Andrew Kolvet on Charlie Kirk's Assassination, Candace Owens Conspiracy Theories, and the Future of Conservative Movement

What has happened

to Candace Owens? You know, 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. I had no foresight that it

was going to become what it’s become. Since Charlie Kirk

was assassinated, the conservative movement

has fallen into infighting with big personalities

at war with one another. "I truly believe

that the deep state is involved in

this assassination and multiple states

are involved." "I think that what Candace

Owens is doing right now is evil." And with a lot of

uncertainty about what the future of the

right actually holds. "If Lindsey

Graham wins, it will be the most

dispiriting thing to happen in American politics

in a very, very long time." So, was Charlie Kirk himself actually holding the right together? What unites the

movement he helped build now? And what does populist

conservatism actually want going forward? My guest today is

Andrew Kolvet, who was Charlie Kirk’s

close confidant. Since the assassination, he’s taken on many of his

friend's responsibilities, including hosting "The Charlie

Kirk Show." That’s placed him in the thick of a struggle

to define Kirk’s own legacy and the future of the right. Andrew Kolvet, welcome

to Interesting Times. Thank you. Honored to be here. So 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. And 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. Yeah, and 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 we

started the show in 2019. May 2019 was our

first episode, and we just did

one podcast a week— Which is I should

say, a lot, I can say, now that I have a podcast of my own. But you were working at

Turning Point before then? Yeah, I’ll go back a step. So I was actually living

and working in Hollywood, and I had a job working with

Mark Burnett of "The Voice," "Celebrity Apprentice." "Survivor," "Shark Tank." So he was doing

those projects. And then at some point, he

got into faith-based content. I was thrown into the deep

end of, one day we would be at Jimmy Kimmel or we’d be

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, a named

Johnnie Moore at the time, started a P.R. company, asked

me to start it with him. I wanted to write screenplays,

doing the L.A. thing. My head was still very

much in that space, and I wanted to make content. And so I kind of refused. Kind of refused. And then he said, "Why don’t

you just work a couple days a week, help me get this

thing off the ground, and then you can

do your own thing?" And along the way,

we started bringing on conservative clients,

so ended up— 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 said, "Hey, you should look into this guy. He’s young, but I think

he’s got a lot of energy. You should contact. Here’s his email." So I reached out

to him, said, "Hey, we’d love to talk about

maybe working with you." 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 blew up. And then he called

me, 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." 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 that it’s, "Well, it’s a campus

conservative group. Maybe it’s an alternative

to the young Republicans." Can you just give a

description of what in its full mid-2020s form Turning

Point is or became? Yeah, Turning Point at its core is

this campus activism, right? Because there is a felt need,

and I think a very real need for conservatives

on campus that are contending with

whether that be professors or other student groups,

they feel isolated, they feel alone. And so we have

chapters on campuses all across the country. And these become

convening points for conservative 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, get venues on campus. So that’s the beating heart

of what Turning Point is now around that there is, there’s

a productions 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. And so this was

again, I think when I think about the

beginning of Turning Point, I was a conservative in a

predominantly liberal campus. There have always been

these various groups that are doing

outreach or providing community for conservatives. And my sense is that as much

as that is the heart of what Turning Point does. It has become a much bigger

thing than any purely campus conservative that it has. It has a religious dimension. It has obviously

a legally separate political organization

dimension. And that, I think before

Charlie was assassinated, a lot of people on the outside

maybe didn’t quite realize how big a part of conservatism

and conservative Christianity in America your

infrastructure had become. No, the infrastructure

is huge. We’re talking hundreds of

thousands of students across the country at these campuses. 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 Yeah no,

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. Would you. You would go to campuses with

him for his tours Yeah no. 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 just I’m so glad I

didn’t see it I saw the video in the immediate aftermath

because I wanted to know if he could survive. And yeah, I saw the

video and immediately regretted seeing

it Yeah, truly. And, the whole team actively

works very hard to make sure that anything we

share with Erika, that 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. So yeah, I mean, I was

traveling with him a lot and did it feel dangerous

to you, the public, the public’s work. Like, do you feel like you had

anticipations or premonitions of what happened. I mean, everybody plays this

mind game after the fact. Did we have

premonitions about it. And you have these thoughts

that run through your head and you 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. So and we had a full

