Charlie Kirk and a Failed Culture War
2026, fresh and bloody
Kirkus calls my new novel, Colossus, “a canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.” You should preorder it now. You won’t regret it.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk was, for a large swath of the right, supposed to be epoch-defining. Though Kirk, as popular as he was among conservatives, never enjoyed great national fame, Donald Trump and the Republican Party aimed, in the weeks after his death, to make his name synonymous with any slain politician or civil rights hero of old. Republicans were wise enough not to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. directly, but in their furious broadsides against anyone who dared question Kirk’s legacy—he had a long history of vicious rhetoric, including attacks on King’s record—they were clear enough in their intentions: sanctify Kirk and chill any criticism of his politics. J.D. Vance, among several other prominent Republicans, cheered on the firing of anyone who spoke ill of Kirk, and the federal pressure was enough to get Jimmy Kimmel suspended from his late night show. There was a brief period, in September and October 2025, that slightly echoed the hysteria following the September 11th attacks, when jingoism surged and the nation, collectively, brayed for war. Kirk’s death, it seemed, could be a pretext to both suppress speech and force-feed a new idol onto the American public.
Three months later, it’s clear the Republicans have lost that culture war. Kirk has not been forgotten, exactly, but he’s been buried under too many successive news cycles to matter. Conservatives might invoke his memory, but few others do. He seems to live on, mostly, as yet another internet meme. Scroll Instagram and TikTok for a few minutes, and you’ll find endless parodies of the “I am Charlie Kirk” song and jokes about his widow, Erika, having an affair with Vance. There is no reverence on the internet. Self-seriousness, for better or for worse, cannot survive, and the Trump regime can do little but look on with a sense of disappointment—or trick themselves, as they are wont to do, into believing they are still winning. I had a similar thought as the horrific news out of Minneapolis rocketed across the country, and I went to cover a press conference Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, held at the World Trade Center on Wednesday. An ICE agent shot an unarmed woman who appeared to be trying to drive away from him. Even if you believe otherwise—if you think the woman was attempting to run him over, or the agent credibly feared for his life—you can mourn the death of the woman, Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three. Human decency—and the Christianity that Republican elites purport to subscribe—would tell you this.
Instead, Noem has called Good a domestic terrorist, Vance has said the shooting was a “tragedy of her own making,” and conservative activists like Jack Posobiec have likened Good to the alien insects from Starship Troopers. It’s all vile, and if you spend enough time on Elon Musk’s X you are confronted with MAGA pundit after MAGA pundit insisting that this woman deserved to die. These were the same sort of characters who wept crocodile tears when a bullet split open Charlie Kirk’s neck; they berated any liberal who dared to question his greatness. They said the Democrats were the dark party, the party of death, and they would uphold morality from here on out. The Democrats have their own problems, but that was plainly not true.
What Trump and his MAGA acolytes hope to do is make this all popular. You’ve got to like ICE. Successful propaganda could accomplish this. Make the ICE agent the new American freedom fighter. There’s time, in theory, make that nightmare fully real. Americans elected Trump and they wanted a strong border. Now he’s acting—promises made, promised kept. Except ICE, according to a recent poll, has fallen from a +16 to -14 net approval rating in a single year. This is extraordinary. It’s not as if the police or the military are now uniformly unpopular. Even with Trump in charge, Americans are going to respect their troops. Police killings haven’t convinced the average American voter to want to defund or abolish their municipal police force. But it’s not political suicide, in 2026 America, to campaign on abolishing ICE. In fact, given how much these hastily-trained agents have menaced towns and cities over the last year, it might be something approaching a mainstream position. Beyond sowing chaos, what’s the point of all this? Who actually voted for it? The many Spanish-speaking Americans who voted for Trump are certainly have regrets.
The plummeting of ICE’s reputation is a reminder that, in fact, MAGA cannot engineer the culture they want. They can’t, by fiat, make Americans think like them. Vance’s manic posts into the X echo chamber aren’t persuasive. Trump is plenty dangerous, but Trump is not winning.
