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Brilyn Hollyhand began by thanking the students in the room. For their courage. For their boldness. For their obvious interest in saving the country.
“Tonight is a testament. You can kill a man, but you cannot kill a movement,” Mr. Hollyhand said. “And every single one of you are a part of that movement.”
Mr. Hollyhand was referring to the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. He spoke that evening, a little more than a month since the shooting, to 100 or so college students who had gathered for an event hosted by the Clemson University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization Mr. Kirk founded.
Standing at the front of a brightly lit classroom in a T-shirt that read “JESUS SAVES,” Mr. Hollyhand, 19, painted a dire picture of the political moment. Speaking in the gentle affect of a youth group pastor, Mr. Hollyhand suggested that Gen Z was driving a political breakdown that could be described only as a “civil war.”
“When our generation gets frustrated with politics, what do we do?” Mr. Hollyhand said. “We shoot somebody or scream at somebody. We don’t know how to have a civil discourse.”
His solution? Just have a conversation.
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The proposal, a bit of Kirk-lite thinking, was the centerpiece of the optimistic, if fuzzy, political pitch Mr. Hollyhand has been making for the past month to his fellow Gen Z conservatives during his “One Conversation at a Time” tour of college campuses across the South. Mr. Hollyhand has described it as a tribute to Mr. Kirk’s legacy of campus engagement while playing up his connection to the deceased activist, whom he considers a mentor.
It’s a claim that has hit a nerve as conservatives, young and old, wrestle with who or what should follow Mr. Kirk. Infighting over his views, leaked texts and conspiracy theories about the assassination continue to roil the MAGA movement and its young standard bearers.
The chaos comes as the movement finds itself in a broader struggle over its political future and style — should it indulge the openly racists attitudes of, say, the podcaster Chris Booth, or the combative white nationalism of a Nick Fuentes, or chart a more measured course guided by Christian and family values, advocated by influencers like Allie Beth Stuckey?
In just a month, Mr. Hollyhand made at least 18 appearances on cable news networks like Fox and Newsmax, signing on from his dorm at Auburn University, where he is a first-year student, to dispense personal anecdotes about his “close friend” Charlie and answer questions about how to carry on his legacy. Still, he has a long way to go: Mr. Hollyhand’s YouTube channel counts just a little over 13,000 subscribers, and his videos rarely crack a few thousand views.
Taken all together, some are not so sure about his being crowned a “protégé.”
“All of a sudden he was doing Fox News, then this campus tour. It was just a little crazy. I’m skeptical, but hopeful at the same time,” said Jane Kihne, 21, a member of Clemson’s College Republicans in attendance that night. “Gen Z is always looking for more spokespeople for the conservative movement.”
When asked about accusations that he was an “AstroTurfed influencer,” as others have called him, or a product of dark money, Mr. Hollyhand demurred. “There’s no way that I could have done this on my own,” he said. “The Lord opened these doors.”
Being a Gen Z spokesman has been Mr. Hollyhand’s design since The Truth Gazette, a political newsletter he started at age 11, living at home in Tuscaloosa, Ala., with his parents. His father, Brian Hollyhand, is a successful housing developer and Republican donor.
He expanded the newsletter into a news and interview platform on YouTube. His interview archive is filled with a deep cast of Republican heavy hitters, like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Donald Trump Jr., gamely fielding the preteen’s amiable questions. None, though, is more important than his sit-down with Mr. Kirk, to whom Mr. Hollyhand sent a chance message when he heard that Mr. Kirk was speaking in his hometown.
“I asked for 10 minutes of his time, and Charlie said, ‘I’ll give you 30 minutes,’” he recalled.
The encounter, in August 2018, was a galvanizing moment. In the video, a preteen Mr. Hollyhand nervously introduces Mr. Kirk, as well as the far-right commentator Candace Owens. “First of all, it’s awesome what you’re doing. You’re way ahead of the game,” Mr. Kirk says to Mr. Hollyhand.
In the years after that first interview, Mr. Hollyhand exchanged text messages with Mr. Kirk, who was known to keep in touch with a wide circle of conservative influencers. By Mr. Hollyhand’s count, they interacted a few times every month, and he occasionally received praise from Mr. Kirk after appearing on TV. It’s because of this sporadic dialogue that Mr. Hollyhand now looks back on Mr. Kirk as “one of his closest friends” in politics.
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“Every single one of you have the opportunity to turn down the temperature down,” Mr. Hollyhand told the audience at Clemson, where a faculty member was recently fired for sharing a social media post critical of Mr. Kirk after his assassination. Mr. Hollyhand has pushed for similar purges of faculty at the University of Alabama.
