Yeah, I think the most explicit one where there have been really clear attempts to claim his mantle and his legacy for completely different perspectives is the issue of Israel. Obviously, that is also entangled with the conspiracy theory stuff.
Kolvet: Sure.
Douthat: Because some of the most prominent conspiracy theories have involved Israel. And I have a general question about, again, I assume this was one of the issues that you guys were talking about before he was killed.
Kolvet: Yeah, of course.
Douthat: But then there’s also the specific reality that Candace Owens, who is one of the most popular podcasters in America, was Charlie’s friend. She is the leading voice for many of these theories. And so I’m curious what your view of her arc since his killing is.
Kolvet: I would say when it comes to the issue of Israel, it was certainly something that we wrestled with a lot. Charlie would go to some campuses, and like 50 to 60 percent of the questions were about Israel. For two years that was true. It wasn’t true at all campuses — it sort of depended — but on every campus there were questions about Israel. And they were questioning the U.S. relationship with Israel, funding, what about AIPAC? I mean, he got the gamut. And he got better and better at answering those questions and spent a lot of time trying to study the issue.
When Charlie started, I don’t want to say he was a normie, but he kind of took it at its face level, like, greatest ally in the Middle East. But he was questioning some of the dynamics because at the end of the day, Charlie was really against war.
He hated war. He took a lot of flak for fighting against this march toward endless blank-check funding of the Ukraine War. He was vehemently against it. He didn’t want America to be involved in killing abroad. He wanted us to focus domestically, and we saw it as a drag on the entire movement and we wanted it to stop.
And when you’re trying to have a mature adult conversation about what our relationship should be with a foreign ally, and it’s met with an emotional response, on the one hand, you understand it ——
Douthat: From the pro-Israel side?
Kolvet: From the pro-Israel side — but from both sides, candidly. You start going like: Well, how are we going to get anywhere on this issue if we can’t talk about it reasonably and we can’t disagree about basic things?
Those things were gnawing at Charlie, there’s no doubt. He was also, I think, frustrated that he would go on campus and he was defending Israel’s right to defend itself, its right to exist. And he felt like he was doing more heavy lifting for a foreign country than the foreign country was doing for itself, at least from a P.R. standpoint, in selling this. That frustrated him, too. He didn’t feel like it should be his role.
Douthat: How much of those questions do you feel actually came explicitly out of the attempt by Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement to target Charlie and put him on the spot and attack him, as opposed to being a kind of organic — I mean, not that Fuentes’s support isn’t organic in some sense ——
Kolvet: Yeah, so I think what’s interesting, and I don’t know if this is a contrarian take or not, but I think that it’s hard to know what was inspired by or organic. The ideas of Fuentes when it came to immigration and Israel, it’s like there’s nuggets of some pretty — there’s truth in some of those immigration arguments, for example. And the conservative side of the aisle was not willing to address some of those questions.
Douthat: Just give me an example of the ——
Kolvet: Well, yeah, and I would like to separate that from some of the vitriol toward Jewish people that Charlie rejected wholesale. I want to make that very clear.
But when it came to — this is actually a funny story. So, in the early days, I think Erika and Charlie were just dating at the time, we took a drive, all three of us, from, I think it was Iowa City up to Chicago. And all we did the whole car ride was debate immigration. This must have been 2018, 2019.
I was living in California at the time. I saw some of the cultural cohesion issues really up close and personal, so I was the immigration hawk in the car. Erika was probably more in agreement with me, and Charlie still had this kind of legacy Chicago boy experience, where he is like: Look at all this farmland. Chicago’s losing population. We need more immigrants.
Charlie changed abruptly on this issue, but I remember telling him: Charlie, you are wrong about this topic. This is a bigger issue than you are realizing — and Charlie just wasn’t quite on that page, because he had gone to a high school in Wheeling, Ill., where it was, I think, a white minority high school. He’d interacted, had a good experience at that high school, and didn’t see any issue with it. And Charlie started out his political journey more libertarian, anyway.
