What Did Charlie Kirk Stand For?

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This week saw the one year anniversary of the assassination of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk on the Utah Valley University campus. There with him that day was one of his closest mentors, Christian apologists, and author Frank Terrick. In this episode, we sit down in studio with Terrick to discuss Kirk's legacy and the challenges and progress he's seen in his own work as a Christian apologist. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley.

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That's promo code wire at takeline.com. Joining us now is Frank Turric, author, and apologist. Frank, thanks so much for coming to studio with us.

It's great being here first time I'm at the daily wire.

Pretty exciting to have you in the studio with us. So we wanted to talk to you this week because it's the anniversary of the killing of Charlie Kirk. But also we wanted to talk to you about some of the work that you're doing now in your new book.

Let's start with Charlie. I mean, this has been an emotional week for a lot of people. There's the celebration of his life this week and the memorial. What has this experience been like for you this last year? Well, the first person I think of when I wake up is Charlie the last

person I think of before I fall asleep is Charlie. Some people call that PTSD but I think that's misnamed because it's not a disorder. It's normal.

“You should when you see something like that.”

Think about it for quite a while.

person I think about the most is Erica because if I'm feeling pain over this

Erica is multiplied by a thousand.

“And so I just try and encourage her as much as I can because her whole world”

was destroyed. Her future was destroyed. The future she thought she had with Charlie and the father of her children was destroyed. But she is such an amazing woman. He did not marry her just for her beauty.

I've learned so much about her over the past year that is inspiring. I mean, she could have lashed out to so many people slander in her and she hasn't.

She's always been focused on the mission which is God family and country,

which is what Charlie was focused on. She's concerned about her children, concerned about the country. And mostly concerned about heaven because she's now guiding these make heaven crowded events that churches around the country. So she hasn't in any way faltered.

In fact, I told her this the other day I said if the rules were reversed, if tragically you had been murdered and Charlie was left behind, I don't think Charlie would have done as well as you have over the past year. She is that good. Now she's not the same person as Charlie obviously.

She has different gifts but I would put her up against anyone going through this difficulty. I think she's handled it so well. Now a lot of listeners might not realize exactly how close to the situation you were. Can you tell us about that day a year ago? Well, Charlie back in 2020 asked me to mentor him in what we call Christian apologetics evidence for the faith

because he had seen so many events I've done on college campuses. Now as you know it can't be difficult mentoring somebody more intelligent than you,

“but not with Charlie because the only thing that exceeded his intellect was his humility.”

The few things that I knew that he wanted to know, he wanted me to help him with. And I wasn't his only mentor. He had people all over the place who were mentors to him because he was that much of a learner. He wanted to learn and get better. So I was with him that day because we had spent the previous three days just getting ready for the tour, getting ready for questions that might be asked.

So I was standing about 25 feet from him. He's under the tent. I'm just outside the tent when he was shot. And I got in the back of the SUV to try and help but he wasn't there. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking right past me into eternity. His eyes were fixed and we couldn't stop the bleeding.

But even if we had the surgeon later told us, Charlie had been shot in the operating room. Couldn't have saved him. That's the only good news we got was that he didn't suffer at all. He was killed instantly.

“Yeah. What do you think about the decision to hold the anniversary at the university?”

At the campus where he was shot. How do you feel about them? Well, I think that that campus needs to be reclaimed for something good. Because obviously most of the people there were find up standing people and they saw a tragedy. A murderous evil event take place right before their eyes. So to go back, I've already been back myself. I spoke to students back in March there.

But this is going to be completely an honor of Charlie. I don't think we ought to abandon any place just because an evil person decided to carry out such a deed. We can go back there and try and bring healing to those people.

In fact, if you look at the Apostle Paul who had some of the most difficult events happening in his life from shipwrecks to beatings to torture to ultimately execution,

he says in his second letter to the Corinthians that God comforts us so we can comfort others. And so when I'm feeling, oh, what was me? I just think about Erica and try and help her and I think TPUSA is thinking the same thing. We're going to take the comfort God has given us and bring it back to that community. And that's what they're doing. If we wanted to ask you exactly about TPUSA and the health of that organization, obviously Charlie poured his life into this.

His wife has taken up the reins and pushed it forward and we know in the early days after his murder that TPUSA sold record number of new charters going up chapters going up. How has it been? How has the health of that organization of that?

