Charlie Kirk’s Lieutenant Has Second Thoughts

PHOENIX, Arizona — Five days a week, or sometimes more if news requires it, Blake Neff takes his seat behind a V-shaped plexiglass desk on the set of the Charlie Kirk Show. Directly to Neff’s left, toward the center of the V, sits “Charlie’s chair,” the high-back green leather rolling chair favored by the show’s namesake, the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Following Kirk’s death one year ago during an event at Utah Valley University, his colleagues at the Charlie Kirk Show started filling the studio with a collection of the gifts and commemorative knick-knacks that fans were sending in droves. The tidal wave of gifts eventually tapered off, but the habit of keeping a small pile of items stacked in front of Kirk’s seat persisted, transforming “Charlie’s chair” into a kind of semi-permanent memorial to the show’s departed host.

On a Tuesday morning earlier this summer, Neff, a bespectacled 36-year-old with a clean-shaven head and a naturally nerdy affect, catalogued the contents of that pile for me: a gold and white Trump “47” hat, a pocket Constitution, a gold challenge coin inscribed with a Bible verse and a plush giraffe hand puppet beloved by Kirk’s two children. Neff joined the staff of the Charlie Kirk Show in 2022 as a writer and producer, but since Kirk’s death, he has assumed full-time hosting responsibilities alongside Kirk’s longtime spokesperson Andrew Kolvet. His new role as the public face of the Charlie Kirk Show has come as something of a surprise — chiefly to Neff himself. A self-described “cultivated wordcel” with a passion for elaborate military-historical board games, Neff told me that he never expected to have a permanent on-air presence, having spent most of his career cranking out scripts for more telegenic bosses.

But in another sense, Neff’s new gig is just the latest unlikely twist in a career that has been unusually full of them. By his own admission, Neff has become a kind of Forrest Gump of the conservative movement, a little-known figure who, through a combination of dumb luck and sheer pluckiness, has found himself at the center of several pivotal moments in the recent history of the American right. In 2016, while working as an education reporter at the conservative website The Daily Caller, Neff was tapped to serve as the lead writer of the newly created Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, which Neff helped transform into the leading organ of MAGA-style populism during President Donald Trump’s first term.

A few years later, in 2022, after resigning from Fox over a series of offensive internet posts, Neff linked up with Charlie Kirk, then a relatively minor conservative activist known for his combative debates with campus liberals. Within two years of Neff’s arrival, Kirk had reached the pinnacle of power within Trump’s GOP, making frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago and the White House to advise the second Trump administration. Trailing close behind him was Neff, who had assumed the role of personal intellectual consigliere to Kirk. “I can count on two hands the number of people who Charlie really trusted,” said Mikey McCoy, chief of staff at Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. “Blake was one of those people.”

Yet Neff has played more than an accidental role in the transformation of the conservative movement under Trump. As a close collaborator to figures like Carlson and Kirk, he has served, in a roundabout way, as a primary author of MAGA’s new ideological playbook. “Along with Tucker, Kirk was probably one of the most important [people] to elevate these ‘online right’ ideas to the mainstream, and I think Blake played a huge role in that,” said Scott Greer, a former colleague of Neff’s at The Daily Caller and the author of a new book that traces the origins of MAGA ideology to the online ferment of the late 2000s and early 2010s. “His own talent, his intelligence, and, frankly, being at the right place at the right time — all that helped him have this influence on both Tucker and Charlie Kirk.”

It’s not a coincidence, Greer added, that MAGA’s ideological posture bears a striking resemblance to Neff’s own political sensibility: contemptuous of the old pre-Trump Republican establishment; preoccupied with the cultural and “civilizational” effects of mass migration; scornful of “wokeness” and progressive cultural values; and, above all else, steeped in the irony-laden lingo and meme-heavy sensibility of the online right. “He played a part in taking these once-marginalized beliefs that were ignored by conservatism and bringing them to the mainstream,” Greer said.