security detail around him all the time. And by the time he

was killed, I mean, the security system

and mechanisms and the team members

that we had around him were very robust. And we spent a lot of

money as an organization. We took it very seriously. And so what I became aware of

after the fact was that a lot of what we had to do was

rely on these campus stops, which rely on local PD,

whether that’s campus PD or local PD. And so much of it, 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 because Charlie’s security detail covers

his immediate proximity. They have a 30 yard

jurisdiction, if you will, and then the perimeter

and the ingress egress is all controlled

by local campus PD. And that’s 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. I guess probably a

month, month and a half before it happened. And he just got mobbed. Selfie, selfie,

selfie, selfie. And it was this moment. I was you’re

really famous now. If you don’t mind, can you

just say something about what the day itself was

like for you Yeah well. It can be brief

Yeah, I know it’s. 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 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 pre-record

for our two, actually. So it’s probably

two in the weeds, but he’s texting

me on his way. And he’s going over talking

points about polygamy because he’s going to Utah. And why is monogamy important. And, we’re just rapid fire. These are our

thoughts on monogamy is advanced societal tech. And it, the killer app

of Western civilization. Exactly it directs

male energies in the right

direction and societal building all these things. And that was about I think

I had it was like 33 minutes before he was killed. And I’m sitting

there at my desk. I’m answering a

couple 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? you know what. Is he O.K. Is he

going to live. Instantly That’s

where I’m like. And she just said,

I don’t know. I was like, how bad was it. She was like, well it looked

pretty bad, but I don’t know. It was quick and immediately I

just shell shocked, completely shell shocked. And I immediately

thought, I have to do something

people are going to look to me for direction

and answers and I got nothing. I got nothing. And 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. And next thing my phone. This is the part I’ll never

forget because my phone starts to just text, text, text,

text, phone call, phone call, phone call. My phone is literally the

next day it 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 of pounds, upon

thousands of texts. Some people saying I’m so

sorry or tell me it’s not true. Or is he all right. And then just a lot of

reporters going, can you confirm that Charlie

Kirk has been shot. And I’m like just

these heartless, this is from such and such

outlet like we’re trying to confirm if. And I’m just thinking

this is like, one of my best friends

in the world my brother and my business

partner and I like, what are you supposed to do

in this moment when they’re. They want to know if

they can confirm it. And you’re like, I don’t

even know what the truth is. So how long did it take before

you knew he had died Shock. There was AI want to say

probably 30 or 40 minutes. So there was a report. There was a report Yeah,

it was before I knew, before Trump put the Truth

Social out and I remember feeling grateful

that he put that out, because I remember having

my computer up because I’m supposed to message this. And I remember like it was

literally that one of those scenes in the movies where

you have the first sentence and you don’t know

what to say next. I kept deleting it,

kept deleting it, and then so I was

extraordinarily grateful. I was funny because I got

a call from some reporter, and 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 it’s like, well, no. And 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. And 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

and at what point, I guess, at what point did it become

clear to you that this was going 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, the voice of Charlie Kirk. In the aftermath, when did

that become clear that was something you were going to

undertake Yeah 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 Charlie GPT or something in the back of my head. I mean, truly, I here as long

as you don’t do the weird we are not going to do the weird. I think we’ve been pitched

on that multiple times. I’m just like, guys, no,

no not 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 and pick up Charlie

and take him back home. It was really amazing. So we’re all in. We’re all in Phoenix that

Friday and we decide we’re going to host the show. And I remember as the seconds

ticked 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, but we just knew we

had to keep it going. And Erika when Erika Kirk

looks at you and says, They won’t silence my

husband’s voice. You have to keep speaking." You do it. Let’s talk a little

bit about I guess, 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 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 kind of relational dynamic

that you were describing. Not just the show, but texts,

phone calls, friendships, and so on. There’s a lot 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. And that’s my understanding of