I mean, they went from 3,000 pastors to 12,000 pastors. They increased their campus groups, whether it's high school or college dramatically.

“I think one figure was like 68% up and another was maybe more.”

And so they've grown dramatically. They've got more donors now than ever because they continue the work. Nobody is going to replace Charlie. However, enough people can help to replace him. And so Erica is keeping a steady hand moving the organization forward.

In fact, the first time I saw her after the murder was in the emergency room.

Maybe five hours after Charlie was murdered and we saw each other for the first time. And she came up to me in tears and said, "He loved you. He was doing what he wanted to do. Please don't let his legacy die." And so she has been doing everything she can to keep that legacy going. I'm doing what I can do.

And I tell the whole story in the first chapter of the war on reality. By the way, this book was halfway done when that murder took place. It wasn't going to be dedicated to Charlie, but after he was murdered, Phoenix, my co-author and I who's brilliant by the way. She said, "Hey, we need to dedicate this to Charlie." Absolutely. So the first chapter is all about what happened leading up to that day.

“What happened that day? What happened after? And then where do we go from here?”

Well, we want to ask you about that book, but one more question about Charlie.

He functioned as kind of like a mediator between different factions of the right. And I think a lot of people have pointed out that things have gone sideways and a lot of ways without him there. In the center, can you talk a little bit about that and what may be you've seen in the wake of it? Charlie was a coalition builder. Charlie could keep Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the same room and say to them, "Do you want to get 80% of what you want or 0%. There's nobody like that now."

And now, of course, Tucker's gone off into La La Land and Ben is steady as ever. But there's nobody like Charlie. There was nobody like Charlie. Nobody's going to replace Charlie. We'll see how it, how it goes, moving forward. But he was unique talent with unique gifts. And of course, he knew everybody, right? And he could be trusted because in fact, we don't have time to get into this.

But I was twice as age, but I learned more from him than he learned from me. In fact, he was following the scriptures better than I was. And I was like, "I mean, I can give you several events like that. I'm going, I wouldn't have done that." But he did it because it was the right thing to do. The war on reality, this is my kind of book.

By the way, it does feel like this was, it's amazing that you were halfway done with it before this happened.

Because over the last year, there's definitely been a war on reality on so many fronts. And we've been seeing this from a conservative, perspective, culture-wide for a long time. But then we actually, this sort of conspiracy theory world that's been created online. Yeah. You've had to battle this personally.

All of us are battling it on some fronts or waiting through the waters of this.

“How do we get the culture back on course in terms of actually being grounded in reality?”

Well, some of what we talk about in the book are basic laws of logic that people don't know anymore, because we don't teach logic in public schools. Instead of teaching kids how to think we're teaching them what to feel. And that can be dangerous because if you follow your feelings without reason or moral restraint, you're going to wind up in a very dark place.

So, for example, one of the reasons our culture is where it is now is because we bought into postmodernism. What is postmodernism? Well, the central tentative postmodernism is there's no overarching truth. There's no grand narrative. They say there's no objective truth.

So when they say there's no truth, I ask them, is that true? Is it true that there's no truth? Because it's a self-contradictory position. It's like saying I can't speak a word in English. You know, yet people don't see these logical contradictions.

So that's one thing we try and teach people. Just basic laws of logic. Don't let them get away with this. Don't let them say, like, for example, reason is a tool of oppression. As they give you reasons to convince you that reason is a tool of oppression.

Right? I mean, it's just, it's logically self-contradictory. And so that's at the basis. If you can knock that out of the culture and get people to believe in basic truth again, then instead of my truth, your truth nonsense.

There's no such thing as your truth. There's no such thing as my truth. There's just the truth. In fact, we have a section in here called reality doesn't have pronouns.

Or I don't have my laws of logic.

You have your laws of logic. There's not a law that says, doubt shall not murder for me, but not for you. Right? I mean, this is just reality. And too many people are rebelling against reality.

In fact, if I had to sum up the problem, it's the problem we've had since the Garden of Eden. The biggest problem we all have is not death or sickness. Jesus has solved that for us. The biggest problem we have is rebellion. We want to go our own way.

So we will rebelling against reality to the point that we'll even say that a man is not a man or a woman. Or a child has to be castrated for some sort of ideology. Or abortion is healthcare as we pull baby parts out of a woman. I mean, it's a complete denial of reality and it's become demonic. What got you interested in writing this book?

