Two days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, his signature podcast was back on the air. To honor Kirk’s memory, four of his closest colleagues hosted an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. They gathered inside his old studio at Turning Point USA’s headquarters, keeping an empty chair for Kirk. Directly to the right sat Jack Posobiec, a conservative influencer. “I know the seat looks empty, but it’s not,” Posobiec said. “Because in a way, Charlie is the only thing we’re all thinking about right now.”
Unlike the other three co-hosts, Posobiec’s primary job wasn’t working for Kirk. Nonetheless, he has become one of the most prominent faces of TPUSA since Kirk’s death. He has regularly spoken at the influential right-wing organization’s events, appeared on various TPUSA podcasts, and occasionally filled in as a guest host for Kirk’s show. He has done high-profile media hits with CNN and CBS News to talk about his late friend, and he delivered remarks at Kirk’s funeral—joining a list of speakers that included President Donald Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and several Cabinet members.
Posobiec, who declined to comment for this story, has long been a star in the world of MAGA. He has 3.2 million followers on X, where his podcast, Human Events Daily, regularly accrues more than 100,000 views. In a 2023 Semafor poll, dozens of Republican strategists most commonly named Posobiec as the influencer with the biggest pull among the party base.
Posobiec and Kirk have many differences, Posobiec’s friends and colleagues emphasized to me. “Nobody can replace Charlie,” Raheem Kassam, the founder of The National Pulse, a right-wing media site, told me. The late TPUSA founder ran a sprawling organization with its tentacles in voter-registration efforts, campus events, fundraising, and media. He also presented himself as a level-headed person who was willing to calmly engage with his political opponents. “Charlie was trying to be a uniter,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, told me. “Jack is totally different.” Posobiec’s approach to politics is much more adversarial.
Even so, Posobiec is better positioned than anyone else to fill at least some of the void Kirk has left as one of the most important figures on the contemporary right. He shares one of Kirk’s biggest strengths: His ability to simultaneously reach both the MAGA base and the most prominent Republicans in Washington. “If there ever was a natural inheritor,” to Kirk in this respect, Kassam conceded, “Jack has that ability.”
Earlier this month, Posobiec attended Trump’s antifa roundtable, gathering in the White House alongside top administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel. In June, Posobiec posted a photo of himself in the Oval Office next to Trump and Vance. Even if no one can replace Kirk, Posobiec, with his large audience and his deep connections, is now more indispensable on the right than ever before.
I first came across Posobiec in 2017, when he dashed by me while I was covering a Democratic press conference about net neutrality on the Capitol lawn. Posobiec passed out flyers and asked the senators holding the event why they supported “satanic porn.” What did demonic erotica have to do with regulating internet-service providers? He never clearly explained. If you had told me then that Posobiec would become one of the most important influencers on the right, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Posobiec started his path to political commentary around 2015, while running a Game of Thrones fan blog. He wrote “The Lady and the Trump,” a satirical Game of Thrones story in which the then–presidential candidate falls in love with Sansa, a teenage character in the show. He was 30 years old at the time and was working as an intelligence officer for the Navy Reserve. Posobiec’s early techniques seemed incompatible with establishing a serious political career. In 2016, he went to Comet Ping Pong—the pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that conspiracy theorists had decided was ground zero for a supposed pedophile ring being run by liberal elites—and livestreamed his amateur investigation. In doing so, he helped mainstream Pizzagate: On a Sunday afternoon, less than a month later, a gunman fired multiple shots inside Comet Ping Pong while families gathered there for lunch.
In 2017, a month before I saw him on the Capitol lawn, Posobiec and fellow right-wing stunt artist Laura Loomer interrupted a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park to protest its references to Trump. While Posobiec was trolling the libs, Kirk, just 24 years old at the time, was busy raising millions of dollars to grow TPUSA into a powerful organization on the right.
During the early Trump years, Posobiec also flirted with the far-right fringe. At least twice in 2016, he posted references to 1488, a number popular among neo-Nazis. (It combines the number of words in a slogan about preserving a white future—14—and the position of h in the alphabet, a reference to “Heil Hitler.”) He has also repeatedly spread hoaxes. In 2017, Posobiec circulated a post that falsely claimed that CNN had published and then deleted an article defending Bill Maher’s use of an anti-Black slur. In 2020, Posobiec tweeted: “2 crates filled with pipe bombs discovered near Korean War Memorial in DC after suspects spotted in bushes. Federal assets in pursuit.” None of this was true.
Posobiec no longer pulls the stunts that he used to. In the past several years, he’s slid into a more conventional influencer role, both podcasting and frequently posting on X. (Bannon takes credit for this. In 2020, he “chewed his ass out” and told Posobiec that he was “too valuable” to be wasting his time with goofy escapades, Bannon told me.)
