I met Charlie Kirk when he was still a teenager, right after he started Turning Point USA. I was entering the political fight around the same time, running for the U.S. Senate after 32 years in uniform. What you saw on camera is what he was behind the scenes: a young man who led with his Christian faith and the founding ideas of America. He invited debate. He invited people who opposed him to come argue it out, civilly and respectfully. You never saw him lose his temper with someone who disagreed. He treated them like fellow Americans who could still be persuaded.
That is not division. That is the opposite of division. The people who called him “divisive” were the ones trying to shut down the conversation, smear the ideas, and eventually silence the man. The mainstream media and the left spent years telling America that Charlie’s beliefs—limited government, free markets, biological reality, the sanctity of life, the uniqueness of Western civilization rooted in the Gospel—were the problem. They were not. Their ideas were the ones that divide a country into tribes, that treat speech as violence, and that treat a young father speaking on a college campus as a legitimate target.
On September 10, 2025, they took it as far as a human being can take it. Our friend and great American Charlie Kirk was brutally executed in public, on video, while doing exactly what he always did: standing under a “Prove Me Wrong” banner and talking to students. He got no due process. A deranged leftist assassin took his life because Charlie was highly effective at witnessing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the political arena—and he was winning.
I said it then and I will say it now: this was not some isolated act of a lone madman floating in a vacuum. It was the furthest attempt you can go to create anarchy, chaos, and violence across a society. Charlie was the sane one in the middle. He took those same arguments to Oxford, to South Korea, and to campuses all over this country because the same leftist project that attacks America is attacking free societies everywhere. He fought tyranny with words, ideas, and faith. They answered with a bullet.
One year later, the mission has not changed. Erika and the team at Turning Point have carried it forward. Young people keep showing up. Chapters keep forming. The lies keep getting knocked down. Charlie was martyred because he was effective. The proper response is not to wring our hands or pretend this was just another tragedy in a divided country. The proper response is the one he would have given: pick up the battle flag from him and keep charging that hill. Fight.
I am a 9/11 Pentagon survivor. I spent decades in combat and command. I know what it looks like when an enemy decides that words and ideas are too dangerous to allow. Charlie Kirk understood that too. He never pretended otherwise. He just refused to surrender the field.
We will continue his mission because the American idea—freedom of speech, prosperity, ordered liberty under God—is still the opposition to tyranny, oppression, and violence. That is not nostalgia. That is the fight in front of us. Charlie did his part. Now we do ours.
Rest in peace, brother. We have the watch.
