For all his meteoric rise, Charlie Kirk never stopped being a good person.
C harlie Kirk was a witness to faith, truth, and courage, on a scale difficult to comprehend. But for me, before all the headlines and the crowds, he was first and foremost a friend.
We met in a ballroom at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach in November 2012, about ten days after Barack Obama’s reelection. Conservative donors were dispirited and questioning whether decades of effort had amounted to much. That evening, a longtime movement supporter named Rebecca Dunn pulled me aside. “Francisco, you need to meet this young man,” she said, introducing me to a 19-year-old named Charlie Kirk.
At the time, I had spent eight years working in the conservative movement and knew every campus group and organization. So when this donor told me that my own organization should be “doing more things like Charlie Kirk’s,” I was taken aback. Later that night, I asked another influential friend in the movement: “Who is Charlie Kirk? What is Turning Point USA? And why is Rebecca Dunn so infatuated with him?” Over the next few years, I would learn why. And this fortuitous meeting also gave me the privilege of knowing Charlie before most of the world did. I remain forever grateful to Rebecca for her instincts and for her early introduction.
From the very beginning, Charlie stood out. He introduced himself to anyone who would listen, asked thoughtful questions, built connections, and wasn’t afraid to make bold asks. When critics came after him with sharp words online, he rarely took the bait. I recall when a well-known conservative intellectual — someone I knew — publicly mocked him. Instead of firing back on Twitter, Charlie texted me to see if I could help arrange a debate and offered this intellectual a space on his podcast platform. He wanted honest discourse, not feuds. The invitation was declined. The conservative critic was more than 25 years his senior. Yet in that moment, it was Charlie who showed the greater maturity.
Some resented Charlie: his tactics, his message, or the competition for donor attention. But he quickly won me over. Charlie recognized that the movement built by William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan was talking mostly to itself. He believed persuasion required fresh approaches. With a start-up mentality, he set out not to reform the established conservative movement, but to build his own.
In those early years, I would bump into him everywhere — conferences, donor meetings, and the living rooms of movement supporters. On a 2014 visit to the Palm Beach home of the now late Lee Hanley, I was told a “young man” staying there would join our conversation. Of course, it was Charlie. The three of us sat together for hours while Hanley predicted that America needed an outsider, a businessman not beholden to special interests, as president. Over the years, Charlie often reminded me of those prophetic words.
On another occasion, I visited a prominent Houston donor’s office and noticed a wall lined with framed photos of that donor alongside presidents and world leaders. One frame caught my eye: a photo with Charlie. I laughed quietly to myself — sometimes even when he wasn’t in the room, Charlie had already left his mark.
As Turning Point USA grew, I watched him evolve from hosting conferences of a few hundred students in Florida to events of over 10,000, with multiple large-scale events across the country each year. After I attended a TPUSA donor gala at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, one of Charlie’s associates told me that, while I wasn’t a major donor, I was wanted on the TPUSA Advisory Council because Charlie valued my friendship and counsel. I was honored to join. In those Advisory Council meetings, I saw another side of him: data-driven, precise, presenting to donors with the polish of a Silicon Valley founder. At this point, I had already known Charlie for five years, but now I was seeing him in another light. I turned to a friend after one meeting and said, “I feel like I just witnessed the Steve Jobs of the conservative movement.”
Charlie’s greatest public gift was persuasion. He could speak with equal clarity and conviction to high school students, billionaires, governors, or presidents. His reach extended from packed auditoriums to the radio airwaves, where he stepped into Rush Limbaugh’s former time slot in hundreds of markets, and into podcasts downloaded by millions. By 2024, he had mastered not only commentary but also the hard work of ground-level political organizing. Without Charlie and TPUSA, it is difficult to imagine Donald Trump’s reelection that year.
What made Charlie remarkable was not just the scale of his influence but the sheer range of skills he carried within one person. The way he balanced strategy, communication, and personal relationships was nothing short of extraordinary. And as he grew his organization, he learned to delegate and empower others. He also learned to take a “digital Sabbath” each Saturday
But as the years went on, Charlie’s message broadened beyond politics. He increasingly urged people, especially the young, to seek faith in God, to marry, to have children, to reject victimhood, and to embrace hard work and courage. His social media debates from college campuses went viral not only in America but around the world, and he never tired of those tours. And I never tired of telling people over the past five years that Charlie Kirk is “the William F. Buckley Jr. of our times.”
Behind the fame, the same 19-year-old I first met never disappeared. Charlie remained humble and kind, even as his influence soared. He listened when I challenged him, sometimes even acted on my suggestions, and occasionally helped me by showing up for events simply because I asked. When I teased him that he was “always right” in our debates, he once texted back, “Not always. I’ve been wrong plenty.” That little flash of humor and humility captured him perfectly.
On September 10, the world lost the most impressive young person of his generation. I lost a friend. Given how omnipresent he was in my life and in the world, I still struggle to believe he’s gone. But as a Christian, I know he is where he always strived to be: with the Lord.
As a close witness to his meteoric rise, I often reflect on why God placed me in that Palm Beach ballroom in 2012, and why Charlie kept appearing on my path so many times since. I don’t know why his life was taken so suddenly, but I do know this: God gifted us Charlie at precisely the time we needed him. His legacy is not only political victories but also the lessons he modeled: persuasion, civil discourse, faith, family, courage, humility.
In one of our last conversations, as in so many before, I told him how proud I was of him. I wish I could tell him once more. But perhaps his final gift is the very public witness of his life and death: people finding their way back to the Lord because of his example and all that he sacrificed for us. He spoke for so many who felt silenced. That is how Charlie continues to speak, even now. It is why people who never knew him personally felt like they did and are changing their lives because of his witness.
The Apostle Peter wrote: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence . . .” Charlie was always prepared and he always delivered his words with kindness and empathy. Because he delivered such hard truths, in a very influential way, there are few people that had as many “enemies” as Charlie Kirk. Yet he never held hate in his heart for anyone. That should be a lesson for us all as we try to find ways to move our country forward even when we don’t know how to do so with people who disagree with us. We must find a way.
For all his meteoric rise, Charlie Kirk never stopped being a good person. He had an internal joy and a magnetic smile. That is how I will remember him. And that is how he will continue to challenge us: to live with courage, to stand for truth, and to hold fast to faith. And always to be prepared to give an explanation to anyone who asks us.