Yet now, a year after Kirk’s death, Neff has found himself in a new and darkly ironic situation. In the months since Kirk’s death, Neff has become the target of the torrent of online conspiracies alleging that Kirk’s shooting was orchestrated by his allies at TPUSA — in some tellings, with the aid of Israel and other foreign governments. In response, Neff is now pursuing a starkly different objective: reconstructing some sort of barrier between the MAGA mainstream and the right’s online fringe. That effort has put him at odds not only with figures like the podcaster and former TPUSA employee Candace Owens, but also with his former boss, Tucker Carlson, who has flirted with alternative theories about Kirk’s death.

“It’s a little ironic, certainly,” Neff conceded, when I pointed out his apparent pivot from insurgent gatecrasher to insider-y gatekeeper.

That dilemma is not unique to Neff. As the MAGA movement cements its control over the Republican Party under Trump, Neff and his fellow insurgents are facing an unexpected revolt from a group of dissidents on the right. Guided by figures like Carlson, Owens and the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, this cohort alleges that, in accommodating themselves to power, the new MAGA mainstream has sold out the true principles of “America First.” In MAGA’s acceptance of the “official narrative” of Kirk’s death, they see a symbol of the movement’s broader acquiescence to a corrupt political status quo. And as with Trump in 2016, the Republican mainstream is divided over how to respond to this faction: embrace it, oblige it, or banish it. Which approach they choose will go a long way toward determining the shape of the Republican coalition in 2028 and beyond.

Neff has staked out a firm position in the “banish” camp. But beyond his war of words with the new voices of dissent on the right, he is facing another set of questions: To what extent are Neff and his allies in the MAGA establishment responsible for creating the conditions that have allowed the new conspiratorialism to flourish? And having successfully torn down the wall between the mainstream and the fringe, do they have the political resources to build it back up?

Sitting in the greenroom outside the studio of the Charlie Kirk Show, I asked Neff if he is optimistic that MAGA can rebuild that boundary. “We have no choice but to be optimistic,” he said. “As Charlie would say, ‘It’s all on God’.”

Neff was born in South Dakota to a conservative Catholic family. But he became himself, in all the ways that would matter for his career, on the online right.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Neff realized early on that he was brighter and more bookish than many of his peers. In middle school, while his classmates were dabbling in the Harry Potter books, Neff tore through all 2,000 pages of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Gulag Archipelago trilogy. In high school, he set his sights on attending Dartmouth College after reading the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s book Letters to a Young Conservative, which recounted D’Souza’s experience co-founding the conservative campus journal The Dartmouth Review.

At Dartmouth, Neff followed D’Souza’s path to the Review. He dabbled in the canon of conservative literature — Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart, about the decline of white working-class America, was a formative read — but his more important political education took place in the byzantine world of micro-blogs and anonymous messaging boards dedicated to edgy and sardonic right-leaning politics. “It was just a bunch of guys blogging on their WordPress site,” Neff recalled of his early days on the web. A personal favorite of Neff’s was Steve Sailer, the paleoconservative commentator whose writings on “human biodiversity,” a slightly sanitized spin on old-school race science, were quietly passed around like samizdat on right-leaning messaging boards and private chats. Neff estimated that one such chat he maintained with a conservative friend from Dartmouth eventually ran longer than the total word count of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Neff’s early politics were also shaped by his reaction to the real-world political atmosphere at Dartmouth, which Neff described as “proto-wokeism.” During Neff’s senior year in 2013, the university canceled classes for a day after a group of protesters disrupted an event for incoming students, alleging widespread homophobia, racism and tolerance for sexual assault on campus. Like many campus conservatives before him, episodes like this one left Neff convinced that his peers were incorrigible radicals hell-bent on destroying the conservative values he had grown up with. “I was coming to a conscious realization that a lot of the things I value are clearly in very steep decline in America,” Neff said, “and it’s not obvious that this is going to stop.”