Buckley’s role as someone who came on the scene, late,

late in his career, but had some exposure,

was that it was much more relational than intellectual

that it was about that he sat at the center of a network of

people who didn’t always like each other, but all liked him. And I felt as a distant

observer that some of that was there with Charlie. And I 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

kind of activist, podcaster 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 JFK level stuff. Do you want me to go

conspiracy theories first or Yeah let’s start with the

conspiracy theories, actually. And then get

bigger from there. I think you’re right,

though, that I think they are connected. There’s been 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

of distrust for authority and a distrust for

institutional authority and governmental authority,

because we have been lied to about things. And so I understand it on some

level like genuinely don’t begrudge people that. And I think in a weird way, a

testament to Charlie’s impact and his importance. And so I have trained myself

to see the conspiracy theories as a testament to

the love for Charlie, just for people who don’t know

all the conspiracy theories. The theories

you’re referencing, the fact that some of the

theories are basically like, obviously someone on Charlie’s

team must have set him up. Sure or that he was betrayed

or and I do my best. And this is why I’m. 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. And that gives me

a lot of I think, an anchor in a pretty

tumultuous storm otherwise. And I also watched Charlie

deal with so many lies about him. 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. And 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 were either they

were not particularly friendly or they were outright

hostile Yeah and so, I mean, I think the most explicit one

where there has been really clear attempts to

of claim his mantle and his legacy for completely

different perspectives is the issue of Israel. And obviously that is also

entangled with the conspiracy theory stuff, because some of

the most prominent conspiracy theories have involved

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. 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 since his killing is Yeah,

I would say when it comes to the issue of Israel, it was

certainly something that we wrestled with a lot. I mean, Charlie, would go to

some campuses and it was like 50, 5,060 percent of the

questions were about Israel, and that was for two years. That was true. It wasn’t true

at all campuses. It depended. But every campus there was

questions about Israel, and they were questioning

the US relationship with Israel funding. What about aipac? I mean, he got

the gamut right, and he got better and better

at answering those questions and spent a lot of time

trying to study the issue. Because I think when

Charlie Charlie started, he was at I don’t want

to say he was Normie, but he was kind of took

it at its face level, 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 flack for

fighting against this March towards 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. We saw it as this a drag

on the entire movement, and we wanted it to stop. And when you’re trying

to have a adult, mature 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 from the pro-Israel side,

from the pro-Israel side. But, 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. So those things were gnawing

at Charlie, there’s no doubt. And 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 PR standpoint, and selling this and that

frustrated him to he didn’t feel like it

should be his role. 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

support isn’t organic in some sense. No, I actually yeah. So I think what’s interesting

and I don’t know if this is contrarian take or not, but I

think that it’s hard to know I guess inspired by organic,

I think the ideas of Fuentes when it came to

immigration and Israel, it’s like there were there’s

nuggets of some pretty I think 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. Just give me an

example of the. Well, yeah. And I would like

to separate that from some of the vitriol

towards Jewish people that Charlie

rejected, wholesale. So I want to make

that very clear. But when it came to this is

actually a fun, funny story. So one 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. And I was living in

California at the time. I saw some of the

cultural cohesion issues really up close and personal. And so I was the

immigration Hawk in the car. Erika was probably more

in agreement with me. And Charlie was like he

still had this kind of legacy Chicago boy experience

where he’s like, look at all this farmland. Chicago is losing population. We need more immigrants. Charlie changed it

abruptly on this issue. But I remember telling

Charlie Charlie, you are wrong

about this topic. Like, this is a

bigger issue than you, than you are realizing. And Charlie just wasn’t quite

on that page because he had gone to a high school

in Wheeling, Illinois, where it was, I think,

white minority high school. He interacted, had a good

experience at that high school and didn’t see

any issue with it, and was and Charlie started

out his political journey more libertarian. Anyways, he eventually

became very convinced that immigration was, I think,

if not the number one issue, darn near the number one 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 do you think

he was responding there to the kind of questions

that he was being asked and the interactions

he was having. 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. And whether that’s Ilhan Omar

or Rashida Tlaib or something like this, which he was deeply

upset at the lack of gratitude from personalities that you

might see online and felt like America had opened its arms

and we were not getting the love and return. More of a grievance based

politics and in a departure from conservative ideals. Further, further and

further and further. It 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,

that and then boom, the illegal immigration

crisis of the Biden years put them well over the top. So I think it was a

natural evolution. He just became

more conservative and his faith became even. It was always

important to him. But I think it became

even more increasingly so important to him. And that began animating a lot

of his political views Yeah well, so just to look

ahead for a minute, let’s take those three issues

as useful for thinking about out where the right is going

and just try and take them one at a time. We’ll say Israel, immigration

and religion and Christianity. And I want to use them

to stress test maybe how much cohesion

there really is on the right going into

the end of the Trump era. So start with Israel. And I notice 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. Now, where Yes, as

