After a hugely successful 2024 for Republicans, when the party swept back to power and President Donald Trump reclaimed the White House, the GOP is sputtering at the end of 2025 on the heels of tough election results and going into a potentially daunting midterm season.
Conservative leader Charlie Kirk is no longer here, but reading his final book, "Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West," released shortly before his death, offers insight into what he might say to conservatives feeling complacent as Democrats appear resurgent.
"Right Wing Revolution" was published in 2024, when Kirk was seeking to help get Trump back to the presidency. Although he certainly railed against numerous intrusions he saw into American life by "woke" elements infecting everything from education to the military to business, his book was more framed as a direct message to conservatives to stop being tolerant, nice, fearful and passive. And he didn't couch his language to do it.
"Revolution can't be approached with a timid, soft touch," he wrote. "It's not the place for gentle words, so it is very possible that in many places, this book is going to be offensive to you, the reader."
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Kirk's grassroots work in the 2024 cycle underlines that he has credibility there. His organization, Turning Point USA, was widely seen as playing a major role in energizing younger voters toward Trump. When the book came out last June though, things were far different: Joe Biden was president and still the presumptive Democratic nominee, and Trump was still a candidate trying to regain power.
In "Right Wing Revolution," written after the bruising 2020 election defeat of Trump and the GOP's weak showing in the 2022 midterms, Kirk conveys a tone of urgency and even frustration with conservatives he viewed as being marched over by woke elements. He seemed unafraid to speak harsh truths about his own ideological allies, not just about their political activity, but in how they lived their daily lives.
"Far too often, American conservatives reflect the dysfunction that has become more common in America as a whole," he wrote in the introduction, adding, "We are fat, unhealthy, and watch too much TV… We treat politics as a spectator sport rather than something of enormous importance to hundreds of millions of people and the fate of the greatest country to ever exist."
He insisted a change in "attitude" was necessary, saying too many conservatives cared too little about their country, in addition to being lazy, smug, scared, defeatist and "morally colonized by the left."
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Kirk went on to diagnose many problems in modern life he saw as wokeism creeping in and conservatives doing little to stop it. In one chapter, he bemoaned some Republicans softening on issues like reparations and social elements, or noticing and complaining about woke problems in the military or intelligence agencies, but doing little to stop it.
"Conservatives notice these changes, and even complain about them, yet our substantive response has often been glacially slow," he wrote, urging conservatives not to fear reforming institutions they see despite their inherent reverence for them.
Conservatives shouldn't fear being called racist when pushing back against what they think of as racially divisive or "race-driven policies," he wrote at another point. At another, he said one of the "saddest signs of conservative capitulation to a woke frame" is in affirmative action.
Kirk had little patience in the book for not taking direct action if you were worried about campus madness or woke elements on your local school board. Tolerance, he wrote, is not always a virtue.
"Letting people who despise you and your way of life take your money to promote ideas that are socially corrosive or outright evil is not tolerant," he wrote. "It's just being stupid. While 'live and let live' isn't strictly wrong, it's been rendered out of date by events."
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Kirk implored his readers to take a deep look at themselves and change the habits he saw as harming the country. Even if liberalism vanished tomorrow, he said, this would be a "badly ailing country," "spiritually adrift" and crippled by "obesity, addiction, and broken families."
Acknowledging it was easy for him to spout advice from his platform, he said he was no hero himself, but "all of us can be better."
"And in fact, that is the single most important thing all of us can do to fend off the woke threat," he wrote.
Since his shocking murder on Sept. 10, Kirk's Turning Point organization has seen an explosion in interest on high school and college campuses across the nation, and conservatives have turned to Kirk's countless videos and broadcasts for insights and advice.
His final book, coming out Tuesday, was completed just weeks before his murder, and was more about his faith than the political wake-up call in "Right Wing Revolution."
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"Stop, In the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life," is about how he began to recharge and reconnect with God, family, and himself through observing the Sabbath, and provides what he calls spiritual wisdom and insights to both the initiated and the skeptical. His widow, Erika, who now leads Turning Point, was "determined to bring it into the world as a tribute to his legacy," and added a foreword to the book after his death, exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital.
"In this book, I intend to persuade you of something that may, at first, seem quaint, old-fashioned, or even unnecessary: that the Sabbath is not merely a helpful tradition or a cultural relic-it is essential to the flourishing of the human soul," Charlie Kirk wrote.
"I will define the Sabbath not just in doctrinal terms but in existential ones. We will explore its origin-not in history, but in eternity; not in law, but in creation," he wrote. "I will show you how to incorporate it not as a weekly [burden] but as a life-giving rhythm that reorders your time, renews your mind, and restores your humanity."
Fox News Digital's Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