If it predated this murder clearly, it was on your mind for a few years. You mentioned some of the trans stuff. What were the issues that really got you feeling like you had to write it? That's how it started Georgia. It started on the identity issue.

Because, you know, say prior to 10 years ago, people might say certain things, but they wouldn't try to impose them on you. Once the trans movement really took off, it wasn't just like, well, I'm really a woman,

“but you have to believe that I am and affirm me in that.”

Now, suddenly, I can live my authentic self, but you can't live your authentic self, right?

What if your authentic self is to always tell me the truth?

Oh, you can't live that, right? But I get to live whatever I want and I get to impose my pretend world on you. And we don't help people when we affirm their errors. Tom is so famously said this, he said, "When you want to help someone, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

How often do we tell people what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear? You know, why we do that? Because we want to protect ourselves. We don't want them mad at us. So we wind up going along with their little pretend world, allowing them to go off the cliff,

and we're just protecting ourselves. That's not love. Love is not approval. Love is telling people what they need to hear. Yeah, truth is hard.

Truth is hard to deliver often. It is not. It feels like writing this and doing the research for this book and thinking through this.

“Did you were you surprised by what you discovered exploring this topic?”

Well, there were some areas we discovered in academia that are actually when you read them. You go, "I can't believe they believe this." That they actually tried to put forth this, like for example, James Lindsay and Peter Burgosian. And Helen Pluck Rose, I think her name was, were atheistic scholars. They invented all these crazy, woke studies and got half of them approved.

And one of them had to do with dog rape in a dog park. And that this was somehow illustrative of human sexual interaction.

And when they finally got found out that all this was fake research, academia just kept going on.

With these crazy, hair-brained theories, but exposing some of that was kind of fun. Yeah. Now, over the past few years, we've seen, particularly around the time of Charlie's death, we've seen a new interest, especially among young people in Christianity. Obviously, that's like right on your beat as a Christian apologist.

What have you seen on college campuses? Is this a trend that you see manifest in real life? Or, as it, would you say, it's overblown? What are you seeing on the ground?

“Well, I think since Charlie, we've had more people ask questions about how do I get my friend to be a Christian.”

Rather than antagonism toward Christianity. Now, if we went back 20 years ago in the hate day of the new atheist, we would get a lot of pushback on issues like, oh, you sure that the universe had a beginning? Are you sure that God's behind it? Are you sure about the fine-tuning argument?

What about all the scientific stuff? That's completely shifted. It seems in the past, say, five or six years. The top three objections now to Christianity are morality, morality, and morality. People aren't as concerned as to whether or not Christianity's true. They're concerned about, is it good?

According to their definition of good, right? And their definition normally means, I get to sleep with whoever I want to sleep with, just being honest. That's really what's motivating this. So it's like the LGBT is the thing? Yes.

And strangely, many of the people who are supporting such movements are atheists. And they claim that there are certain rights. But if there is no God or no rights, everything's just a matter of opinion. It's just your opinion against somebody else's opinion. Because if there is no standard of righteousness,

objective standard outside of ourselves that we're all obligated to obey, then you can't say that living a certain way is right and living another way is wrong.

No, there are no rights. Everything's a matter of opinion.

“And yet we all know murdering somebody on a college campus is not a matter of opinion.”

Yeah. It's really wrong. If it's really wrong, there must be a standard of right. We're all obligated to obey and that's God's nature. And that's why our country began.

We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal and endowed by their government. No, it doesn't say that. Endowed by their creator, we're certainly an alienable rights. Governments are instituted to protect rights.

Not to grant rights. If government gives you your rights, they're not rights or preferences.

You've got most countries are, actually.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And new government comes in and changes the law. You don't have rights. No, you have rights regardless of what your government says.

If God exists. How do you combat? You've said some of this, but I would love to have this fleshed out. How do you combat the identity, the identity, the identity morality? I guess this is how you would say it.

Identity morality. Morality that actually stems from my identity and my identity and realizing that is the ultimate moral good. How do you combat? How do you? Well, we have in chapter 10 we have a chart on page 192 that really once you see the chart you go.

Oh, now I see why we have such conflict in our culture because our culture is bought into cultural Marxism. That if you have certain qualities, you're automatically an oppressor. If you're a white Christian male who is, say, a heterosexual and a United States citizen, you're automatically an oppressor. Notice Charlie Kirk at all of those qualities. But if you're a person of color, if you're LGBTQ, if you're female, if you're a non-Christian and a non-citizen, bonus points, if you're an illegal alien, then you're oppressed.