After college, Neff considered going to law school, until he realized that “all the lawyers I knew wanted to jump out of buildings.” Instead, he pivoted to journalism, completing a year-long fellowship at The Hill in Washington before landing a gig as an education reporter at The Daily Caller, the conservative outlet co-founded by Carlson in 2010. At the Caller, he carved out a niche covering sensational campus controversies, writing scornful articles about Ivy Leaguers tearing down a portrait of Shakespeare or a law school professor praising “white genocide.” “The ‘woke movement’ that came to the forefront in a public way in 2020 — he was writing about that as early as 2014 or 2015,” said Michael Bastasch, a friend of Neff’s from the Caller who now serves as a communications adviser for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Neff’s work, which often flew to the top of the Caller’s most-read list, caught the attention of Carlson, who took a liking to Neff’s quirky intelligence and off-color sense of humor. Their friendship was solidified in the summer of 2015, during a three-hour car ride to New York City from Bastasch’s wedding in Albany. “I think we just talked about the Roman Empire the whole time,” Neff recalled.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, Neff got a call from Carlson asking him to join his new show at Fox as the lead writer. Neff traveled to New York for “what was kind of a fake interview, as far as I could tell,” and landed the offer. His first day on the job was New Year’s Day, 2017, just three weeks before Trump took office.

Neff’s average day at Tucker Carlson Tonight started around 12:30 in the afternoon, when Carlson would email around some preliminary notes on the show’s main segment. For the next few hours, Neff would work with Carlson and the other members of the show’s “brain trust” — producers Alex Pfeiffer and Charles Couger — to turn those notes into a draft of a script, which Neff would deliver to Carlson by 5:30 or 6:00. Depending on the day, Carlson would either leave Neff’s draft as it was, punch it up a bit or tear it down and start over before it was loaded onto the teleprompter.

In the early days of the show, Neff explained to me over lunch at a strip-mall Thai restaurant near TPUSA headquarters, the format was weighted heavily toward testy on-air debates between Carlson and left-of-center guests. But as liberals gradually stopped agreeing to come on the show, the layout shifted to spotlight Carlson’s opening monologue, which gradually grew in length from about five minutes in the early days to up to 20 minutes later in Neff’s tenure.

The shift in format gave Neff a significant degree of influence over Carlson’s on-air message — and also bolstered his proclivity for pushing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. As the show evolved, Neff told me in between bites of yellow curry, he became “very, very” aware of pushing the boundary of mainstream discourse on a whole range of issues, from race to immigration to transgender issues. In 2017, Neff helped Carlson write a series of segments criticizing California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters for her views on race. According to Neff, he and Carlson wanted to include a statement in a script arguing that Waters, a longtime civil rights figure, harbored anti-white views — that “Maxine Waters hates white people,” as Neff recalled — but he was told by Carlson that executives at Fox objected to such explicit invocation of white people as a group. (A representative for Fox declined to comment; Waters did not respond to a request for comment.) In response, Neff and Carlson “developed a vocabulary” for couching this argument in more palatable terms: Instead of referring to animus directed at white people, Carlson would talk about animus directed at people “because of their skin color.”

The tweak became a kind of cheat code that allowed Neff and Carlson to make a previously unsayable argument — that the left hated white people because they were white — into a sayable one. “If you watch Tucker clips from 2018 through 2020, we very rarely use the word ‘white,’” Neff told me. “We’ll say, ‘This person hates people for their skin color,’ or ‘This university is discriminating based on skin color.’”

In retrospect, Neff said, it was a small but significant victory against the kind of informal censorship that had kept arguments about “anti-white bias” out of the conservative mainstream. “People didn’t want to say the w-word, but at least we’re getting it out there that this should be a thing we’re allowed to talk about.”

Around the same time, Neff was coming to grasp the surprisingly broad power of his new role. In July 2017, Neff proposed a segment calling for a ban on transgender troops in the military, a move that Trump had campaigned on in 2016 but had not taken any action on in office. Carlson was on board: “That’s great — write that up,” Neff recalled him saying. For the July 7 broadcast, Neff drafted a segment criticizing the Trump administration for dragging its feet on the promised ban. A few weeks later, on July 24, Carlson did a follow-up interview with a doctor who criticized gender-affirming care for minors. Two days after that, Neff woke up to a series of tweets from Trump announcing a total ban on transgender troops. Neff never learned for certain whether the segments had influenced Trump’s announcement, but the episode nevertheless served as a wake-up call. “That definitely was a big moment of realization for me, that we have the power to alter what this country does if we use it correctly,” he said. “It literally was, like, a conversation I had with a producer, to Tucker, to television, to Trump, to national politics.”

