➡ The text is a heartfelt tribute to Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. The speaker shares their journey with Charlie, from their first meeting to their shared vision for the organization. They highlight Charlie’s ambition, work ethic, and dedication to his cause, despite challenges and criticisms. The speaker also emphasizes Charlie’s humility, sense of humor, and focus on ideas over appearances.
➡ This text is a heartfelt tribute to a friend named Charlie, who was known for his humor, frugality, and dedication. Charlie was a good steward of donor funds, loved Kanye West’s music, and was always ready for a debate. He was reliable, even in difficult circumstances, and stood by his beliefs even when they were controversial. The text also highlights their shared experiences, from road trips to facing protesters, and how they always had each other’s back.
➡ This text is about a deep friendship between the speaker and Charlie, who supported each other through life’s ups and downs. They shared a bond like siblings, often joking and planning together. Despite pressures and misunderstandings, their friendship remained strong. The speaker expresses deep sorrow over Charlie’s tragic end, vowing to keep his memory alive.

Well, that has never happened before. I guess we could say Charlie broke the Internet one more time. 150,000 of you guys were watching, and the system just sort of crashed. And it just really makes me happy that that happened, actually. It was already very difficult for me to do this for a lot of reasons, but I knew it was important because I didn’t want the last thing that people had in their minds about Charlie to be the moment he lost his life. That was what was especially hard because he’s just had so many amazing moments throughout his career.

And as I was saying, I was having this discussion with George this morning, obviously through a lot of tears about not wanting Charlie’s caricature to survive, when the actual Charlie Kirk individual, who Charlie Kirk actually is, is so much more important. The caricature of the cartoon is that Charlie’s this young, smart guy, made a career out of debating college kids, decided not to go to college, started Turning Point usa. And I think a lot of people thought that Charlie must take himself a bit too seriously. And I want you guys to know that that could not be further from the truth.

Charlie and me were always laughing. Yes, he was ambitious. Everybody knows Charlie is ambitious. I met him back in 2017 when Turning Point was this very young organ. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew who Charlie Kirk was. And Charlie was always wearing these really baggy suits. I mean, they looked like they were hand me downs from three generations. Because he was focused on the ideas. He didn’t care about his appearance. He was laser focused on what he knew Turning Point could become. Not could become, but would become. He hired me on the spot. We were at this conference in Florida, and he and I used to always say, we never said the rest.

The rest was history. You know, the rest is history. We say the rest is future. We were totally locked in. And I want you guys to know about our first planning sesh, okay? It was in the middle of Chicago o’ Hare Airport. There is this restaurant that’s called the Macaroni Grill. And I sat down with Charlie on our first trip together. He flips over this little paper menu as we’re waiting for our flight, and he takes out this pen and he just starts drawing a map of what he wants to happen into the future, what the Turning Point organization will become.

And it was spastic. It was unhinged. It was the absolute best. It was true. Charlie, he was a visionary. Charlie was a visionary. If he could envision it, it was going to happen. He knew that. I knew that. And what he had envisioned was for Turning Point USA to become the biggest conservative student organization, not just in the nation, by the way, but in the world. He kind of squabbled and squibbled and wrote that the structure is currently a 501C3. And he’s sitting there talking to me, but here’s what we can do in the future, and here’s.

And then I’m going to probably take control the RNC. I mean, he’s 23 years old, right? And he’s talking to. Speaking to me about how he’s going to take over the rnc. The person that he adored the most, like, really never in a million years did he think that he was going to meet him. And of course he did, was Rush Limbaugh. He was really raised on Rush Limbaugh, listening to Rush Limbaugh day in and day out. And he told me through many conversations that if he could have a show like Rush Limbaugh one day, he would be very happy.

That was, I think, his ultimate goal. And it happened. We had a bunch of rules. Charlie’s rule was never say no to Fox News. So even if the show was at 4am in the morning, crack of dawn, I cannot tell you guys how many hits we did on Fox News. I’m talking four hits a day up at 4am for Fox and Friends first, and then doing whatever the evening program was because he believed this is the way that we’re going to get our names out there. You know, we have to work harder. My rule was like.

I was like, we shouldn’t drink. Everybody in politics is drinking. They’re drunk all the time. If we’re passionate, we have to understand that it’s a disadvantage. People are always made weaker. It doesn’t make anybody stronger to be drunk after an event. And so we didn’t drink. And we had a motto, a couple of mottos. But Charlie’s was, we can always outwork our opponents. I can’t tell you how many times we looked at each other and we said, we can outwork them. Everyone was bigger than us, but not working harder than us. It came really directly from Charlie.

