MORNING GLORY: Mourning Charlie

Charlie Kirk was my colleague at Salem Media with whom I was friendly and with whom I would exchange texts and emails. He was not a close friend. I was not his mentor. If anyone was a mentor to this gifted autodidact who founded Turning Point USA, it would be Dennis Prager, to whom Charlie’s new book is dedicated. 

Dennis suffered a devastating injury late last year, but is slowly recovering. I learned from Dennis’s close colleague and co-founder of PragerU, Allen Estrin, last week that Charlie was often by Dennis’s hospital bed, and that Dennis summoned the strength to post his own grief online after the assassination. Dennis is a moral giant, a shaper of men and women and especially young men. It is not surprising that Charlie looked up to him, as he did few others. 

If Charlie had been Jewish, "Sitting Shiva" would now have concluded. As a great supporter of the State of Israel and of religious liberty generally, Charlie would have been overwhelmed by the love of his Jewish friends and admirers around the world. That evangelicals and Catholics grieve his loss so deeply is less surprising, but its degree is astonishing still. 

YOUTH LEADERS MOURN 'THE GODFATHER OF CAMPUS CONSERVATISM' CHARLIE KIRK FOLLOWING ASSASSINATION

Most media people know Charlie as a political leader and supporter of President Donald Trump. His colleagues at Salem Media knew him as this incredible, growing force in many fields. I confess bewilderment at what comes next. The assassination of young and dynamic leaders who did not seek office, but only to strengthen the reach of the Gospel and the strength of the Constitution is new in the history of the Republic. 

Turning Point USA will carry on and there are lots of young men and women who will pick up Charlie’s flag, like his wonderfully articulate wife Erika and his friend Alex Marlow. The tragedy for the Republic is that Charlie was showing a way to renew the commitment of the framers to ordered liberty, to a public square where the passion of faction could dissipate in debate that became dialogue. For some, that was the threat. They do not welcome argument. They want only the power to impose their will on non-adherents to their visions. 

"I really hope that the assassination of Charlie Kirk is a turning point for us as a society where we look and see where things have come, the point at which we’ve come to in the United States," Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told me this week. Referencing a passage from G.K. Chesterton on the necessity of argument, but the need to avoid quarreling, she noted that this distinction is crucial and argument and quarreling end at very different spots. "One is to silo ourselves so that we don’t engage with the other side. Now that’s the opposite of what Charlie Kirk did. He consistently engaged the other side."

"I think the other message in that [Chesterton] passage is that when you do engage the other side, we’re engaging ideas and we’re not trying to attack or tear down people," the justice continued, "And there’s a huge difference between the two. And I think those who fall into attacking people primarily do it verbally and not physically. But too often, I guess, we’re now seeing that verbal attacks can spill over into something more sinister." 

I first met Charlie a dozen years ago on the campus of Colorado Christian University, where former United States senator and the then president of the university, Bill Armstrong and his colleague State Senator John Andrews, had talked me into teaching about 40 high school students a two-week course. The course covered the Constitution and the outline of American history one needed to understand the great "frame of silver" that protected our nation’s "Apple of Gold" as Lincoln described the Constitution, borrowing from Psalms. 

It was the genius of Bill and John, a legacy carried on by CCU’s new president, Eric Hogue, to bring high school students to the Western Conservative Summit held in Denver every summer and to use their mornings for teaching, their afternoons for enjoying the Rockies and their evenings to learn from speakers at the summit. Just brilliant. 

I accepted their invitation to lead the students in the morning class, though my experience is teaching law students, not high schoolers. Senator Armstrong then added another brilliant stroke (for he was a brilliant man.) He asked me to set aside an hour to two for a young man starting a new project. That young man was Charlie, at age 18 or 19. Turning Point USA had the barest of bones of structure then. I of course agreed. What teacher doesn’t welcome a guest speaker? 

I was not prepared for Charlie, however, for when he rolled in and up to the front of the room in front of those 40 or so students just a couple of years younger than him. Charlie took and held their attention and implanted in them an enthusiasm for political engagement of the sort that endures. It was a revelation. He had a gift. Charisma cannot be taught. It simply shows up. Charlie had it. He never lost it. 

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Over the dozen years since, as our paths have repeatedly crossed until we both landed on the air for Salem, Charlie was always growing and learning. I’d hear from his colleagues in a seminar at the Claremont Institute. Charlie inhaled everything online at Hillsdale College, would repeatedly urge me to continue the "Hillsdale Dialogues" with the college’s president, Dr. Larry Arnn, because Arnn is a gifted teacher and Charlie wanted to learn, learn, learn. The classic autodidact, Charlie made his own way towards wisdom while being in, but not of, the world. 

Along the way, he met and married the beautiful and wonderful wife the country has now met as a grieving widow, had two beautiful children and became the friend and ally of pretty much every Republican of note, from President Trump down to school board members of remote townships. Charlie and his Turning Point USA team were all about building the next generation of political leadership. He has done that. They are everywhere, just as Hillsdale grads are, just as diligent followers of PragerU are. Because those who build institutions build lasting monuments to their genius. 

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When Allen Estrin spoke about Charlie last week, he noted that Charlie, as significant as he had already become — the reach and influence of Rush Limbaugh, but half the age of when Rush hit that mark and backed by a large and growing movement that Charlie had built on campuses across the country — was not even at 40% of what he would have become. That is the tragedy for the country. Charlie was producing informed and activist citizens, young men and women of faith and purpose who were injecting lifeblood into a republic of laws, led by older generations weary of battles among themselves and always facing enemies abroad. 

There are other dynamic young leaders out there — Vice President Vance, Secretary Marco Rubio, Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, Congress members Elise Stefanik and Dan Harrigan, a generation of warriors from battlefields across the world and many more. All is hardly lost in the ongoing struggle to preserve the Constitution and religious liberty and Charlie would be the first to say the Lord is in control. But as his Sitting Shiva ends, it is all together right and proper to say: We shall not see his equal again. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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