As the show’s audience steadily grew, Neff took full advantage of that pipeline, lifting arguments floating around the online right and injecting them directly into the conservative mainstream: that gender-affirming care was a sop to Big Pharma; that affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs were tools of anti-white discrimination; and, most infamously, that the Democratic Party was intentionally using mass migration to remake the demographic balance of the U.S. in its favor. Bastasch, Neff’s friend from the Caller who by that point had become a producer for Laura Ingraham’s show at Fox, took note of the familiar tenor of Carlson’s show.

“Tucker,” he said, “just sounded a lot like Blake.”

And thanks to Trump’s insatiable appetite for cable news, Neff’s ideas kept getting piped directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In June of 2019, after the Iranian military shot down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump had privately authorized — and then abruptly called off — retaliatory strikes against Iran. The following day, The New York Times reported that shortly before publicly announcing his decision to call off the strikes, Trump had tuned into Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson had delivered a monologue — drafted by Neff —making the case against escalation.

“I’m not gonna lie — it felt awesome,” Neff said of his indirect line to the Oval Office. The episode affirmed his dawning realization that the writers’ room at Tucker Carlson Tonight was the closest thing that MAGA had to an in-house think tank. “There would be discussions [on the right] where people would say, ‘It’d be great if we had a think tank for these MAGA ideas, like Cato is for libertarianism,” Neff said. “And I’d be like, ‘It’s not that pressing, because that is literally Tucker’s show.’”

In June 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight topped the cable news charts — not only as the highest rated show on television, but as the highest-rated news show ever, with over 4.3 million average viewers across the second quarter of that year. A few days later, Neff got a message from Oliver Darcy, a media reporter at CNN. Since 2013, Neff had been posting anonymously on AutoAdmit, an online forum that functioned as a kind of 4chan analog for internet-brained law students and lawyers. Writing under the pseudonym “CharlesXII,” a reference to the 18^th-century Swedish warrior king, Neff had made thousands of posts on the site, several of them containing racist, sexist and homophobic jokes. (“Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down,” Neff wrote in a post from June of that year. Elsewhere on the forum, he curated a lengthy thread of posts mocking a female online acquaintance, whom he referred to derisively as “Azn megashrew.”)

Darcy had gotten a tip that Neff was the poster behind “CharlesXII” and planned to publish his findings. When the report appeared in early July, it came as a crushing blow to Neff, though also not as a complete shock. Neff’s identity as CharlesXII had been something of an open secret on the site since 2017, when Neff had participated in a Washington Post “Date Lab” article and dropped several inside jokes from the forum. (The article, in which Neff referred to alcohol as “poison” and confessed that “most of my hobbies allow me to escape women,” did not lead to a second date. He’s still unmarried.) At Fox, meanwhile, Neff had occasionally flaunted his position for the amusement of his fellow forum members by inserting lingo from the forum into scripts that Carlson read on air.

After Darcy’s article appeared, Carlson — under pressure, he later claimed, from executives at Fox — asked for Neff’s resignation. On the Monday evening broadcast after Neff resigned, Carlson offered a kind of non-apology apology, condemning Neff’s comments as “wrong” while also taking a swipe at “the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man.” (Fox declined to comment on the circumstances of Neff’s resignation.)

In retrospect, Neff said, he doesn’t hold the decision against Carlson, even though he maintains that he was targeted by an overzealous “cancel culture” that zeroed in with special ferocity on prominent conservatives. “It’s a lot of guilt by association,” he said of the CNN report, downplaying the crassness of his comments. “This is on a website with zero censorship that I was on for a seven-year period, and the worst thing they have me say is that I once made fun of people who are foodies by saying ‘foodie faggots.’”

