In December 2023, I spent half a minute with Charlie Kirk in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center. Turning Point USA, the youth organization that he founded in 2012 and built into a right-wing juggernaut, was holding its annual convention in the city that the Chicago-born Kirk had made his home. Tall and dark-haired, he was moving quickly with a group of aides through a crowd of admirers. He had just exercised his considerable rhetorical talents in an opening address to 14,000 mostly young, wildly enthusiastic people from all over the country, whipping them up into a mood of ebullient, aggrieved hostility toward the various groups that he warned were trying to destroy America, telling his audience: “This is a bottom-up resistance, and it terrifies the ruling class.”

“Charlie,” I ca

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