He eventually became very convinced that immigration was, I think, if not the No. 1 issue, darn near the No. 1 issue that’s animating the base, that is important to conservative voters to feel like we are able to still have our country that we grew up in, feeling like there is a sense of place, a sense of identity, a shared American identity. He became very convinced about that. And I think ——
Douthat: Do you think he was responding there to the kind of questions that he was being asked and the interactions he was having?
Kolvet: No, I think he was responding to experiences he was having outside of that. I think he was responding to political stories. I think he was watching this emergent dynamic play out on the national scene, whether that’s Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib or something like this. He was deeply upset at the lack of gratitude from personalities that you might see online. It felt like America had opened its arms, and we were not getting the love in return — more of a grievance-based politics. And in a departure from conservative ideals, further and further and further, he was worried that these cultures were bringing in socialist ideas or that they were going to scapegoat white America for some perceived ill or offense. Those types of concerns, I think, grew over time, and he began to realize that the sheer volume was unsustainable. And then: Boom, the illegal immigration crisis of the Biden years put him well over the top.
So I think it was a natural evolution. He just became more conservative, and his faith was always important to him, but I think it became even more increasingly so important to him. That began animating a lot of his political views.
Douthat: Just to look ahead for a minute, let’s take those three issues as useful for thinking about where the right is going and just try and take them one at a time. We’ll say: Israel, immigration and religion and Christianity.
Kolvet: Sure.
Douthat: And I want to use them to maybe stress-test how much cohesion there really is on the right going into the end of the Trump era.
So, start with Israel. And I noticed you didn’t answer my question about Candace Owens. I think Candace Owens is a clear example of just how much potential division there is on the right right now. Where, yes, as you were suggesting, you could see a kind of stable middle ground that reassesses the U.S.-Israel relationship in some ways. But in practice, you just have a lot of absolutism in the pro-Israel camp. And then you have an anti-Israel camp, with Owens as a prime example, that has just veered all the way very quickly into antisemitism.
So maybe start with her. What has happened to Candace Owens?
Kolvet: I don’t know is the truth. I’ve known Candace since I guess I want to say probably 2019. I think that’s when I first met Candace. And she was always very opinionated. She was always, I would say, a fiery personality. For a while she existed within the Turning Point ecosystem. And she just simply grew to the point where it made more sense for her, I think, in her eyes, to sort of do her own thing outside of the Turning Point ecosystem. She’s obviously a tremendous talent, from a pure oratory standpoint.
And you’ve seen pictures of Charlie and Candace in Israel for the Embassy moving ceremony, when they moved it to Jerusalem. So when I was interacting with her more frequently, there wasn’t a question about Israel.
Douthat: Do you or your team have interactions with her nowadays?
Kolvet: I interacted with her in the immediate aftermath of what happened with Charlie. I didn’t realize that we were going to be the subject of a daily streaming show, where our own characters were impugned or that we were somehow implicated in a betrayal conspiracy or something. I just assumed that Charlie, that she was ——
Douthat: That she was his friend?
Kolvet: Yeah. And she was obviously worried and she was traumatized, as we all were. And I had kept in contact with Candace intermittently over the years, so I thought I should call her and be her point of contact when everything happened.
She was obviously distraught, and I felt for her. I had no foresight that it was going to become what it’s become.
Douthat: Again, for people who are watching or listening who don’t know exactly, there is constant programming on her very, very popular podcast that is a kind of conspiratorial drama about the betrayal and murder of Charlie Kirk in which Israel features prominently, and people close to Charlie ——
Kolvet: Yeah. And France.
Douthat: Right, France. But you haven’t, like, called her up — someone hasn’t called her up and said: What the hell is going on?
Kolvet: I believe there’s been one contact in relatively recent days, but other than that, it became apparent that we were becoming a focus of her ire and that it was not exactly a safe relationship to proceed with.
Douthat: Do you think your audience and her audience overlap right now?
Kolvet: I think, yeah. I mean, I’m not sure how many people are really buying into some of the——
Douthat: The French theories?
Kolvet: I don’t know what people are really buying. I do think that there is — and you see this with Netflix — you see the true crime genre of things. It’s a successful genre. Women seem to especially be drawn to it. So I think there’s a big group that tune in just to see what’s coming next in this unfolding narrative.