It was the thing that he said we could always control. And I totally agreed with that. Work ethic meant everything. I think it’s very obvious to everyone. I was the culture. Charlie was the politics. Charlie needed a little bit more culture. I needed to learn the rules of politics. I mean, he could tell you every office in the White House and what this person does. Things I’d never even heard before. I was just passionate about Black Lives Matter. I just, I knew it was going to be harmful for black Americans, and I wanted to share that message.

And Charlie showed me how to do that in the best way possible. I learned very quickly with Charlie that politics breeds unnecessary enemies. It is incredibly, it’s disheartening industry. You know, you’re lucky if you have one friend, you’re lucky if you have two friends. There are so many people that will test your character along the way. Like I said, I was a nobody. I was funny going through text messages yesterday and I’m like, charlie, my goal is to have 50,000 followers on Instagram. I think we can do it by the end of the year. And after he hired me, he had been working already really hard on doing this campus tour throughout California.

He called it the Big Three. Ucla, we’re going to Stanford, we’re going to do Berkeley. And there was somebody who was a lot bigger than me at the time who was going to be kind of the face of it, because like I said, people were not going to buy tickets to hear me and Charlie Kirk speak. And he had someone that they definitely would hear speak. And for whatever reason, and this was just my luck, Charlie was pumping gas. He was inside of the, inside of the gas station. And I’m sitting in the car and I see this person, his phone is sitting in the car and the messages are lighting up on the screen.

And this individual saying, I don’t want to do this event with that new girl you hired. Like, I don’t want to share the stage with her. Essentially just mean, I mean, just mean spirited. No reason I’m bigger than her. I should do this by myself. And then if she wants to come on and be an auxiliary, that’s fine, but I don’t want to share the stage with her. This newbie, I remember Charlie gets in the, in the car and he, he looks at the message and he looks at me and he knows I’ve looked at the message I saw and I’m like, Charlie, I said, I have no idea, like, where this is going.

Obviously, I understand that the sensible you doesn’t want to lose this person on the ticket, that this means a lot to you and you’ve worked hard on it. But you’re going to have to learn that you have to make the right decision and not the easy decision. And this is only going to work if we keep making the right decisions, you know, And I could just see the struggle within him. And then he just, he did the right thing. He said, okay, if you don’t want to do this event with this newbie Candace, then we’re not going to do the event, and Candace and I will do it alone.

And we did. We went. We went at it alone, Actually. I think for that particular event, Dave Rubin hopped on and the rest was future. For two years straight, Charlie and I flew around the world together on very little sleep. We were always exhausted. I’m not kidding. We took hundreds of flights together. We slept in the crappiest hotel rooms. I mean, walls so paper thin, I could. You just hear everything. And when you’re in that capacity with someone two years straight, just traveling nonstop, you really get to know them, you really see them in every condition.

You start bickering like an old married couple. Charlie, this is not how you pack a suitcase. I say to him, you can’t just, like, put your dirty running shoes on top of your clean shirts, okay? You just can’t do that, Charlie. You can’t. You need to eat something, okay? You’re running on things. You got to eat something, okay? This is not. This is not a full meal. Back forth. Charlie, you gotta buy yourself some suits that fit that conversation. I was like, charlie, okay, I get it. You’re like, boy, Wander, you gotta buy some suits that fit.

I wasn’t the only one that was hammering him on that. It was also Don Jr. And eventually him. And I think it was actually him and Eric. They’re like, you know, Charlie, I know you’re very frugal. We know that you’re very aware that your salary comes from donors. He always wanted to be a really good steward of their capital. But eventually Don and Eric got him a gift certificate, I think was for his birthday to a fancy suit, place to go get fitted. And the rest. The rest is future, right? I. It is so important for me to make sure that you guys understand how absolutely hilarious Charlie was.

Charlie was hilarious, okay? He did not take himself too seriously. He was. Was so good at doing imitations and accents. Anybody, Any imitation, any accent. He was just on the money. And all we did was laugh. It’s all you can do and laugh. People were just so crazy all the time. When I was reading through the chat today, I was just laughing with just tears in my eyes, thinking of the many road trips that we took. So many hours spent just talking trash to one another, making fun of one another. One of the best moments that I can think of, and there are so many to choose from, was we were driving through Colorado and I put on a Kanye song, you know, on my playlist, and Charlie goes, is this Jay Z? I almost made him pull over the vehicle.

I was like, are you kidding me? Okay, I understand that you don’t do culture, but, like, come on, you don’t know the difference between Jay Z and Kanye. And he didn’t. And I explained to him the difference. I was like, okay, no, you gotta get into some Kanye west music. Next thing you know, Charlie’s really getting into some Kanye west music. He’s running 10 miles a day. He got really into running. And he’s texting me about how great it is. Like, there’s this text Charlie. He’s like, yes, it’s my new favorite. It’s my new favorite song.

