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Time magazine will award its Person of the Year soon. And the frontrunners, according to Polymarket, are artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, entrepreneur and OpenAI officer Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia.
So, basically, three of the five frontrunners are either AI itself or someone AI-adjacent, like Altman and Huang. Pope Leo would be good for selling magazines (new popes in the past have outperformed on that front). And Mamdani would certainly appease Time’s readership, which is profoundly liberal at this point.
But it’s also obvious that President Donald Trump should always be a top consideration every year as long as he’s president, given the award is about who has had the strongest impact on history or who represented the year most, according to Time’s own criteria. Given how impactful the first year of Trump’s second term has been, it is an easy case to make: He essentially closed the border, is carrying out mass deportations, ignited a tariff war resulting in better trade deals for the United States, and made his tax cuts permanent. Gas prices are at four-year lows, Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been decimated, and the peace deal in Gaza is holding. That’s a strong impact on history.
All of that said, the late Charlie Kirk is the best choice for this award posthumously. His assassination was the first major political assassination in this country since the 1960s. The Turning Point USA movement, which Kirk began at age 18, has resulted in millions of followers. And his death, leaving a wife and two very young children behind, has spurred more than 120,000 new Turning Point USA chapter requests across the country.
Back to impact. Kirk has been the most googled name of the year, even surpassing Trump, who rightly won the award in 2024 for winning back a presidency few thought he could following the 2020 election. Per Fox News, “faith leaders report a 15% rise in church attendance as young people inspired by Charlie Kirk turn to Christianity.” Bible sales have also skyrocketed, with a reported 36% increase after Kirk’s death in September, when compared to the same time one year ago. “Get married. Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy,” Kirk often preached. And his followers appear to share the same values. Per a recent NBC News poll among those aged 18 to 29, young men who voted for Trump list having children as being most important to their personal definition of success. Also among the top 10 are being married, being spiritually grounded, making family and community proud, and using talents and resources to help others.
However, among women who voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, having a fulfilling job/career is listed as most important at 51%, with having money to do things you want as second at 46%. You have to go all the way down to 9th on the list to find being grounded spiritually, and 11th to find being married as a top priority (just 6%), which is tied with having children.
Recent census data backs up this sentiment from women on the Left, which shows that the number of children per family is falling to below two (1.9) for the first time. And a study released by Morgan Stanley shows that nearly half the female population aged 25 to 44 will be single and childless in this country by 2030.
“Having children is more important than having a good career. … My kids matter more than how many social media followers I have,” Kirk told Fox’s Laura Ingraham earlier this year. But contrast that with what possible Democratic presidential nominee Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has said about having children, or in this case, not having children.
“Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around, and so it’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram Live video in 2019 while chopping food in her kitchen. “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it OK to still have children?’”`
Ocasio-Cortez, who has been engaged for more than three years and has no children, would go on to predict that “the world will end” by 2031 if trillions aren’t spent to address climate change. Given her massive social media following, it appears more than a few of her supporters are actually taking this ridiculous warning seriously.
Harris, who also has no biological children of her own, latched onto this sentiment during her recent book tour. Young adults are “experiencing what they’ve coined ‘climate anxiety’, which is their fear that because of changes in extreme weather, the future of their lives is very much at stake,” she stated.
In a related story, her presidential campaign spent more than $12 million on private jets during its 107-day campaign last year.
Without family, as Kirk often stressed, society crumbles. You can’t pass along wisdom to a younger generation if that generation doesn’t exist. The joy of family is replaced by doom scrolling through social media to fill the hours. And the association between being single past the average marriage age and depression is very real, with the National Institutes of Health studies showing clear links to suicidal ideation and mood disorders.
The most important institution in society is the family. If we lose the family, we lose everything,” Kirk once declared. And more than his political beliefs or support of Trump, his preaching of family and faith will be his most lasting legacy and therefore should absolutely warrant Time’s attention, but it undoubtedly won’t due to the magazine’s unabashed liberal bent.
Over the years, the magazine has made some truly ludicrous choices in this regard. In 1988, the choice was “The Endangered Earth.”
“Now, more than ever, the world needs leaders who can inspire their fellow citizens with a fiery sense of mission, not a nationalistic or military campaign, but a universal crusade to save the planet,” Time said back then. Thirty-seven years later, Earth appears to be doing just fine.
Greta Thunberg was also Time’s person of the year in 2019, in the same vein, at just 16 years old.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth!” she said in 2019 to the United Nations General Assembly. “How dare you!”
How’s that mass extinction coming along, Greta? Six years later, she has ditched being a climate alarmist and instead is focusing on the “genocide” in Gaza.
The following year, Time broke its own rule of choosing a singular person or entity in selecting both Joe Biden and Harris to be politically correct. In past years, when selecting newly elected presidents from Kennedy to Nixon to Carter to Reagan to Papa Bush to Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama to Trump, never once was the vice president also included. Go figure.
Time magazine is a shell of what it once was. Person of the year used to carry some serious weight, and perhaps it still does on the Left.
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But any objective person with no skin in the game would be hard-pressed to find an argument not to choose Kirk.
But this award is more about politics and business than anything else, much like the rest of legacy media these days.