And I will say, I will never look at a conspiracy theory the same way again. Because when you’re close to something, and you know what’s true and what’s not — you know, one of the allegations is that Bibi Netanyahu is offering Charlie all this money. That’s not true. There was never an offer. If there was, nobody on the team knows about it. Charlie would’ve had to just privately ——
Well, first of all, I don’t think Charlie would’ve ever taken anything from Israel, just as a matter of principle. Or from Ukraine or from the U.K. He just had a hard and fast no-foreign-money rule.
Douthat: Has this changed how you think about Trump era conservatism? Because, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of conspiracism on the right. And I am, by the standards of The New York Times, more sympathetic to many people about some conspiracy theories. I think there are weird things in the world that are not fully understood. I have interest in everything from Jeffrey Epstein to U.F.O.s.
Kolvet: Same. [Laughs.]
Douthat: Good. [Laughs.] We’ll do a show about those subjects. But it is also the case that there is a wildness to conspiracizing on the right, in the era of Trump, in the era of Covid, with the 2020 election and so on, that it’s just a distinctive part of conservative culture.
Do you regard that more critically, now that you’ve been on the receiving end of theories about yourself that you know not to be true?
Kolvet: Well, I’ve never been a hugely conspiratorial person in general, but I’m very sympathetic to why people are. When you think about the conservative mind-set and the conservative wiring, you realize, I think, even more why this is happening.
What we are living through is an era where conservatives have this bent to conserve our tradition, conserve our culture, conserve our heritage. But those institutions that are supposed to be doing the heavy lifting for us are not in alignment. The institutional capture by the left in America is pretty dramatic. And so I understand that that’s actually fueling a lot of this.
And then you throw in J.F.K., you throw in 9/11, you throw in Covid — all of these things that people question. They question: Are they getting the real narrative or not?
Just having been on this side of a conspiracy theory, and you just realize there’s a pattern to this, where they will allege connections that might have a grain of truth, an ounce of truth, and then they will leap to a conclusion that is so wild and you’re like: How did you put one and one together and then allege this from these two things? Or throw in a third element that wasn’t even true, and then that spun it in a whole different direction, and then all these people believe it and distrust you, and now you have this pall of doubt cast upon your person?
That’s the part that I didn’t fully appreciate, being on that side of a conspiracy theory, as opposed to being on this side of it. And you’re just like: OK, the facts have to matter somewhere in this equation.
And I think, as a conservative movement, we do have to make sure we’re fact-based. We do need to be sure that we police ourselves of some of the zanier, crazier, intellectually lazy conspiracy theories. But when it comes to U.F.O.s, when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, I think there’s some conspiracy theories that we need to dive into.
Douthat: How do you do that policing? On just the Israel question, if there’s no one who can call Candace Owens and say: What are you doing? You should stop — and she’s only one example of people who have gone all the way to conspiracy theories and to antisemitism on Israel, can the right hold together on Israel when there’s so much difference, again, going all the way to conspiracy theories?
Kolvet: Yeah, I would say that the answer is yes. I firmly believe that. Charlie believed that. And he was working, I think, on the preliminary stages of that.
I would say this is a generational moment, where you have President Trump, who is almost 80, in the White House, who is obviously fully supportive of Israel, at least ostensibly so. He is friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, but the base is becoming ——
Douthat: A complicated friendship, I would say.
Kolvet: A complicated friendship, a complicated relationship. The president has been pretty stalwart in his defense of Israel. But I think what you’re seeing is this generational divide — you could call it under 40, under 50 — which is becoming increasingly skeptical of the status quo.
Now, I can tell you from our experience with Turning Point that Charlie and I actually did a focus group with a bunch of our students when we were at the Student Action Summit. That was in July in Florida.
And we had dozens of these kids. We kept rotating them in. We wanted to get a really broad section of their feelings about Israel. And it was remarkable because a lot of them were like: Well, we like Israel. We like them more than Hamas, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have questions about: Should we be funding them? Do we have to get dragged into wars? It feels like we’re getting dog-walked into this conflict.