And he just loved it. Kanye’s Power kind of became our theme song for the tour. I have no idea why, but that was our hype song before we went on stage. So you can only imagine when just a couple of months later, we’ve been listening to Kanye’s old albums on repeat, suddenly Kanye west tweets. I love the way Candace Owens thinks. The excitement. Okay. We were certain that we had manifested it. We were 100%. We manifested this by listening to power on repeat. Actually, I found a clip of us backstage on that day when that tweet happened, and we were doing what I used to refer to as, like, the Charlie Dance.

Here it is. You don’t understand, like, the divinity of him tweeting that by living in the 21st century, there is such meaning to the era of Kanye. I can’t even explain it because you really did have to be there. Charlie was my overly bright and sometimes really annoying kid brother. I was smiling, going through my chat of how many times he would text me a picture and say, does this look cool? Does this look cool? Do I look cool? This is, like, just a screen recording of us talking about a pair of sunglasses he’s just sending me.

And I’m like, nah, that’s not good. Nope, that’s not. No, no, send. Okay, that one’s. Ok. That’ll work. And this is actually one of my favorite photos of him where he said, I can just hear him when I look at this photo, I can hear him saying, does this look cool? He was wearing a pair of Yeezys that Kanye gave him. And he looks really cool. I thought they really suited him. I was like, yeah, you look. You look really cool, Charlie. The reverse of that, obviously, was him constantly hammering me on debates. I mean, Charlie was like, look, you gotta.

You gotta know the argument of your opponents backward and forward. I remember I had Note cards like I was in high school, just memorizing every statistic and being strengthened by, you know, just day in and day out, he was just pretending to be a protester, pretending to be a radical. And he used to always say, iron sharpens iron. And we spent so much time practicing, debating, and really thinking through what our ideas were. Charlie never missed a meeting that he had. He wouldn’t do that. He took that very seriously. It doesn’t matter what the circumstance was, even if it was a hurricane.

And one day there was literally a hurricane. I think we were in North Carolina, South Carolina at the time, I don’t remember, but all the flights got canceled and we needed to be in D.C. by morning. And Charlie looks at me, he’s like, we gotta rent a car. We gotta drive eight hours. Totally insane. And one of the most fun road trips I’ve had in my life. Every single song was sung. We were always. Me and Charlie were always singing in cars to show you. This is from that road trip. My eyes. And then, of course, there was always some hip hop mixed in.

Ignition remix. You look cool, Charlie. You look cool. We really did go everywhere. I mean, all 50 states, Canada down to the border, the United Kingdom, Israel, you name it, we were there. And there was always a new T shirt to print out. Justice for Brett Kavada sends to me. How’s this one? I love it. We just loved the T shirts. That was a thing. The hymn 2:1. That was controversial. That was a controversial moment. One of those character forming moments. I won’t forget it. Because that MeToo hashtag, it just started going viral and people were emotional.

And right away I was like, MeToo’s awful. This is terrible for women, it’s terrible for men. You know, just me being Candace, saying the thing. And left and right, people were hammering me. They could. It was like, how dare you say that we need due process. We’re talking about rape. And I remember he had young women at Turning Point who were threatening to quit crying in the office. How could she not support me too? Women who. Young women who did quit. And then we had at the same time, the YWLS conference. So the reporters who already hated us just completely, they just swooped in there and they were like, oh, do you support her statements? And I just remember just being behind Charlie and Andrew Colva and he just held the line.

He held the line because he agreed with me. And he knew it was going to be a bit of fire. People, you’ve got to fire her. How could she say this? And he didn’t. He held the line. And, yeah, it just. It was one of those moments where Charlie, he had good character. But the prep for every one of those events, like even the him2 event, it was always Kanye. Here it is just literally me, Charlie, and Sarah, who was his assistant at the time, just playing the hype music. Charlie and I fought a lot of battles together.

I mean, of course, who could forget the infamous day that we got chased out of a Philadelphia restaurant by antifa and they threw water and they threw an egg on Charlie. We were just amazed at how quickly they had assembled once they found out what restaurant we were at. But I want you to watch him here. Like, even in this moment of shock and adversity, he finds a reason to smile. And it’s incredible. Take a look at this. I know that was Charlie. That was Charlie, man. That was always his main thing, be a happy warrior.

And he was a happy warrior. And we were happy warriors. And we laughed a lot at the protesters. The absurdity of the protesters always. I personally think some of the protesters liked that Charlie and I were making light fun of them. I don’t even know what campus event this is, but I love this video of me just playing with the protesters sitting in front of one of their signs and Charlie speaking over my shoulder. Take a listen. If you aren’t wealthy, white, and male, Charlie, Kirk is not your friend. What do you think my friend anymore? Are we not friends? Is that right? I’m going to find out a sign outside of a thing, an event that we just did that you’re now my friend.