Still, he said, he may have gone about things differently if he could do it over again. “What I should have done is realize that you live in dangerous times and stop posting — or if you’re going to post, delete your account, start a new one and add more squid ink,” he said. “And the extremely dumb reason that I didn’t was that I was kind of a popular user there — a person who was generally liked. I didn’t want to just blow that all up.”

During his “wilderness years,” as he calls the period after his firing, Neff was, by his own account, pretty depressed. For six months, he couldn’t bring himself to read even a short novel, let alone his preferred historical tomes. “I would read one page, and I couldn’t focus enough to do it,” he told me. He took on some occasional freelance writing gigs, contributing to The Spectator and Revolver News, the website founded by the conservative academic and future Trump State Department official Darren Beattie, but he struggled to summon up much enthusiasm for it. A particular low point came in 2021, when he took a contract job writing scripts for Stew Peters, the rapper-turned-bounty-hunter-turned-online-conspiracy-theorist who rose to minor internet notoriety during the pandemic as an anti-vaccine influencer. (Neff stopped writing for Peters in late 2023, as Peters embraced more openly conspiratorial and antisemitic views.)

In late 2022, TPUSA’s chief marketing officer, Marina Minas, who had worked with Neff at Fox, recommended him for an open producer role at the Charlie Kirk Show. Neff was initially skeptical of working for Kirk, whom he knew by reputation as a goofy libertarian rabble-rouser whose followers had once worn adult diapers to protest “safe spaces” on college campuses. But he was encouraged to take the role by several friends who knew Kirk, including Carlson, who assured Neff that Kirk had undergone a genuine ideological and religious conversion. A final phone call with Kirk ultimately sealed the deal. “Charlie said, ‘Blake, I want to hire you, and also when you move out here to Phoenix, I want to put you on air to show that I’m not going to be intimidated’” by the woke mobs, Neff recalled. “‘I’m not going to think you have anything to be afraid of.’”

After joining the show full-time in December 2022, Neff quickly developed a unique rapport with Kirk. Dazzled by Neff’s encyclopedic memory for obscure historical factoids, Kirk nicknamed him “BlakeGPT” and made a habit of quizzing him about Roman emperors or the Ming dynasty during long flights and car rides. By the time Neff joined the show, Kirk was already partway through an ideological evolution from a youthful and immigration-friendly libertarian to a more doctrinaire MAGA nationalist, but he increasingly leaned on Neff to help articulate his new political intuitions. “Sometimes it was, like, ‘Blake, how should we feel about these immigration topics?’ or ‘How should we describe early voting to people?’” Neff recalled. “I think I enabled him to explain [his positions] better, and I gave him a lot of the vocabulary for doing it well.”

Neff also subtly nudged Kirk further into the edgier and more transgressive territory characteristic of the online right. Ahead of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 2024, Neff approached Kirk about doing a critical segment on the storied civil rights leader. “I told Charlie, ‘You know, there’s more complicated stuff about MLK. He was actually quite left wing when he died,’” Neff said. Kirk greenlit the idea and subsequently hyped the forthcoming segment during a podcast appearance, which caught the attention of a reporter at WIRED, resulting in an alarmed article. In response to the story, Kirk ordered Neff to expand the segment into an entire show to run on MLK Day, which it did, under the headline “The Myth of MLK.”

After Trump won the 2024 election, Neff also quietly leveraged his proximity to Kirk to influence the Trump administration’s staffing decisions. Behind the scenes, he encouraged Kirk to support the nomination of his longtime friend and occasional writing partner Sarah B. Rogers, whom Trump eventually named under-secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department. “Blake advocated for me to meet Charlie, and Charlie advocated for me in all kinds of rooms thereafter,” said Rogers, who is now up for nomination to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media. “I owe them both.”