And I actually thought that was great because what I don’t want to see — and I think this is the through line for Israel — is you do not have to support Israel to belong to the team, at least in a traditional historical sense. I don’t want to see a conservative movement like that. I’m an American. I’m born in this country. My kids are going to be raised in this country. I’m going to die here. They’re probably going to die here. I care about America. I mean, God bless Israel; I want them to succeed, too. I just want to make sure we’re taking care of home base first.
And I totally personally get that impulse. As I said, the animal passions of the America First movement have been unleashed. President Trump perhaps didn’t foresee or could not foresee all that that would entail, but this is a central pillar of this. And I think Israel has become a symbolic battle about: What does “America First” really mean?
Douthat: Immigration seems like a different case. On Israel, you have these divisions within the right. You also have them within the left. And both coalitions are trying to find a stable center.
On immigration, it seems to me you have tremendous unity on the right right now. And that the arc you described earlier of Charlie going from being moderately pro-immigration to being very anti-immigration is just a general arc for the conservative base. If you ask me: What does the populist right believe in? What does MAGA believe in right now? It’d be hard to do any better than immigration restriction as a unifying issue.
At the same time, it’s also a place where the larger country, including lots of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024, are not all the way where you are or where Charlie is. And there’s a lot of people who had the suburban high school experience that Charlie had that you described, who have incredibly favorable experiences of immigrants and immigration.
And there’s a lot of people who were alienated by the Biden immigration wave, but who also look at the right right now, and look at deportations to a Salvadoran prison and look at ICE agents wearing masks, and they’re like: Well, I want deportations, but I’m not sure that I want that.
And you yourself just said: Well, in being anti-immigration, there are some things Nick Fuentes says that I think are true.
There’s a lot of Americans, it seems like, who are sympathetic to the Republican Party, who could be turned off by mass deportations for 20 years, everyone has to go back kind of conservatism. What do you think about that?
Kolvet: Yeah. Just to clarify what I was saying, what Fuentes tapped into, which I do believe that there is truth in — and we saw this for years — is that you have a whole generation, especially of young men, but of young women, too, that felt betrayed, alienated, discarded, villainized by the establishment class. And they were told that they were the problem just for being born in America. Maybe they had white skin, maybe they had brown or black skin, but they were told that they were toxic. They were told that they were some sort of an issue.
And when you do that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, you are going to create a whole class of people that are probably going to be reactionary for something that they were told they were supposed to get, but got screwed out of by the incumbent financial system or by the incumbent political class. That’s an energy that, once you unleash it, once you seed the ground for the base elements of that, there will be a reckoning. And that is a truth, regardless of who talks about it, that you have to, as an American, come to grips with.
Now, Charlie’s mission was to say: Hey, before us are two roads. You can either go grievance politics, socialism, free stuff populism, Mangione-ism, Mamdani-ism, or you can go MAGA. Now, you might not like MAGA on its face. You might think it’s mean or cruel or bad P.R. or whatever, but at least you can live with it. It’s going to be a tough pill to swallow and stuff. There’s national populism. There’s going to be some medicine that we all have to take here, but at least on this road, there’s still going to be an American ——
Douthat: What is the tough — are we talking about ——
Kolvet: Well, I’m getting to immigration.
Douthat: But when you say those two roads, are you directing that to the alienated young man or to the squishy moderate?
Kolvet: Probably both. I think MAGA on its face is a tough pill for some to swallow. That would maybe be young people. So I’m putting myself back into that 2022-23 mind-set. Joe Biden in 2020, there was a lot of ink spilled about how he did with the youth vote and how he did so well.
So we had a tough mission going into 2024, and Charlie had a tough mission. How do you sell this populist conservatism of Trump to a generation that seems to be repelled by either the energy or the branding or Trump himself?
What we started seeing, though, was that they had been so disenchanted with the liberal establishment and the economic reality that they were facing — the malaise, everybody could feel it — that when you would start forcefully presenting the conservative worldview on these campuses, they started flocking.
But I think for a long time it felt like this was going to be tough. How do you sell being accountable for your own actions? And the fact that we have to deport people that are here illegally, and you’re going to confront all the nasty headlines and the sob stories from the news media?
