A Turning Point: Carrying Charlie Kirk’s Torch Forward

Like so many others, I don’t even know what to say. There is nothing to say to take away this devastation.

A young family man was murdered in cold blood yesterday because people have become so radicalized in 2025 that they feel justified assassinating someone because they didn’t like what that person had to say.

I haven’t liked everything Charlie ever had to say. When he first came on the scene I even side-eyed him quite a bit. Mostly that was from my own marriage and religious trauma — he had a lot to say about women, marriage, and parenthood and the dude was a single 20-something.

After being spiritually abused for years by multiple men who claimed “biblical leadership” over me simply because I was a woman, I just couldn’t listen to some young, overly-confident young man talk about biblical marriage when he didn’t have a wife or children. Like you know nothing, sir.

But that was ME, not Charlie. So you know what I did? I scrolled past when I saw him come up in my feed.

But sometimes I watched the clips, or read his posts, and a couple years ago, I noticed that he seemed to have mellowed and focused, and I found myself agreeing with him more and more, and even when I didn’t, he seemed like a truly solid, grounded dude. A lightbulb went off, and after a quick google search, I discovered that he had gotten married and had a baby.

I’m not saying you have to be married with children for me to listen to you — I’m just saying that it has a way of humbling you that comes across in every other aspect of your life. Charlie was all of a sudden speaking about marriage and families from the perspective of being a husband and a father, not just from the dream of it.

All that to say that I truly appreciated him as a human being, and I was really glad that I had changed my mind about him. I loved that every time someone came to the mic with a child, he had something to say about that kiddo being a beautiful blessing. I loved that when South Park recently poked fun at him in an episode, he was tickled and did a response video saying he knew he’d made it because South Park was finally making fun of him.

I love that his middle name was James like Captain James T. Kirk, and I have no idea if that was an intentional choice by his parents, but I like to think that he was raised in a home full of humor and love.

I don’t know why this death is affecting me so much. I feel like when I did when Andrew Breitbart died many years ago, but I knew Andrew. We were friends. We broke bread together. We worked together in the movement (I wrote for Big Hollywood and Big Government back in the day, for anyone who remembers those Breitbart sites).

I didn’t know Charlie — at least not personally. We had a few mutual friends, and from everything I’ve ever heard, he was truly a good man.

I don’t want to make it about me but I can’t help but put myself in his wife Erika’s shoes. I’ve watched from the audience or backstage many times when my own husband has had the privilege of speaking to a crowd about his convictions, which largely align with the conservative movement.

Justin and I have both received numerous death threats for our right-leaning beliefs throughout the years, sometimes on a daily basis. You don’t become a national leader on the anti-covid lockdown front without getting death threats.

I never took the threats seriously. I wonder if Charlie and Erika ever took the threats on his life seriously.

We are living in such a broken world and my heart is breaking over it.

I have a cherished friend who was at the event when Charlie was assassinated, with her husband and two adolescent children, in or near the front row. Her husband called mine immediately in the aftermath and that’s how we found out, before even the media reported it within minutes. My friend and I exchanged texts, and the kids are ok but in shock (obviously), and she shared that she’s angry that this is the world that we are living in and raising our kids in.

This woman is also one of the most outspoken and loving Christians I’ve ever known. In her texts she shared with me, “...I guess it's also a reminder that there is no hope this side of eternity. Our hope is in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Just moments before he was hit, Charlie gave the Gospel, proclaimed Jesus Christ, quoted the Word.”

A man was martyred yesterday, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be the same. Charlie loved Jesus, and he was BOLD about it. He was truly a “happy warrior,” a term coined by Andrew Breitbart to describe his crusade against the culture war in our country that has been raging for decades.

Andrew wasn’t a Christian and his death was from heart failure, not a bullet, but I can’t help but compare the similarities of their life’s work and their untimely ends.

It makes me want to be bold and intentional in the way that I live, the way I engage my community, and the legacy that I want to leave. I only hope that so many others feel the same way, so that anyone who would laugh or mock the death of a public figure just because they disagreed with them will be shamed into taking back those words.

We should not have to explain that it’s not ok to say someone deserved to die because they expressed their opinions. I fear that is just common decency — and it makes me so sad that many Americans have forgotten that.

I hope that Charlie Kirk’s death is not soon forgotten, because I can’t fathom what happens next if this is swept under the rug. The man is gone from this earth, but his movement isn’t. I hope that this is a true Turning Point for our country, to co-opt the name of Charlie’s organization — Turning Point USA.

Charlie’s voice has been silenced, but his message and his impact will not be. My prayer is that his death will awaken something in all of us — not hatred, not bitterness, but courage. Courage to speak boldly, to love openly, and to remember that disagreement does not mean dehumanization. If we can honor him in that way, then maybe, just maybe, this unthinkable loss can spark the kind of unity and resolve our broken world so desperately needs.