And this explains why so many of the left are saying we've got to let these people out of jail because they're oppressed. That they're actually protecting the victim, or I should say the perpetrator rather than the victim. And when you don't punish the guilty, you wind up punishing the innocent.

“And that's what's going on in our culture right now.”

So once you see this cultural binary between oppressor and oppressed, then you realize we're judging people, not on what the Bible says, be impartial. Not on what Martin Luther King says, you know, let's judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We're actually judging people and putting them in good or bad boxes based on non-behavioral characteristics like race. Like whether you're a citizen or not, whether what your economic status is, all of these are supposed to be somehow either virtuous or non-virtuous.

When they have nothing to do with virtue. And so it's a completely backward worldview, it's a worldview of perpetual conflict. You can't have a community, common unity. If you continually pit the people within that community against one another based on non-behavioral characteristics. Do you get the sense that anything is changing on college campuses?

Obviously there's a lot of pushback against this daily wire has done a pretty good job of exposing what's going on on college campuses. There are parents who want something different. I have heard that over the past, say, 30 years, Christians have flooded into philosophy departments in much larger numbers than, say, 60 years ago. Are you seeing any kind of tied turning on college campuses with regards to allowing more free speech? Or do you think they're still very much.

I still think the college campus is the most anti-Christian anti-reality real estate in America. Not all. Quite obviously you got Hillsdale, you got Liberty, you got a few others, right?

“But generally, and that's why we go there.”

Because we want to throw a lifeline to the believer and put a stone in the shoe of the skeptic. And just give a case that what they're believing is false and Christianity is true.

This is why I always ask the question, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

And actually, 99 times out of 10, as we say in Mississippi, the answer is no. They wouldn't believe it because it's not a head problem. It's a hard problem. They don't want God to exist because they want to be God over their own lives. They're not on a truth question or on a happiness quest.

And they're just going to believe whatever they think's going to make them happy. That's the problem. But at least asking the question, all the objections are off the table then. Yeah. You're simply saying, if it were true, would you believe it? How do you evangelize to people like that?

Well, with people like that, you ask the question and they say no. And at least forces the... Yeah, it is not much you can do. Other than, I pray, and I may be plant seeds if I can stay in their life a little bit. I love them, which means I don't approve of what they do, but I try and tell them what they need to hear.

I ask them a lot of questions to see if they can even affirm their own worldview. And then I wait. Yeah. Why wait? Because sometimes people only look up when they're on their back. You know, when a tragedy strikes, then they call you.

Oh, you're a person, Georgia, you're a person of spiritual depth. Can you tell me why this happened? What can I do now?

Let's rate theest friend going to say it. There's no rhyme or reason any of this, right? No, they're going to call you when the students ready the student will summon the teacher. So, until a tragedy strikes, sometimes nothing's going to happen. And even then, they may not.

And sometimes it's being forced to say something out loud. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe not in the moment, but down the road has an impact. Reality, you know, is part of the title of your book.

Reality does win in the end.

“But I think the problem, I think we've seen in the US,”

is that sometimes that takes a long time. Oh, reality's undefeated. It's undefeated. But sometimes it takes decades. But we have seen, it seems like some just getting on the political side of it.

Some policies, some just the justice system practices and policies. We have seen, it's almost like a fast track where we've seen the negative results in a pretty quickly, like a legal immigration. We've seen massive negative results of that. You know, we have seen the violence, sorry to say, coming from the trans community.

Oh, yeah. Here we had something exactly coming from that with Charlie, coming from that side. That's where the stuff leads. We have seen that happen very rapidly. Is that part of the key here is just reality slapping people in the face.

And maybe us being able to point them in that direction or show them that this is the natural result of this part of it. I don't know if you know James Lindsay is, you know, James Lindsay. I just mentioned, you know, he's an agnostic now. He's moving in the direction. Anyway, maybe three or four years ago, he texted Charlie and he said Charlie.

I've been reading a lot about communist socialist regimes in the last century where they murdered like a hundred million other own people.

And because of that, I'm starting to believe in Satan and Charlie texted him back. If Satan, then God. And James was like, good point, right, because there can't be evil unless there's good, because evil is a privation in good. So when people start seeing evil, sometimes they start thinking, well, maybe there is a good side. There has to be a good side if you think about it, because evil is a lack in a good thing.