Toward the beginning of 2025, Neff and Kirk started having more frequent conversations about one issue in particular: Israel. Online, Neff had noticed that young conservatives were growing increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel, and that many of their criticisms were tipping into explicitly antisemitic territory. According to Neff, Kirk, whose own thinking on the issue was shifting away from a staunchly pro-Israel position, was open to serious geostrategic critiques of U.S. support for Israel, but he also saw the deepening antisemitism on the right as a real moral and political hazard. “One time — and I got a kick out of this — he was like, ‘Blake, why do people hate Jews?’” Neff recalled. He received an assignment from Kirk to carve out a middle-ground position that made room for criticism of Israel without licensing antisemitism. “Go read everything you can about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so you will know about it, and I can go to you if there’s something I need to know,” Neff recalled Kirk telling him.

In September of that year, Neff was reading Righteous Victims, an 800-page history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, when Kirk requested that he join a brief trip to Utah for an event at Utah Valley University. Kirk was anticipating fielding questions about the Israel issue from Groypers — self-identified followers of Nick Fuentes — and he wanted to do some last-minute brainstorming with Neff. The night before the event, Kirk, Neff, McCoy and the Christian author Frank Turek huddled for a Zoom call with a handful of other TPUSA allies to talk through possible approaches. After the meeting, Kirk suggested that Turek go grab a bite to eat with Neff. “I think you’d really like Blake,” Turek recalls Kirk saying. “He’s my number one weapon.”

On the car ride over to the Utah Valley campus the following day, Kirk texted Neff with a last-minute request: a brief defense of monogamy. Neff, who was riding in the SUV behind Kirk, sent him some thoughts in a text message, which Kirk reacted to with a thumb-up.

At the event, Neff was scrolling through his phone about 20 feet to Kirk’s left when he heard what he thought was a firecracker go off in front of him. He looked into the crowd, and then toward the tent where Kirk had been speaking. “You can imagine what I saw,” Neff told me, his voice breaking a little.

Sitting in the emergency room waiting area at Timpanogos Regional Hospital, Neff’s first thought was for Kirk’s wife, Erika, and his two children. His next thoughts, tinged with a sense of dread, were about Candace Owens. “I literally had a conversation with someone at the hospital, and somehow Candace came up, and one of us was like, ‘Oh, Candace is going to go nuts over this.’”

Neff didn’t know Owens personally — Owens left her role as communications director for TPUSA in 2019, while Neff was still at Fox — but he had watched her evolution online, where Owens had been waging a dual-front war against Israel, which she has called a “demonic state,” and Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, whom she has claimed is secretly a man. Almost immediately after the shooting, Neff feared that Owens would direct those same conspiratorial energies toward Kirk’s death. “I kind of knew what would happen,” Neff said.

Neff, it turns out, was right to be worried. In the months following the shooting, Owens turned her attention toward an ever-expanding investigation into Kirk’s death. Casting doubt on the idea that Tyler Robinson, the 23-year-old who is standing trial for allegedly murdering Kirk, had acted alone, she has suggested, variously, that Kirk’s co-workers at TPUSA, his wife and the governments of Israel, France and Egypt may have been involved in a plot against Kirk’s life. (Owens denied accusing anyone of killing Kirk, saying in a statement, “What I have asserted many times is that the investigation fell short of exploring possible leads, both foreign, and yes internal to the Turning Point USA organization.”)

At first, the consensus within TPUSA headquarters was to avoid engaging directly with Owens for fear of drawing more attention to her accusations. But after Owens started singling out TPUSA employees by name, that consensus started to erode. Within Kirk’s inner circle, Neff was one of the most vocal proponents of adopting a more confrontational approach. “Blake had a desire to clap back,” said McCoy, the TPUSA chief of staff, whom Owens had singled out for suspicion. On an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show in late October, Neff previewed that strategy, denouncing unspecified allegations implicating McCoy in Kirk’s death as “utterly vile.” After Owens continued voicing suspicions about specific members of the Turning Point staff, Neff doubled down in a seven-minute monologue on the show in late December, calling Owens out by name and dismissing her claims as “either lies or innuendo thrown around with a total, reckless disregard for the truth.”