But here’s my one pushback to the premise of the question: I think that this has been going on for so long, and the transformation of the country and in our cities and basic social services have been so dramatic, that this is such a wildly popular position, and I think it goes beyond the base. And you saw how much immigration played into Trump regaining the White House.
So I think people underestimate the issue of immigration. I understand that there are differences of opinions about the raids or who we should be deporting.
Douthat: Well, let me just speak for the squishes for a second, because it seems to me that when you’re talking about the hard sell of MAGA to different groups, there’s the group of alienated — it’s not all young men, but we’ll just call them alienated young men — who have the experience that you’re describing, and those are the people who are getting pulled to more and more hard-core positions, and potentially all the way to where Fuentes is.
So to those people, Charlie a year ago, and now you are in the position of saying: OK, how do we keep them from becoming white nationalists, but we have to be sufficiently hard-core that they feel like they’ll stay on our side?
But then there’s another group of people who were not super conservative but were totally alienated by the Biden economy and by the Biden immigration wave and who voted for Trump — maybe they voted Republican for the first time. That group included a lot of recent immigrants, second-generation immigrants, a lot of Hispanic voters. But those voters are never going to be hard-core anti-immigration voters, I don’t think.
And it just seems — I feel like it’s not just your dilemma, but it is your dilemma in part — that you’re trying to simultaneously say: Look, we’re really hard-core on immigration. We’re going to do all the things that the alienated young man who feels like he’s lost the future of his country wants us to do — but in doing some of those things, you end up alienating the moderate conservative who you got in 2024.
Kolvet: I don’t know that that’s true. I just don’t know that I agree with that. I actually think ——
Douthat: OK. I could be wrong. It has happened.
Kolvet: Yeah, you know, we saw that dynamic play out in 2016 with “build the wall” and the Never Trump movement. People consistently underestimate this issue. People have a memory of the way the world used to feel when they were a kid or when they were going to school, and they see how it’s changed.
Now, some of that change can be OK, and some immigration certainly can be OK. As a country we’ve historically scaled up or scaled down, or changed the way we formulate it. I think that there has not been nearly enough reform in this area, especially with legal immigration, H-1Bs — this is still a wildly and dramatically animating issue.
And I think even with moderates that maybe don’t want to tell a pollster that they don’t like it, but they don’t like it, OK? People want to feel familiar in their communities. They want to live near people that they share values with. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. So many times we turn this into “you’re a xenophobe” or “you’re a racist, you’re a bigot.” No; this is as old as time. People like to be in a community that they feel safe in, where they feel like they know their neighbors. This is just the way people tend to congregate.
So I would say I think you’re underestimating. And then when it comes to new immigrants, you’re not giving immigrant communities enough credit for understanding the downside of unfettered mass migration.
Again, I would say this is an issue that has been underestimated time and time again, and it will consistently deliver for the conservative movement.
Douthat: What else is conservatism — MAGA conservatism, Turning Point conservatism — for right now? Because we’ve entered a phase of the Trump administration where there’s no big legislative agenda in Congress, and I think there’s clear unity on immigration on the right, clear divisions on Israel, and I’m just uncertain what the other animating issues are that will shape the contest to succeed Trump and everything after that.
And you’re closer than I am to those voters. What does the populist right want in 2026, 2028 and beyond?
Kolvet: Besides immigration?
Douthat: Setting aside immigration and the Israel debate.
Kolvet: Affordability is huge. And I think what we need to be for — and you’ve seen this, at least the beginnings of this — is an economic moonshot, if you will, to make housing more affordable.
I think housing is the crux. I think people owning their own homes, feeling like they have a stake in this economy, in this country — I mean, if you want to have a nation of renters, then those people are going to burn down the country real fast when things go south. And so a bulwark against radicalization and revolution is letting people own the roof over their head. It’s a place to build a family to get married.
So I mean, I agree with Charlie. He and I worked these ideas out together before he died, and it’s like: Hey, we need five million, 10 million new homes. We need to make sure that those are not being bought by institutional money or by foreign buyers. We should be considering a lot of creative ideas.