Evil is anti creation, evil tear things down, speaking of conspiracy theories. It can take you 13 years to build an organization.

“Other people can try to tear it down in 10 minutes, right?”

It can take you a year or two to build a house. You can burn it down in five minutes. Evil to grades what is good. It's not a thing in itself. And so when people start seeing evil up close, tragically, we saw a year ago, then you start realizing that good exists.

In fact, the more evil that I witness or hear about, the more convinced I am that Christianity is true, because Christianity is actually the answer to the problem of evil. There'd be no reason for Jesus to come to earth unless sin had entered the world. Since it did entered the world, he came to take it upon himself and by trusty and in him. We're not only forgiven, but given his righteousness.

So yes, evil has starting to wake people up. Like, this is getting really bad. When we have women actually deciding that it's okay to murder their children and people are applauding it. Because, oh, she took too much medicine or whatever. I think other people look at that and go, this is crazy.

This is demonic. If there's a demon world out there, there's got to be an angel world. It's hard to witness this, but maybe there is a purpose in the end. And it is a lot of times we've talked about this a lot. What is motivated some of the actions that we've witnessed of the last few years.

And it really is evil for the sake of evil. There is actually no rationale for it that you can defend. It is evil for the sake of evil.

“I think when you come to see that, you have to conclude that there is.”

If there's evil, there's good. There's good. Yeah.

Well, one thing that I've seen over the past year, first of all, Jesus and the apostles called Satan, a murderer,

a liar, accuser, and slander who seeks to steal kill and destroy. We had a murder last year. What have we had since then, lies, accusations, and slander seeking to steal kill and destroy. It could hardly be more obvious. People don't believe in the demonic, I'm going, it's textbook, it's right out of it's exactly what Jesus said.

And people are blind, you're going, how can you miss this? That's what this is. And how many people have we heard in recent years of hearing voices to murder somebody else? Yeah. That's demonic.

It's happens on several occasions. On the positive side, you know, I get, I can get pretty depressed, doomed, scrolling on Twitter. But there's a lot of, there's more people that see through this. There's more, there are more people that are waking up that are being deceived. And you mentioned James Lensy, I think that shows that the intellectual climate is changing.

I mean, you look at Ion Hercelli.

I mean, certainly the intellectual class is always going to be a decade or more ahead of, you know, regular people, or behind in some cases.

And I kind of kept pulling on the thread and eventually, like I came to see the same world for you as you when it comes to Christianity.

“But, you know, it takes a while and it's very interesting to see some of these public intellectuals who have sworn up and down.”

They've been atheist for decades now kind of turning.

Yeah, there is some of that. You're absolutely right.

Justin Bradley over in the UK calls with the surprising rebirth of belief in God.

“So, yeah, there is some high profile people that are now saying, yes, Christianity is indeed true.”

Even some atheists who don't want it to be true are admitting the benefits of it like Richard Dawkins. Suddenly, I'm a cultural Christian. Dude, you've been fighting against Christianity your whole life and then suddenly you see Islam coming along and you go, oh, maybe I want a Christian society rather than a Muslim society. But to see people like that living, even incrementally, it's something.

Yeah, that's that's the good thing. There's always a ripple effect. There's a ripple effect to Charlie's murder.

It's actually a tsunami. It's been a lot that's happened since Charlie's murder and awful event, but did bring forth a lot of good. A lot of people came back to Jesus. A lot of people learned about Jesus for the first time. A lot of people got saved and sanctified and I still get emails from people saying, I was an atheist. I'm a Christian now because of Charlie Kirk. Still happens. So, there are good things to come from. In fact, I submit to you if we could bring Charlie back to here today and say Charlie,

all these people now are headed for glory because of what happened to you. If we gave you the choice to go back to just before the murder, would you want to?

“And I think he would say, I don't want to leave Eric and the kids, but now that's what my life was about anyway.”

Trying to get people into the kingdom and trying to get them to care about their family and their country. If thousands or millions of people are in the kingdom now because of what happened to me, I'll take that. Well Frank, we so appreciate your time and coming in. I've been a fan a long time and yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me so much. Thank you. That was Frank Turk, host of I don't have enough faith to be an atheist and co-author of the war on reality. And this has been a week in addition of one of why.