Charlie Kirk was shockingly assassinated on the Utah Valley University campus earlier this week. A giant among conservatives, he was also a man of great faith, husband, son, and father.

I run my eyes over the word “assassinated,” but my mind still cannot catch up with what my eyes have processed. My heart is heavy. Like many others, I have been sucked into doomscrolling to distract myself, only to find social media has become a haunting echo chamber of his voice blaring behind words of intense grief. 

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And, I write this filled with grief, but also guilt. I am painfully aware I should not be the one writing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. 

I have criticized him publicly for making points with which I disagreed. I clearly wasn’t paying enough attention to his mission because I didn’t call or write to him and didn’t give him a chance to discuss it. 

Yet, he always made it clear that his goal was to hear both sides of an argument. I didn’t give him the opportunity to hear my side, and today, I can’t apologize. 

I regret my decision not to approach Kirk with my concerns directly. Politics is heated. It’s been called a blood sport with no room for error, but the truth is, he and I were on the same team. Sometimes, team members disagree on the play. There were certainly areas where we were never going to come together. 

OPINION: CHARLIE KIRK’S HONORABLE LEGACY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE

Still, I saw great things blooming from his work, and I didn’t highlight them.

Charlie was one of the greatest defenders of life we will see in our lifetime. He was a staunch advocate of the unborn. We watched debate after debate as he methodically prodded some of the most rabid pro-abortion activists into finally recognizing that an unborn baby is a person deserving of a chance at life. 

Kirk’s debates were meant to inspire thought, not judgment. Apparently, it was too effective for the radical Left. They hate it when independent people think.

Politics was in his blood from a very young age, but let me be clear, politics alone was not the reason the Left hated him. His common-sense political viewpoints weren’t dangerous to them — quite the opposite, actually. 

If Kirk said something they found offensive, that was a tool to rally their troops. The radical Left news organizations centered hours of programming on 30-second clips of Charlie’s opinions. And, politicians joyfully used him to provoke hatred, the great motivator on the left.

No, it was not politics that made Kirk dangerous to the Left. It was something far more dangerous and undefeated. It was Christ. 

Kirk regularly preached a message of the love and joy we find in Christ our Savior. He asked people to join him as a happy warrior for the cause. Love is what they feared. 

Both love and hate have the ability to control human behavior. The Left chooses hate. They need their followers to hate someone because hate creates victimhood and a thirst for revenge. And every victim needs a savior.  

He broke the cycle of victimhood. He showed young Americans not just the beauty of life, but eternal life. There is no “messaging” on the Left that can compete with Christ.

I am sure they assumed Kirk’s popularity would fizzle out, and his movement would quietly end. In the purely political world, we see things in cycles — two-year, four-year, six-year, even eight-year cycles — but he wasn’t controlled by the political cycle like we are. He didn’t shy away from truth and light just because it wasn’t the winning message that cycle. He stood on principle.

God, family, life, and freedom were always the message. The Left couldn’t tolerate it, and in 2020, they thought they beat it. They got Joe Biden into the White House and won the youth vote. They falsely believed that had ended Kirk’s career.  

But his resolve grew deeper. The mission of Turning Point USA was never about a political cycle or a candidate. It was about preserving the free America we love. Kirk mixed his political platform with the Gospel. The Gospel doesn’t mix well with the culture war launched by the Left. In response, they ramped up their hatred for him.

Kirk was regularly telling young men and women to go to church, get married, have babies, and follow Christ. That’s not always a popular message in a political cycle, but Charlie played the long game. 

The day before Kirk was shot, the New York Post published a new poll that found “young men who voted for Donald Trump prioritize having children above all else — but being a parent is of so little importance to young women who voted for Kamala Harris, it charted second to last out of 13 options.” 

A revival was happening in this country. The men wanted to lead their families again. The long game was working. The innate desire to mate, have children, and love each other was being affirmed and embraced. Kirk’s message of love had permeated the next generation of men.

TRUMP AND VANCE LEAD MOURNING AFTER CHARLIE KIRK KILLED IN UTAH

Victimhood was out, valor was in, and the Left was permanently losing ground. 

You could cut the political tension with a knife. It took the Left decades to break the nuclear American family. Kirk was on a mission to rebuild it, and he had half the team ready to rock. The Left became desperate to stop him. 

Even the radicals know God-centered marriages bear good fruit. Christ-centered relationships take care of communities. The Gospel is the most dangerous message in the world because they can’t fight or silence God.

We relearned a lesson this week. Good doesn’t win every battle because Satan is real. But he will not win the war. This is not a passive fight. The fight for good, the fight for love, and the fight for God is daily. It’s minute by minute, especially in a world where Satan has disguised hate as love. 

We will never be silenced.

Kirk was not carrying a weapon the day he was killed. He was carrying a microphone. We live in a world where the Left calls speech “violence” to encourage people to respond to speech with violence. It’s a dangerous rationalization that will undoubtedly end in more bloodshed.

Speech in America is free, but protecting it comes at a price. Now, we will take up the microphone and carry on.

For Kirk and the country, we continue the mission to spread the Good News. He encouraged the men to lead their families once more. We will stand by their sides, and we will show American women the overwhelming joy family brings. We will break the lies of the Left and their hold on the next generation of mothers.

Kirk was recently interviewed and asked how he would want to be remembered. He responded, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing. The most important thing is my faith in my life.”

EDITORIAL: WHAT THE MURDER OF CHARLIE KIRK MEANS

The pain of loss is real for those left behind in the world. We lost a freedom fighter. We lost a voice for our movement, and we lost a man of great faith. Our hearts break most for Kirk’s young wife and family, whose world was shattered by pure evil. This young family is now separated by the divide between this life and the next. For that, we are devastated.

We know Kirk is celebrating his homecoming with our Lord and Savior. We rejoice in the knowledge that he is in paradise. His wife and children will see him again. Godspeed, Charlie. We’ll take it from here.

Tudor Dixon is a former Republican gubernatorial nominee, executive in Michigan’s steel industry, breast cancer survivor, and working mother of four girls. She is currently the host of The Tudor Dixon Podcast.