you were suggesting could see a kind of

stable middle ground that reassesses the us-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 anti-Semitism. So maybe start with her. What has happened

to Candace Owens. I don’t know is the truth. I know that. I mean, I’ve

known Candace for. I guess I want to say

probably 2019, I think, is when I first met Candace. And she was always

very opinionated. She was always, I would

say, a fiery personality. And she for a while she

existed within the turning point ecosystem. And she’s just simply grew to

the point where it made more sense for her, I think, in

her eyes to do her own thing outside of the turning

point ecosystem. And she’s obviously a

tremendous just talent. And from a pure

oratory standpoint. And she I’ve you’ve

seen pictures of Charlie and Candice at in Israel for

the embassy moving ceremony when they moved

it to Jerusalem. So at, when I was interacting

with her more frequently, there wasn’t a

question about Israel. Do you or your team

have interactions with her nowadays. I interacted with her in the

immediate aftermath of what happened with Charlie. I didn’t realize that

it was going to be this, 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

she was his friend. And she was obviously worried. And she was traumatized,

as we all were. And I had kept in contact

with Candice intermittently over the years. So I thought I should call her

and be her point of contact. When everything happened and

she was obviously distraught. And I felt for her. I knew I had no. Foresight that it was going

to become what it’s become. And for those, 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 Yeah, it is a kind of conspiratorial

drama about the betrayal and murder of Charlie Kirk,

in which Israel features prominently people

close to Charlie. right. France, but you

haven’t called her up. Someone doesn’t

call her up and say, what the hell is going on. I believe there’s been one

contact in relatively recent days, but other

than that, I mean, it became apparent that we

were becoming a focus of her ire and that it was not

exactly a safe relationship to proceed with. So, yeah, I mean, do

you think your audience and her audience

overlap right now. I think, yeah, I

mean, I think some. So I’m not sure how many

people are really buying into some of the French,

the French theories. I don’t know what people

are really buying. I do think that there is an

arc see this with Netflix. You see the true

crime genre of things. It’s a successful drama

genre especially 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. But yeah, I mean when

and I will tell you, I will never look at a

conspiracy theory the same way again, because when you’re

close to something and what’s true and what’s not, one of

the allegations is that Bibi Netanyahu was offering

Charlie all this money. That’s not true. There was never an offer. If there was, nobody on

the team knows about it. So Charlie would have had to

just privately seek the secret flights Yeah first of all, I

don’t think Charlie would have ever taken anything

from Israel. Just as a matter of principle

or from Ukraine or from the UK like he just had a hard and

fast no foreign money rule has. Has this changed how you think

about Trump era conservatism then. Because there is I

mean, let’s be honest, there’s a lot of

conspiracism on the right. And I am by the standards of

the New York Times’ I am more sympathetic, I think, 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 UFOs. But same good. We’ll do a show

about those subjects. But it is also the case

that there is a kind there’s a wildness to conspiracies

rising on the right in the era of Trump, in the era of

COVID, with the 2020 election and so on, that is

just a distinctive part of conservative culture. Do you regard that

more critically now, maybe that you’ve been on

the receiving end of theories about yourself that

not to be true. I’ve never been a huge,

hugely conspiratorial person in general, but I’m very

sympathetic to why people are. And when you think about

the conservative mindset 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,

to conserve our culture, conserve our heritage. But those

institutions that are supposed to be doing

the heavy lifting for us are not in alignment. They are 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

JFK, you throw in 9/11. You throw in COVID,

all of these things that have I mean

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 know 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 then just

distrust you or are and now you have this pall of

doubt cast upon your person. So 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, O.K, 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, I think, intellectually lazy

conspiracy theories. But when it comes to UFOs,

when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, I think there’s some

good there’s some conspiracy theories that we

need to dive into. How do you do that policing. And is it 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 anti-Semitism on Israel. Can the right hold together

on Israel when there’s so much difference. Again, going all the way to

conspiracy theories Yeah, I would say that

the answer is yes. I firmly believe that

Charlie believed that and he was working. I think 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’s friends with