Now, I’m not a policy wonk, so I’ll let the experts work this out, but maybe they get to write off the first $50,000 of their mortgage. Maybe they get special interest rates, or whatever the idea is. Let’s throw ——
Douthat: The 50-year mortgage?
Kolvet: No, OK, the 50-year mortgage was potentially a bit of a mixed bag. You know what’s funny? OK. I will tell you ——
Douthat: It’s OK. You can just say it’s a terrible idea.
Kolvet: It’s probably a very terrible idea.
Douthat: President Trump is not watching. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Maybe he is.
Kolvet: No, no, no, listen. So the reason I hesitate — my instinct was that it was a terrible idea. Then we put it out to the audience and asked them what they thought. And people are smart. A lot of our audience was like: Hey, listen, you don’t want to be a debt slave to this. The median first-time home buyer’s 40 years old. Fifty-year mortgage, you’re 90 by the time you pay that off.
But a lot of people were saying: Well, if that gets you in the door, your house appreciates in value. You could refinance — people were already getting creative, and they were seeing it as a potential tool that they could take advantage of.
So I just want to say, on its face, it felt like lipstick on a pig. But our audience was sort of split on it.
Douthat: So you just said: I’m not a wonk. I want to encourage you to wonk out.
Kolvet: Wonk — OK.
Douthat: Just take this issue as an example. And again, this connects to some of these larger dynamics on the right in the age of Trump. You mentioned two ideas: We need to build a lot more homes, and we need to make sure that they aren’t bought up by Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, foreign investors and so on. It seems to me that when I look around the right, there’s a lot more enthusiasm for that second point.
Like when I go on social media and someone’s like: Oh, bad news, this hedge fund is buying up real estate — that gets tons of engagement. And there’s less engagement if someone says: Here’s my legislative plan to remove regulatory impediments.
But I feel like that’s often the dynamic that the right gets trapped in, where you have all this energy around mistrust of institutions, but in the end, if you want more homes in America, the most important thing is figuring out how you build more of them. Right?
Kolvet: Sure. Yeah.
Douthat: I’m not asking you for the 10-point plan. The problem with the 50-year mortgage, like a lot of these ideas, is you’re subsidizing demand. But the right and the left — everybody — we need supply.
Kolvet: Yeah, we need supply. You need to address the core affordability issues and structural problems — 100 percent.
And I mean, I’m not trying to be coy or not answer the question. I genuinely believe that there are people who are steeped in this, on the regulatory side — what it takes to build a home, what it takes to clear the land, what it takes to approve the permits and all that stuff — who are far more versed in this.
Douthat: Some people from your home state of Nevada, I think, probably have some strong views on this.
Kolvet: Oh, yes. What’s funny about this is I am a conservationist by heart. Being a Western boy and watching cities expand into beautiful virgin land has always been a struggle for me, actually. But I do think that we do need to — it’s simply too important.
Douthat: All right, let’s end with faith and religion and Christianity. Charlie Kirk was a political activist, a political brawler, to some extent — somebody who liked who liked to fight. He was also increasingly, as he got older, a more serious Christian.
I feel like, to the extent that there is a kind of inevitable curation and presentation of a life in the aftermath of an assassination, that the presentation of Charlie’s life has leaned on the religious element. I’m curious if you think it’s good if Charlie Kirk is remembered more as an evangelist for Christianity — and not just Christianity, but someone who was trying to be a model of fatherhood and religious commitment and family commitment to young men. Is that a more important part of his legacy than politics?
Kolvet: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it’s not even a question, actually.
He was asked not long before he was killed, and you could say before he was martyred — which I do count him as an American martyr, as a Christian martyr — that he wanted to be remembered for his courage, for his faith. And as the years went on, it was very clear to me just how much more pronounced that became, even as he would talk about politics.
Charlie believed that America was fundamentally founded as a Christian nation for Christians, providentially guided by the hand of God to become the greatest nation in the history of the world, and that if we lost our Christian heritage, we would lose our identity. We would lose the very thing that made us special, that made America so great.