But his penchant for the extreme hasn’t gone away. Last year, he co-wrote Unhumans, a book in which he contends that progressives are subhuman and appears to defend Augusto Pinochet—the Chilean dictator who killed dissidents by dropping them out of helicopters. “Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism,” writes Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec. The book is dedicated “to the memory of those who have fought communism.” (Vance glowingly blurbed Unhumans on its book jacket.) Last October, he boosted false claims that then–vice presidential candidate Tim Walz had sexually abused one of his former students. At a TPUSA event in July, he pushed the idea that it’s “wrong” to think that “if you just hand someone a piece of paper, that makes them American.” He focused in particular on Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayoral candidate who was naturalized as a citizen in 2018. “Is Zohran Mamdani an American like we are?” he yelled to the crowd. “No, he’s absolutely not!”
Posobiec maintains close relationships with many people in the Trump administration. I spoke with half a dozen of his friends and colleagues, who all mentioned his connections. In February, Posobiec joined the press corps with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine and was invited as press on a diplomatic trip with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to Germany. Donald Trump Jr. described Posobiec to me, in a statement via a spokesperson, as “one of the most influential media voices in the America First movement today.”
During a speech last March that Posobiec attended, Vance named “Jack P.” as one of his “good friends” in the crowd. Kassam told me that Posobiec has “almost immediate access to anybody he wants in the White House. He can probably walk into Mar-a-Lago whenever he wants.” Bannon and Kassam both told me that Posobiec has relationships with Peter Navarro, White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing, and Sergio Gor, the ambassador to India. (Until earlier this month, Gor was the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.)
Anna Kelly, a deputy White House press secretary, declined to comment on Posobiec’s ties to Navarro and Gor. “He has been invited to cover numerous White House events due to his status as a trusted voice within the MAGA movement and reach that dwarfs that of The Atlantic and others,” she said in an email. A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.
In large part, Posobiec has been able to ingratiate himself among the most powerful people in Washington for a simple reason: He is nice—at least to conservatives and especially to Trump. “Jack’s a great guy,” Libby Emmons, the editor in chief of the publication Human Events, the media outlet he podcasts for, told me. “He’s a good family man. He’s a good friend. He’s trustworthy. He makes friends easily.” (Today, Human Events agreed to the Pentagon’s media restrictions and joined its “new media” press corps.) Others I spoke with offered similar explanations for his deep connections. “Everybody loves him. There’s a genuineness to him,” Lucian Wintrich, a right-wing media personality and friend of Posobiec’s, told me.
I couldn’t help but think of the similarities with Kirk, who was also widely beloved in MAGA circles. This is frequently not how things work on the right. Loomer—a provocateur and media figure with influence over Trump—is notorious for picking intra-party fights. Tucker Carlson has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration and doesn’t shy away from attacking other prominent influencers. (Carlson has said that Loomer is “the world’s creepiest human”; Loomer has called him “Tucker Qatarlson.”) Meanwhile, Posobiec generally doesn’t get mired in MAGA squabbles and focuses his ire on the left.
There are other reasons for how Posobiec has become so well-connected. He is seen as an expert on China by his inner circle—almost everyone I spoke with cited his ability to speak Mandarin. Tom Sauer, a figure on the right who served in the Navy with Posobiec, told me that his “time in the Pacific” has given him a unique knowledge of geopolitical affairs. Both Sauer and Bannon said that Posobiec was in consideration for a position at the National Security Council earlier this year. (The White House declined to comment on whether Posobiec was considered for an NSC job.)
And with his large following, Posobiec is seen by many on the right as both a bellwether for what the base cares about and a way to reach that base. “People ask his opinion,” Bannon said. “They know that if they have to drive a message, Jack has a huge reach.” Last month, Posobiec targeted Mark Bray, a Rutgers historian, calling him a “domestic terrorist professor” on X. Because Bray studies anti-fascist movements, Posobiec accused him of belonging to antifa. “The day after the Posobiec tweet, I received a very direct death threat saying that someone was going to kill me in front of my students,” Bray told Wired. Fearing for the safety of his family, Bray decided to leave the United States and move to Spain.
Posobiec is sufficiently unctuous to the correct people, he espouses the correct ideological positions to align himself with the administration, he triggers the libs, and he can rally the base. These are the things that matter to Trump, and Posobiec excels at them—as did Kirk. Each man has had a gift at influencing. And they both illustrate the paradox of what it means to be influential in MAGA world. Kirk’s and Posobiec’s nativist perspectives have strengthened the purchase of those ideas in the administration, but the two were ultimately advocating for things Trump had already said he wanted—closed borders, fewer migrants, economic nationalism. Posobiec is now among the most important figures in MAGA, but MAGA has always started and ended with Trump.
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