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… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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