Benjamin Netanyahu. But the base is complicated,

a complicated friendship. Complicated friendship,

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 we did a Charlie and I

actually did a focus group with a bunch of

our students when we were at the

Student Action Summit, and that was just

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 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 and that and I said, it’s the animal passions

of the America First movement have been unleashed. President Trump perhaps didn’t

foresee or could not foresee all 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? Yeah. 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 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. This is if you ask me,

what is the populist. Believe in. What is 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 have the suburban high school experience that

Charlie had that you describe, 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 also look at the right now and look at deportations to

and Salvador prison and look at ICE agents wearing

masks and are 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 who are like, if you and to be clear, I know

you’re not saying that his anti-Semitic or

racist hate is true, but 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 of conservatism. What do you think

about that Yeah well, and just to clarify what I was

saying, what Fuentes tapped into, which I do believe

that there is truth in, is that you have a whole

generation of young men. And we saw this, for years. There’s a whole generation,

especially of young men, but of young women, too, that

felt betrayed, alienated, discarded, villainized by

the establishment class, and that 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 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 that got screwed out of by

the incumbent financial system or by the incumbent

political class. And that’s an energy

that once you unleash it, once you cede the ground for

the base elements of that, it will. 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, what Charlie’s

mission was to say, hey, before us are two roads. You can either go grievance

politics, socialism, free stuff, populism,

Mangione, modernism, or you can go MAGA. Now, you might not

like MAGA on its face. You might think it’s mean or

cruel or bad PR or whatever, but at least you

can live with it. It’s going to be a

tough pill to swallow. And stuff the

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. What is the tough

are we talking about. Are we talking about. But when you say

those two roads, are you directing that to

the alienated young man or to the squishy moderate. Probably both. Probably both. I think MAGA 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, 2023 mindset. 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. And so that’s a tough pill to

swallow for some young people. What so 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 is going to be a tough how do you sell

being accountable for your own actions, being 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 is differences of opinions about the raids

or we should be deporting. Let me just speak for

the squishes, right. For a second, because it seems

to me that when you’re talking about the hard sell of

MAGA to different groups. There’s one there’s

the group of alienated, 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 hardcore positions and potentially all

the way to where Fuentes is. So to those people,

Charlie, a year ago now are in the position

of saying, O.K, how do we keep them from

becoming white nationalists. But we have to be sufficiently

hardcore 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 hardcore anti-immigration

voters, I don’t think. And it just seems I feel like

it’s not just your dilemma, but it is. It is your dilemma in

part is you’re trying to simultaneously say,

look, we’re really hardcore 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 you to do. But in doing some

of those things end up alienating the

moderate conservative who you got in 2024. I don’t know that that’s true. I just don’t know that

I agree with that. I actually think I could be

wrong Yeah, it has happened. I think that is when we

saw that dynamic play out in 2016 with build the wall

and the never Trump movement. And 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 O.K, and some immigration certainly

can be O.K. As a country, we’ve historically scaled

up or scale down or changed the way we formulate it. I think that there has not

been nearly enough reform in this area,

whether 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. O.K like 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, I think so. So many times we

turn this into a oh, 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,

that 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

did New immigrants, you’re not giving immigrant

communities enough credit for understanding the downside

of unfettered mass migration. And then I just

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. 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. Well, besides

immigration setting aside immigration and the

Israel debate Yeah, I mean, affordability is huge. And I think what we need to

be for and you’ve seen this at least the beginnings of

this is, a 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. 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 and I work these ideas out

together before he died. And it’s like, hey, we need

5, 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 maybe they

get special interest rates or whatever. The idea is, let’s

throw 50 year mortgage. No, the O.K, the

50 year mortgage was potentially a

bit of a mixed bag. What’s funny O.K. It’s

O.K. You can just say it’s a terrible idea. It’s probably a very

terrible president. President Trump

is not watching. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Maybe he is. No, no, no. Listen, I actually. 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. I mean, listen, a lot of

our audience was like, hey, listen, you don’t want to

be a debt slave to this. I mean, the median home

buyer is 40 years old, 50 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, you start your house

appreciates in value. You could refinance people. People are 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 split on it. So you just said,