And Charlie and I bonded originally over our shared Christian faith. That was really one of the things that brought us together. And it’s one of those things that I think will guard you from antisemitism. It will guard your heart against the radicalization and the excesses that you see in these corners of the internet.
And I think that’s why, when you asked me earlier in this conversation: Were you afraid? And I said: Well, no, because Charlie wasn’t afraid — and he wasn’t afraid because of his faith.
I think he had realized that his life was not his own, and he had come to terms with that. He had come to terms with the fact that God was going to use him however he was going to use him.
Douthat: One important element of Christian culture and Christian heritage is the idea of loving your enemies. It goes all the way back to the Gospels. And there was a now famous moment at Charlie’s memorial where Erika — sorry, I have to ask you about it, and I think it’s a good place to end — his wife, one of the leaders of the movement that he built, got up and talked about forgiveness and forgiving Charlie’s killer. Forgiving your enemies, loving your enemies.
And then the president of the United States, also a friend of Charlie’s, a man on whose behalf Charlie did so much work, got up and said — and it was a joke, but it was not a joke, as with many things, Trump ——
Kolvet: We brought it back up at the Medal of Freedom ceremony as well.
Douthat: Right, that Erika can talk me into it. But he said: I’m sorry, I can’t help. I hate my enemies.
I feel like that duality is very obviously on display in conservative politics, where you have a conservatism and a populism that is informed by Christianity in a lot of ways. But at the same time, I think it’s hard to deny that the Trumpian attitude is a huge part of right-wing politics. The idea that you’ve got to know what time it is, you’ve got to fight your enemies, you can’t give them an inch.
Would you agree — and you could disagree — that conservative politics going forward, through the end of Trump and after, could use a little more of the Erika Kirk spirit? And if you agree, how do you do that?
Kolvet: Well, if you’re asking: Do I endorse a little bit more of Erika Kirk’s spirit? Of course I do.
Douthat: Good, good. OK. I thought that would be an easy lift. But what does that mean when you’re not just preaching the Gospel and talking about Jesus’ love, but when you are doing politics with your fellow citizens who you end up having really good reasons — or feel like you have really good reasons — to treat as an enemy?
Kolvet: I mean, I don’t even love using the word “enemy” when it comes to any political setting. Some people certainly do. I find myself using words like “my political foes” or whatever more often.
Douthat: My misguided friends and neighbors.
Kolvet: [Chuckles.] Yes. Sometimes, extraordinarily so.
I would say, I think there’s a tendency in the modern media landscape, especially when you’re talking about legacy media — and immigration’s a good example of this — where they’ll turn the volume all the way up for what I call a sob story of somebody that’s in the country illegally, getting deported. And they will turn the volume all the way down on the sob story, which is actually a real tragedy, of a family that lost somebody to fentanyl, or that was trafficked, or that was hit by a drunk driver that shouldn’t have been in the country. Whatever the story was, you will see the volume turned all the way up in the legacy press on the one and all the way down on the other.
My counter to that is that loving my neighbor and loving my community means that I want to, sometimes I’m going to be forced to do the hard thing on immigration, or I’m going to be forced to do the hard thing on law and order issues, because actually, that’s what love looks like. Love does not look like simply being sympathetic and saying: It’s no big deal. We’re going to let this pass all the time.
Love can look hard sometimes. And it’s basically saying: I love you enough that I’m not going to let you drink the toilet water, America.
Douthat: OK. But that’s ——
Kolvet: I’m going to give you a glass of pure water.
Douthat: But that’s not quite what I want to press you on. So let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that there are a lot of potentially harsh-seeming conservative policies ——
Kolvet: Like what?
Douthat: Like deportation, that can be undertaken in a spirit of love for your country and do not necessarily conflict with Christianity.
I think that’s true. I don’t think that Christianity forbids deportation. I don’t think it forbids various forms of tough punishments for lawbreaking — any of those kinds of things. But there’s also a question of the spirit in which you were doing those things, and this is where I think the Erika Kirk-President Trump contrast is sharp.
That if you are deporting someone who is sympathetic, you can do so while saying: This is the law and we have to enforce our borders, but I understand that I’m doing something that is going to cause hardship, and I want to be sympathetic to what people are going through.
