How the Right squandered Charlie Kirk’s death

The 11 days between when an assassin fatally shot Charlie Kirk in front of thousands of people and when millions more tuned in to watch his widow and the president of the United States memorialize him at a packed football stadium felt like they could change the world.

Here was a brilliant, handsome young man at the height of his influence, murdered on national television for publicly defending his beliefs. There was a legacy media that was forced to grapple with the reality that far-left rhetoric had motivated someone to the type of violence it had long argued was only a threat on the Right. And all around was a sense of moral clarity for conservatives about the stakes for the movement and the importance of fighting its common enemies.

But suddenly, that clarity was gone. And the impact of the most consequential act of political violence in decades was blunted before