I’m not a wonk. I want to encourage you

to wonk, wonk out on just take this issue as an example. It seemed and

again, this connects to some of these

larger dynamics on the right in the

age of Trump, right. You mentioned two ideas. We need to build

a lot more homes, and we need to make sure

that they aren’t bought up, 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. When I go on social media and

someone’s like, oh, bad news. Hedge fund is buying up

real estate or so on that gets tons of engagement. And there’s less engagement. If someone says, here’s my

legislative plan to remove regulatory impediments

Yeah, right. 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. So this is I’m not asking

you for the 10 point plan. I’m just encouraging you

to sell because so much of the problem with the 50

year mortgage a lot of these ideas, is you’re

subsidizing demand. But the right and the left,

everybody we need supply. We need supply. You need to address core

affordability issues, structural problems

Yeah no percent. And I mean, I think I’m not

trying to be Coy or not answer the question. I genuinely believe

that there are people that are steeped

in the regulatory side. What 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 that are far more versus some people. People from your home

state of Nevada, I think, probably have some

strong views on this. I mean, it’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. All right, let’s end. 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 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 a evangelist for Christianity and

not just Christianity, but someone who was a 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 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. And, 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. Like, 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 anti-Semitism. 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, but

because Charlie wasn’t afraid and he wasn’t afraid

because of his faith, and I think he had made. I think he had realized that

his life was not his own, and he had come to

terms with that. And he had come to

terms with the fact that God was going

to use him, however he was going to use him. One important element

of Christian culture and Christian heritage is the

idea of loving your enemies. It goes all the way back,

right 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 worked, 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, right. As with many things, Trump,

he brought it back up at the metal, the metal

freedom ceremony as well. That Erika can talk to

me and talk me into it. But he said, I’m

sorry, I can’t. I can’t help I hate

him, I hate my enemies. And 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, got to

know what time it is. You gotta 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. Well, if you’re asking, do

I endorse a little bit more of Erika Kirk’s spirit. Of course I do. Good O.K. I thought that

would be an easy lift. So now so. But what does that mean when

you’re not just preaching the gospel and talking

about Jesus’s 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 Yeah, I mean, I

don’t even love using the word enemy when it comes to

any political setting. I believe some

people certainly do. I find myself using words

like my political foes or whatever more often

because my misguided friends and neighbors. Yes, except 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 major, 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 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 you’re I’m not going to let you

drink the toilet water. America O.K, I’m going to give

you a glass of pure water. But that’s not quite. I think that’s

not quite what I. 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 that can be well, that

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 tough, tough punishments

for lawbreaking, any of those kinds of things. But there’s also a question

of the spirit in which you are doing those things. And this is where I think

the America 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 and. And if you read

the social media accounts of certain federal

agencies in the age of Trump. I don’t get of cascading

spirit of Christian love coming from them. And I think that’s all

downstream of Trump himself, who is 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 it Christian to deport people. Can you have conservative

policies that are offered with more love and fellow feeling

than they’re being offered right now. I mean, I think you said

it that a lot of this comes straight

from the top right. That a lot of this

flows downhill from Trump, his

persona, his imprint on the conservative

movement more broadly. And this all reminds me of

by the way, the conversation that people, especially

in the faith community were having in

2016, 2017, what to do with President Trump,

the evangelical coalition that was around him. Can we support this. This man that 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 and

you’re Catholic, right. Or yes, most days

Yeah most days a good day Yeah for a second

there, I was like Lutheran. No Catholic never. O.K with all you tell that

to all Lutheran, all Lutheran listeners. But make you have

to acknowledge that. That old cliche 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, a 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,

became weak, feminized. And Trump was this vehicle by

which there was 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 for a little

bit more of the spirit. And I would say, yeah 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 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. So there’s a lot of different

social media posts out there. 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 need

to find our backbone, I think, as a Christian movement

in this country and reassert

ourselves politically, which is why TPUSA faith,

was founded anyway. 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 him they couldn’t meet and they couldn’t

worship together. He didn’t think that stood

a chance of holding up. And then it kind of

did, because when you get into a pastoral role,

there is all these forces that comes 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 abroad and say, hey,

we’re not going to cede the public square anymore. 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 feminization. Christian yeah. Well, wouldn’t be the

worst thing in the world. Well, I believe the church

has become overly feminized. I think Erika would

agree with me on that. And she’s even said she’s

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 mean, 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 I think all good Christian

execution of policy, you’ve got to take prudence

and it’s case by case. But certainly I think once

the era of Trump is past us, the next you’re not going

to Trump is singular. This moment will

not last forever. All right, Andrew

Kolvet, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.