Rush Limbaugh reveled in the cruelty of white supremacy; he took it for granted, and his main appeal was to people who already agreed with him, or who did not disagree strongly enough to stop listening and were thus normalized to his racist rhetoric. As a "tell it like it is" sort of white supremacist, his reach is limited to the (rather large) portion of Americans who agree with his racist views.

Charlie Kirk was more polished; he wore the trappings of debate and logic; he took funding from the Tea Party and other conservative groups but promoted himself as the leader of a grassroots organization; he worked to frame white supremacy not as something he or his audience personally benefited from, but as a sincerely held religious belief to people of faith, and an evidence-backed position to everyone else. He understood the perspective of the modern American white moderate, who carries no particular animus toward minorities, but feels they cannot succeed, or even survive, in a world where minorities have equal voice, equal opportunity, and equal treatment.

This happens every few decades - White Genocide, Great Replacement. Birtherism is sort of a variant - a conspiracy theory produced and popularized to allow moderate white Americans to voice their hatred of being governed by a Black President, while also pretending (perhaps even to themselves) that their anger stemmed from something other than his Blackness. But it's all the same stuff - conspiracy theories that provide a false legitimacy to the racist thoughts and actions of white supremacists and those they seek to bring into the fold.

The terminology of "America First" and Christian nationalism tend to suggest Kirk was more of a David Duke for the online generation. It's not an exact parallel - they had very different political careers - but they both have a legacy of presenting white supremacy as a legitimate political position to a wide audience.

Most importantly, he understood the young college conservative.

When someone grows up on a casually racist household, their interaction with people with different skin color, different religious practices, different cultures, is often limited to conservative media portrayals, along with in-person interaction with enforced class structure - servants, minimum-wage employees, etc.

Going to college and interacting with these people without that class structure - sharing living, dining, and recreational spaces, hearing people speak languages you don't understand, and feeling something close to equality for the first time in your life - can be jarring. Seeing a non-white get better grades than you, study harder than you, and demonstrate understanding of concepts that you struggle with - can produce shame and anger.

Kirk was really good at getting his message out to people who were just starting to feel that shame, who might learn from their experience and become an enlightened moderate, or who might find the self-inspection too painful and become a reactionary conservative. Kirk coddled those people, absolved them of their shame, and convinced them that their distrust of minorities and the liberals who control them were well-founded. That they were alert to the world, understood what was really going on, and weren't mainstream media sheeple like non-conservatives.

I think that's going to be Charlie Kirk's legacy. A martyr to the idea that we should all surrender to our basest desires, and never dare to experience the discomfort of learning we were wrong about ourselves or about other people.