Mr. Hollyhand’s idea of “civil discourse” unfurled over the next hour, which he spent sharing his views on topics such as D.E.I. (“We need to return to a merit-based system”), Israel (“No more money should be sent overseas”) and pornography (“a threat”). His responses were, for the most part, uncontroversial in a crowd of young conservatives sprinkled with a handful of gray-haired adults.
A tense exchange came, though, when a member of the Clemson College Republicans hounded Mr. Hollyhand about his support for a “legal immigration” option. “America is about to be less than 50 percent white. How do you feel about that?” the student asked.
Mr. Hollyhand dodged the question, calling it a “rabbit hole.” As the conversation continued, he paused to note the civil discourse unfolding before their eyes.
“That’s the point of this,” he said. “See? Nobody shot each other. Nobody screamed at each other. We’re having a civil conversation. That’s why I’m here.”
The student retorted, “Not yet,” causing an outburst of laughter across the room.
Mr. Hollyhand clutched his microphone and grimaced.
“OK, then,” he said. “Next question.”
He was headed to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville at the end of the week and Florida State University after that, the final stops on his tour. In between, he appeared on the conservative commentator Brandon Tatum’s podcast and spoke at Liberty University. Yet even after plenty of smiling photo ops, Mr. Hollyhand is aware he has rubbed some people the wrong way. He was taking heat from some corners of the online right before ever stepping foot on a college campus this fall.
When announcing his plans, he appeared to overstate Turning Point USA’s affiliation, claiming that the group was sponsoring the series when, in fact, it had no involvement. (Local campus chapters, which operate independently from the national group, booked Mr. Hollyhand’s appearances individually.)
In a post on X last month, Tyler Bowyer, the head of Turning Point Action, wrote that the way Mr. Hollyhand had gone about organizing and advertising his events came off as “distasteful.”
When asked directly about Mr. Hollyhand, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, spoke only of Mr. Kirk. “What makes Charlie’s legacy so unique and powerful is that he’s inspired a sea of new people to get into the arena,” he wrote in an email.
Mr. Hollyhand again faced backlash last month when he posted a video from aboard a private jet. Viewed more than 39 million times, it became a subject of scorn online, where some derided Mr. Hollyhand as a rich kid and accused him of being an establishment plant.
In response, Mr. Hollyhand wrote on X that a “hometown friend” had offered the use of the jet and said he flew privately to make it from class to a campus speech 10 hours away. In an interview, he declined to share his method of travel to the Clemson event, citing “security reasons.” (Mr. Hollyhand did, though, arrive that evening through the town’s regional airport, which offers no commercial travel.)
“He’s just risen out of the weeds very quickly,” said Jacob Hein, a 20-year-old farm management major at Clemson. “It’s raised a lot of speculation.”
Evan Howard, the student who had sparred with Mr. Hollyhand about immigration earlier that evening, called him “hopelessly out of touch.”
“I don’t think he has any right to speak on behalf of Gen Z,” said Mr. Howard, 20. “Young conservatives are worried about immigration. They’re worried about the country not being white anymore. They hate Israel. That’s not even my opinion. It’s just fact. I think he’s completely out of his place. He should not be talking here.”
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Yet the criticism doesn’t seem to faze Mr. Hollyhand, who says that ideological disagreements are healthy for the Republican Party.
“It would be weird if we were all in sync,” he said. “There aren’t talking points being sent out that we’re all supposed to agree on.”
As for the claim that his emergence onto national stage was suspiciously timed, Mr. Hollyhand politely requested that his critics check the receipts.
“Perhaps they weren’t aware of me. That’s fine,” he said. “But if you go back and look at the social media data, I’ve been here since I was 11.”
Mr. Hollyhand largely avoids the trope of “debate me” politics. His stance on immigration and hesitance to lean into racial stereotypes are out of step with the America First movement that has found appeal among many Gen Z members of the Republican Party.
Asked about the recent exposure of a group of young Republicans who sent racist texts, Mr. Hollyhand condemned the behavior as “disgusting.”
“If we don’t call out this fringe, they’re going to drag our party off a cliff,” he said.
In a strange inversion of today’s attention economy, this measured stance may attract more eyes to Mr. Hollyhand.
“He’s not perfect,” said Mitchell Boone, 27, who drove an hour just to see Mr. Hollyhand.
“But, honestly, I was surprised — I was telling the group chat that he was going to be some RINO phony,” Mr. Boone continued, using the acronym for “Republican in name only.” “I’m glad to say he’s not.”