Or you can say: Every immigrant here is an invader.
Kolvet: I get what you’re driving at.
Douthat: And if you read the social media accounts of certain federal agencies in the age of Trump, I don’t get a cascading spirit of Christian love coming from them. And I think that’s all downstream of Trump himself, who I would say, I think he believes in God in some way, but I don’t think that he is animated by the truest spirit of Christianity.
So I guess what I want to know is not whether it is Christian to deport people, but can you have conservative policies that are offered with more love and fellow feeling than they’re being offered right now?
Kolvet: I mean, I think you said it, that a lot of this comes straight from the top, that a lot of this flows downhill from Trump — his persona, his imprint on the conservative movement more broadly.
This all reminds me, by the way, of the conversation that people, especially in the faith community, were having in 2016, 2017, of what to do with President Trump — the evangelical coalition that was around him. Can we support this man who has lived a very worldly lifestyle?
And I think that there was a recognition by most, certainly not all, but I would think more broadly — I mean, you look at the voting records of evangelicals and Catholics, even — I know you’re Catholic, right?
Douthat: Yes, most days. On a good day.
Kolvet: For a second there, I was like Lutheran? No.
Douthat: Never.
Kolvet: Yeah. Okay.
Douthat: We welcome all Lutheran listeners.
Kolvet: You have to acknowledge that old — it’s a cliché now, but “we’re voting for a president, not a pastor” kind of thing. And you also have to acknowledge that there are critiques, especially for Big Eva, as we call it — big evangelicalism — and the megachurches. And there is a very ample reason to believe that the majority of the evangelical movement, at least within the organized church circles, became soft, became limp-wristed, weak, feminized. And Trump was this vehicle by which there was sort of a handshake deal where he was injecting a little swagger, a little masculine energy into church circles that had lost their backbone.
Now the question then becomes, you were asking: Could we do with a little bit more of the Erika Kirk spirit? And I would say: Yeah, I would agree with that. I would concede that point to you, that sometimes, even for me, when I see some of the social media posts, I’m like: Eh, that’s a little too much.
And then sometimes I’m like, I love that we’re just unapologetic about the fact that we’re reinstituting law and order.
So I see it from both sides ——
Douthat: There’s a lot of different social media posts out there.
Kolvet: Yeah, there’s a lot. So I’m not going to say all of them are bad or all of them are good, but I would say that we needed to find our backbone, I think, as a Christian movement in this country and sort of reassert ourselves politically, which is why T.P.U.S.A. Faith was founded.
And it was founded in Covid, because Charlie never believed that the church was just going to roll over and take it, and they were going to tell them they couldn’t meet and they couldn’t worship together? He didn’t think that that stood a chance of holding up.
And then it kind of did, because when you get into a pastoral role, there are all these forces that come upon you to go halfway, to say it a little softer, to go, I would say, a little more feminized.
And Charlie didn’t like that. He wanted everybody to be able to come together, get encouraged, get courage and to go back out and take that around and say: Hey, we’re not going to cede the public square anymore.
Douthat: But now, three years to go of Donald Trump, as whatever happens, a continuing shaping influence on the right. You work with Erika Kirk. Maybe a little more feminized Christianity wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world?
Kolvet: Well, I believe the church has become overly feminized. I think Erika would agree with me on that. And she’s even said: No, Turning Point is not going to become feminized.
Now, that being said, to the extent that Christian — like, core Christian — spirit and doctrine and biblical principles are reflected in our government, I’m all for it. And certainly I could concede that I would have a more conciliatory tone at times than our president. And sometimes I’m glad he showed me the way and said it like he said it.
So, like all good Christian execution of policies goes, you’ve got to take prudence, and it’s case by case. But certainly, I think once the era of Trump is past us — Trump is singular. This moment will not last forever.
Douthat: All right. Andrew Kolvet, thank you so much for joining me.
Kolvet: Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Andrea Betanzos and Raina Raskin. Associate produced by Emma Kehlbeck. Edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker and Sophia Lanman. Cinematography by Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Julian Hackney. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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