Go figure. Looking back at too many photos, I just have too many photos with Charlie. It’s. It really is incredible to see how many times he’s just right behind my back. Charlie always had my back, and I always had his. Charlie was right by my side when I started blexit. Obviously. He was also there the night that I met my husband, which was absolutely an incredible night in the uk, which I didn’t expect to happen. I gotta tell you, initially, Charlie, ever the analytical mind. What I told him, I’m like, oh, I think I’m going to marry this guy first.

He’s like, wait, wait, like, is this going to be good for your brand? Like, Charlie, this is love. This is not a brand decision. And then he sat down and he spent just one evening with George. And he. Charlie was just the most supportive of everything. And this is our text chain speaking about that moment. He’s like, his heart is wonderful. You guys are meant for Each other. I see it brilliantly and clearly, and he gets it. He isn’t afraid of you being you. And he’s been through hell. And it was. Yeah, Charlie was by my side the day that I got married.

Of course he was by my side, you know, when I got married to George. And of course, Charlie fell in love with Erica. That entire journey to me when I was reading through a text is so funny because it was exceptional. I was always leaning into Charlie’s analytical mind and making fun of him, like, oh, all we need to do is get a plan. You love Erica. Okay, what’s the plan? What are we gonna do? What’s step two? And the plan that I came up with instantly was all we have to do is convince her that her last name is terrible.

Her last name. She’s just got. She’s got to marry you because it’s practical. Kirk is going to. Mrs. Erica. Kirk sounds so much better than Mrs. Eric. Ms. Erica. Francie. What is that last name? It’s a practical decision. This is the text chain from that Charlie and Erica Kirk. He says, it’s going to be the power couple of a century. I need to continue to pray about it. I said, her last name’s dumb. She literally needs you to propose. It’s way too complicated. He said, I’m going to tell her. It sounds like a sneeze. It’s horrible.

And then I wrote, marry me. It’s a logistics thing. That’s just who we were. Always making fun and always wanting to know what the plan was. And obviously it worked, you guys, it worked. Our plan worked. We broke Erica down. First came the name Shame. Then came the wedding, and then came the children. You know, Charlie really loved, really, really loved Erica from a time, reading through the text today, just loved her. He loved his family. He really did. And I just want to say that Charlie and I, because I think this is important. Never for a single minute ever did Charlie and I stop being friends, even when the world demanded that from both of us.

Our relationship was. It was real. We were brother and sister. You know, we were fortified. Our relationship was forged in fire. The fire of politics. I knew him. I knew Charlie, the real Charlie. And Charlie knew the real Candace, you know, and people knew. I didn’t like a lot of people in politics. I didn’t like a lot of people calling me and doing the political dance. Of course, people guessed it correctly when they said, oh. The person who probably was the intermediary when Trump called about Brigitte was Charlie Kirk. Of course it was Charlie they would never send anybody else to call me with anything because they knew that Charlie was a brother to me.

And there was so many things that were said that were wrong. And we laughed at how wrong it was when people thought that when I had made up my mind about Israel, that Charlie and me fell apart. Nope. Never. Not for a second. I said, it’s the easiest decision ever, because Charlie knew who I was and I knew who he was. I said, charlie, this is where I’m at, and there’s no room for movement. And you tell your. Whoever that needs to hear it, whatever you need to tell them, because we’re always going to be brothers and sisters, you know, we’re always going to be brother and sister.

And we would talk about things and debate things behind the scenes. And I think my perspective was as it’s been throughout our relationship. You might not get it now, Charlie, but you will. I’m only a few years older than you, but I think you’re gonna. You’re going to see things my way. And I think. I think in the end, Charlie. Charlie was going through a spiritual transformation. I don’t think I know it. He was going through a lot, and there was a lot of pressure, and it’s hard for me to watch the people who were pressuring him, I don’t know, just say the things that they’re saying.

You know, I just. There’s something about it that just feels really fake. Feels really fake to me. And they would have allowed him to lose and wanted him to lose everything for changing or even slightly modifying an opinion, and then to see them doing what they’re doing today, it’s hurtful to me. It’s very hurtful to me, but I don’t want today to be about anything other than you guys knowing that. Charlie really was an amazing person. You know, he was, like. We were really close, and he was. He was my best friend. And my brother. And I will never unsee the footage of what I saw, the violence of it.

I pray for the people who took any pleasure in that. I would never. There’s not a single person in the world that I would wish that on, and least of all someone with a heart like Charlie’s. He loved his family, he loved his wife, he loved his country, and he didn’t deserve that ending. You know, he’s really young. But I know that we will carry the torch. I will never allow the memory of Charlie to be forgotten, obviously, because there is no Candace without Charlie. You know, we came up in politics together, and so I don’t know what else to say, guys, other than a lot of paint right now.

And I love you, Charlie, and, you know, I’ll see you when I. When I’ll see you. I love you very much. Thank you, guys.
[tr:tra].

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