Neff’s direct criticisms of Owens made him an object of suspicion among Owens’ allies, with skeptics pressing him on the details of his movement the day of Kirk’s death and claiming gaps in his account of his whereabouts in the hours leading up to the shooting — allegations that Owens has amplified on her show. (Neff dismissed these criticisms as spurious: “I’m not going to jump through hoops to answer bad faith questions from people who have ill intent.”) Now, eight months into the back-and-forth, the conflict has settled into a more or less stable pattern, with Neff and Owens regularly sniping at each other on X. Their exchanges have, at times, taken on an absurdist air. On a recent episode of her show, Owens accused Neff of having a “background” in “military strategy” — an allusion to the fact that, between 2016 and 2020, Neff held a part-time contracted position teaching military board games to students at the Marine Corps War College. (The college cut ties with Neff in 2020 after the CNN report about his AutoAdmit activity.)

When I asked him what he thinks is driving Owens’ criticisms, Neff reached for the psychoanalytic. “I think she hates Erika, and I think that, deep down, she was resentful and envious of Charlie that he was a bigger name than her,” he said. “She saw all the love towards Erika as his widow, and that made her angry and resentful because she is a huge narcissist. So I think she believes that Tyler Robinson did it, and she wants him to get off because it will hurt Erika.” (“The idea that there was any jealousy between me and Charlie is simply laughable,” Owens said in response, adding that Neff is “bitter because he has failed at replacing Charlie on his program.”)

Still, the high-profile feud between Owens and TPUSA has run alongside an even more fraught situation for Neff: his relationship with his old boss. Nine days after Kirk’s death, Carlson flew to Phoenix to co-host the Charlie Kirk Show, where he told the story of Neff’s firing from Fox — “the saddest moment of my 15 years there” — and lavished praise on Kirk for giving him a second chance. “I love Blake,” Carlson said, sitting across from Neff and Kolvet. “He’s just a wonderful person, and a deeply decent person.”

Since then, the relationship has grown strained. Neff is cautious about publicly criticizing Carlson, who maintains a relationship with TPUSA. But Neff told me that he has been troubled by Carlson’s claims that Kirk was killed primarily because of his “evolving views on Israel,” a claim that Neff has called a lie on X. He also has taken issue with Carlson’s decision to host a guest on his show who cast doubt on the lone-wolf shooter theory and criticized Erika Kirk for showing insufficient grief after Kirk’s death. “He has sometimes said things I didn’t like, he’s done episodes of his show that I didn’t like, and I’ve said that publicly,” Neff told me. He mentioned Carlson’s chummy interview with Fuentes last December. “I didn’t like it, and I didn’t care for how that happened.” (“Poor kid. He’s in the wrong job and I feel sorry for him,” said Carlson, who otherwise declined to comment for this article.)

When I asked him what he made of Carlson’s focus on the Israel issue — and whether it was recognizable to him from his days at Fox — Neff hedged. “I think Tucker himself has spoken to this, that he feels he is saying different things today than what he said on Fox.” But he cast some doubt on Carlson’s suggestion that that shift has occurred because he’s now free to say things he couldn’t while he was at Fox. With the exception of the Maxine Waters incident, Neff said, “I otherwise did not feel like we were controlled or censored while I was there.” In that respect, “what Tucker is most focused on now does, to me, feel different from what he was most focused on at Fox.”

At the same time, Neff acknowledged that he sees a glimmer of something familiar in Carlson’s recent turn toward the fantastical — be it his openness to various alternative theories about the 9/11 attacks or his newfound belief in the existence of demons. “He was probably more open than me on various stories [to thinking] that there might be bigger, unseen stuff going on in the background,” Neff said, though he denied that this tendency ever tipped over into “territory that was, for lack of a better term, harmful to the country.”

