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Six weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, University of Mississippi junior Lesley Lachman was standing in a campus parking lot near her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, scanning the calendar on her phone. She had interviews coming up with PBS, a local radio station, and Fox & Friends, before which she needed to redo her nails. I asked her why, and she looked at me like I was insane. “This is red. I’m doing Funny Bunny,” she said. The red wouldn’t look right on TV. Other members of her team had been getting interviewed too, and she worried they were being banal. “I’m like, ‘This is a brand, guys. Stop saying sentences like ‘We’re a conservative organization on campus.’ Say, ‘We are a true America-loving college!’”

Lachman, 20, is the president of Ole Miss’s TPUSA chapter. This was the most eventful week of her adult life, when she was set to introduce Kirk’s widow, Erika, and Vice-President J. D. Vance onstage at the Sandy and John Black Pavilion in front of roughly 10,000 students. After Kirk was killed, TPUSA’s leadership decided to keep alive the group’s ongoing campus tour, which was to pass through Oxford in late October. It was rechristened the “This Is the Turning Point” tour and populated with conservative A-listers who would debate students in the take-all-comers manner that made the 31-year-old Kirk an icon on the right and MAGA’s youth leader.

Lachman had lobbied for Kirk to come to campus after she heard him name-check her university during TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit near Dallas last June. “He said, ‘If you have the intent to find a husband at Ole Miss, it’s just going to happen,’’’ she recited. Lachman had just begun her fall term when Kirk was killed, a before-and-after moment for young conservatives across the country. At Kirk’s September memorial, which was held at an NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona, I had met a 20-year-old Cal State, Chico, student named Aaron Berman. He said he had been in his apartment when he saw the video of a bullet tearing through Kirk’s neck as he was debating students at Utah Valley University on September 10. “I instantly stood up, walked outside, and I started calling just, like, my brother, my parents,” he said. Within days, Berman had filed to start a TPUSA chapter on his campus.

Like countless others around the country, Ole Miss’s TPUSA chapter has surged in popularity since Kirk’s death. At least in Lachman’s enthusiastic telling, it has become the biggest student organization on campus, judging by Instagram followers (about 17,000) and GroupMe members (about 1,800). Competition to sit at TPUSA’s table outside the student union is fierce and managed via spreadsheet. Lachman has appointed 13 members to her executive board and untold deputies below them who are eager for official responsibilities. The logistics of the Vance event were eating her alive. “I hate it when they ask the president stupid questions. I wonder if Trump deals with this,” she said, looking at an email. “Why do you ask the most important person in the organization where to park? Not my job, okay!”

Lachman is a highly motivated individual, a Tracy Flick or Cher Horowitz for the right. She speaks at 2x speed, often in breezy malapropisms and endless run-on sentences. A public-policy-leadership major at Ole Miss’s Trent Lott Leadership Institute, she is also a harpist and the former president of a campus ballet club. Her roommate swears she has only ever seen her go to sleep once: “She gets everything done, she doesn’t forget anything, she’s very nice to everybody. She always sits in front of the union, and she has all her pins” (SOCIALISM SUCKS; POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DESTROYS DIALOGUE). Lachman says her social standing has soared since she became the TPUSA chapter president. “It’s like free rizz. No, like, honestly. My ex-boyfriend baked me a pie. He wants me back.”

Lachman’s celebrity status in Oxford reflects a seeming paradigm shift in post-Kirk America. At least since William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951, the conservative movement has regarded the university as a uniquely hostile and fallen place — and therefore a vital site for counterprogramming. When Kirk founded TPUSA as an 18-year-old in 2012, it was as a dynamic update of Young Americans for Freedom, the youth organization Buckley helped create in 1960. Kirk, who grew up outside Chicago and didn’t graduate from college, started out as a tea-party-supporting political wunderkind before shrewdly hitching TPUSA’s wagon to Donald Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Kirk essentially worked as Donald Trump Jr.’s assistant. After the election, TPUSA’s status as the de facto White House youth organ allowed it to outpace PragerU, Young Americans for Liberty, and other rival groups.

The organization’s clout is evident everywhere in Kirk country. At dinner one night in Oxford, Lachman was chatting noisily, irritating a nearby couple. “Are we too loud? I’m your Turning Point USA president! I’m the reason J. D. Vance is here!” she cheerfully told an older man at the bar. A wealthy alumnus, he was all too happy to buy her next round and secure a commitment from the men from his fraternity to attend her TPUSA “Freedom Formal.” On the other end of the spectrum, Ole Miss had fired an administrator in its development office after she shared someone’s Instagram post calling Kirk a “reimagined Klan” member, part of a crackdown on those violating the compulsory piety that followed his death.

The burgeoning campus counter-revolution brimmed with the same spirit of revival that had imbued Kirk’s September memorial, attended by a staggering 90,000 people, where jocks in white FREEDOM shirts prayed alongside young fathers cradling sleeping infants in noise-canceling headphones. The spiritual tenor of the event sprang not only from Kirk’s overt religiosity — his abstention from alcohol, the Sabbath he observed on Saturdays, the Bible verses he texted to friends and family — but from the sheer spectacle of the pilgrimage people had made to be there. Many of them had come across the desert literally on foot: When the traffic jammed, people started getting out of their cars to walk the final mile or two to State Farm Stadium.

