From Politico:
Charlie Kirk’s Lieutenant Has Second Thoughts
Blake Neff helped make stars of Kirk and Tucker Carlson. Now he’s trying to rein in what he unleashed.
By Ian Ward
09/10/2026 05:00 AM EDT
Ian Ward is a former staff writer for POLITICO Magazine.
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. …
On a Tuesday morning earlier this summer, Neff, a bespectacled 36-year-old with a clean-shaven head and a naturally nerdy affect… 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.”
Occam’s Razor might suggest that the reason both Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk surged to the top immediately after hiring Blake Neff to write for them is because Blake is the best conservative writer of his generation.
Indeed, this article then hints at that:
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.
Scott Greer’s new book is entitled Whitepill.
“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. …
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.
It’s almost as if I were a huge influence on the best minds of the next generation.
… 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. …
Paywall here.