Neff declined to elaborate on his criticisms of Carlson, but they point to the central irony of his career: After a decade spent tearing down the boundary between the conservative mainstream and its online fringe, Neff is now scrambling to reimpose some sort of cordon sanitaire around what he sees as the dangerously conspiratorial segments of the right. “As conservatism has moved much closer to Blake’s ideology, he now sees himself as defending the new type of conservatism against threats from the influencers, which I would call ‘insane clown populism,’” said Greer, who, like Neff, was eventually fired from his job at the Caller after being outed for writing pseudonymously for an alt-right website.

Neff doesn’t dispute this basic dynamic, though he objects to the suggestion that he is “pulling up the ladder” to exclude members of the right with whom he disagrees. What he is trying to do, he says, is foster a healthy debate about the right’s core vision without reverting to censorship or cancellation to silence his opponents. “We’re against censorship, so we’re very much of the point of view that you should be allowed to say things on social media, on YouTube, on a college campus or out in public we disagree with or that we consider abhorrent.” But, he added, “When you’re running a political movement, you aren’t just having total anarchy. You are trying to find values … and trying to negotiate out what are core beliefs that everyone should hold. What are the beliefs we’re debating over? And what are reprehensible beliefs that are totally incompatible with our political project?”

But as generations of political insurgents before Neff have discovered, the more difficult question is not whether to draw lines but where to draw them. Neff suggested that the right should honor a fundamental distinction based on “whether [something is] true or not” — a line that he maintains his work for Carlson and Kirk always respected. Yet when I raised some possible problems with this argument — for instance, that even many conservatives concede that the leader of their movement displays a blithe disregard for the line between truth and falsity — Neff ceded some ground. “A way to look for lines,” he said, “is does it have real payoff” in the concrete political objectives of MAGA? “A lot of stuff that is conspiratorial and fringe usually has no upshot other than ‘I have secret knowledge and I want us to declassify everything.’” He pointed to the debate over the war in Iran as a case in point. “If you want to say the Iran war is a disaster and we should end it immediately, I don’t think anyone has a problem with you saying that. But if your constant output is ‘The Jews lied us into this war,’ then I’m going to be like, ‘OK, why are you emphasizing it that way?’”

Neff told me that he doesn’t feel personally responsible for the trajectory of figures like Carlson, but he confessed to grappling, in a roundabout way, with the possibility that his maximalist position on free speech has helped foster the conditions that have allowed rank conspiracism to flourish. “I’ve reflected on this often,” he said, sipping a s’mores-flavored cold brew on a leather couch in the studio’s greenroom. “We got what we wanted on speech, and that means we also have to endure a lot of things that were tamped down on before.” He sees only two potential paths forward: “Either we have to make our peace with censorship and explain how we’re going to do that, or we have to explain how we’re going to combat this without censorship. But we’ve got to confront it.”

I asked him if he really believed that his preferred strategy of combating conspiracism without reverting to censorship could succeed, especially in the age of algorithmic media that reward the most outlandish and outrage-inducing messengers. Since Kirk’s death, his successors’ more measured message has struggled to break through: A recent review by The New York Times found that monthly viewership of the Charlie Kirk Show on YouTube has declined steeply since Kirk’s death, falling below the YouTube audience for Owens’ and Carlson’s shows. (A spokesperson for the Charlie Kirk Show told me that average viewership across all platforms has rebounded to 75 percent of its pre-shooting levels.)

Yet Neff said that he remains hopeful. He cited a private conversation he had recently with a Kirk-truther, who admitted to rethinking some of his initial skepticism after seeing the evidence presented during the preliminary hearings in Tyler Robinson’s murder trial. “There was so much loose, nervous energy [after the shooting] that people need to see the wheel of justice turning,” he said.

But Neff didn’t sound totally convinced that the truth would prevail, or that his powers of persuasion could overcome the maelstrom of conspiratorial thinking that’s swirling around him. “As Charlie would say, we do things not because we know it will succeed, but because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

I asked him if, knowing everything he knows now, he wishes that he had just become a lawyer. He shook his head. “I have lived through interesting events, I have affected interesting events, and certainly I’ve never really thought, ‘Oh, I wish I had just gone to law school’,” he said, sipping his cold brew. “I think I got what I was looking for.”

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