The consensus in Glendale, where Kirk was eulogized by Trump and prominent members of his Cabinet, was that the assassination would set the Manichaean terms for who stood for right and wrong in America. The alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, espoused left-wing positions and fit the image of the internet-dwelling radical; one of his unfired bullets was engraved with the words: HEY FASCIST, CATCH! Daxton Van Duren, then a freshman at Sierra College, predicted Kirk would be “immortalized in his beliefs.” He and Berman were wearing hats that read MAKE AMERICA CHARLIE KIRK, suggesting a new, posthumous figurehead for the MAGA faithful.

When Erika Kirk took the stage and forgave her husband’s killer, the rapture felt complete. Practically overnight, a successor politics to Trumpism seemed emergent, locking in the right-wing drift of young voters and casting conservatism in the mold of Kirk and his vision of a civilizational war to save the Judeo-Christian “West.” “Trump voters, young men, they want family, children, and legacy,” he said on Fox News two days before his death. “Young women who voted for Kamala Harris, they want careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” A eulogy in the Claremont Institute’s publication The American Mind, drawing on the persecution of Socrates, captured the depth of feeling on the right. “The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans,” it read. “Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics.”

The more time I spent in the subsequent weeks with conservative undergrads on campus, where Kirk had sought to plant his flag, the more his importance became evident — but not exactly in the way his followers might have predicted. Just before she forgave Robinson, Erika Kirk, now the CEO of TPUSA, had said her late husband’s true vocation extended beyond politics. “Charlie passionately wanted to reach and save the lost boys of the West,” she said. “Men who feel like they have no direction, no purpose, no faith, and no reason to live. The men wasting their lives on distractions and the men consumed with resentment, anger, and hate.” He had wanted “to save young men just like the one who took his life.”

Her broader meaning would come to seem prescient, as threats to her late husband’s legacy came from within the big conservative tent Trump had built. For many young conservatives, Kirk’s assassination was bitter confirmation of left-wing intolerance and a spur to deeper radicalization. Staring into an abyss of leadership, some of Kirk’s mourners flocked toward Jesus Christ; others were seduced by quite different forces, as antisemitism and conspiracism engulfed the right. In time, the armies of Charlie Kirk looked as if they might not come at all. A political moment that started with an overwhelming show of unity devolved day by day into something more like civil war, ensnaring everyone from the vice-president down to TPUSA’s campus leaders. “Who is going to be the next Charlie?” Lachman wondered. “Is there going to be one?”

Growing up in a moderately conservative household in Westchester County, Lachman had wanted all along to end up on a fun-loving patriotic campus. Her mother, Jacqueline, works in marketing for the City of New York. When Lachman was younger, her parents owned a bakery and wineshop in Bronxville; her father now works in auto sales. When I asked how she became immersed in right-wing politics, she found the question hard to answer, as though nothing could have been more natural for a popular, well-adjusted girl like herself. She eventually said she did not want to take the COVID-19 vaccine as a teenager and preferred the values of her Catholic-middle-school classmates to those of her public-high-school classmates. (One of her close friends from Catholic school is now president of Baylor University’s TPUSA chapter.) Mostly, it seems, she regarded liberals as depressing and wanted to be far away from them.

Her time in Mississippi has only fortified those impressions. A friend at a college in the Northeast told her their campus set up a crisis hotline after Trump’s election in 2024, which Lachman found pitiful: “They’re offering helplines, and we’re wearing red, white, and blue and MAGA hats.” The Ole Miss College Democrats exist but are not a proud campus presence. “Look at their Instagram, look at ours,” Lachman said. “We’re going to the rodeo. They’re, like, you know, planting seeds.”

To Lachman, the University of Mississippi is an uncomplicated place. She did not come to Oxford to bury herself in its Faulknerian literary mystique, nor is she versed in the history of the school’s infamous 1962 desegregation battle, when undergraduate James Meredith broke Ole Miss’s color barrier. If anything, she finds all this ancient lore irrelevant. In 2003, the school’s mascot, Colonel Reb, was retired from service for obvious reasons. The campaign to revive him, which entails wearing a Colonel Reb suit, is led by a member of her TPUSA board who is Black. “That’s called progressive,” Lachman said, beaming.

She is wary of turning off new recruits with too hard-core a message, even on Kirkian issues like abortion. “I would never bring up abortion, ever. Because that’s ‘Republican,’ not ‘conservative,’” Lachman said. “Gen Z is scared of the word Republican.” Instead, students “want to hear about free speech. Second Amendment rights is a big one. They love MAHA; they eat up the seed-oil stuff. Anytime we do DOGE things, they’re like, Hell yeah. The finance bros eat that up.”

In this way, she sees her own identity as a brand asset. Lachman’s TPUSA presidency is an update on an archetype that has informed modern conservatism since Phyllis Schlafly: the anti-feminist female powerhouse. Kirk’s notion of a woman’s path to fulfillment — to get married and have children — raises........

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