A year after Charlie Kirk was murdered, a new collection of writings honors his legacy

This past Thursday marked one year since my friend Charlie Kirk was killed. I have spent most of that year reading him.

I met Charlie in the summer of 2016. Donald Trump Jr. introduced us in Jackson, Wyo. I had never heard his name. I am not easily impressed. Then the kid started naming donors. My donors, the ones I had spent a decade cultivating one dinner at a time, because getting into that world is an art form almost nobody manages. He was 22 and he had all of them. My mouth hit the floor. Turns out he liked my work too, and the mutual respect made us partners.

The Charlie I knew then was not the one the internet thinks it knows. The clips of him successfully debating students on college campuses came later. Back then, he was filling rooms with wide-eyed young adults who had finally found somewhere it was acceptable to be conservative.

He loved this country first, and he loved Donald Trump as the standard-bearer for it. He loved watching conservatives and Christians find each other, and he showed up at their weddings. Though he was then single, he knew the importance of marriage. Then lightning struck him. Two dates in, he called me. Christy, he said, I met the woman I am going to marry. He sent me two photographs of a stunning young woman named Erika. He never looked back, not for a single day. He was honorable and faithful.

After he met Erika, his faith went somewhere deeper. I watched a boy who called himself a patriot and a Christian become a man of God on fire, leading a nation with a calm that came from knowing who he belonged to. He reconciled with old rivals, healed old wounds. He had peace, and brought it with him wherever he went.

He told young people what their lives were for: get married, have kids, praise God. Plenty mocked him for something so simple. He kept saying it. He died at 31, and his children will grow up knowing exactly who their father was. How many of us, given 80 years, could say the same?

When he was killed, I did what you do when your own words fail you. I went back to his. He left more than a decade of writings. He was so much more than a debater. He wrote about faith. Marriage. Fatherhood. Courage. Gratitude. He said things off-camera that are just as vital as his campus videos. So I made a book of these writings: “Charlie Kirk, in His Own Words” (Post Hill Press).

Every dollar made from this book will go to Carry the Torch, the nonprofit I founded in Charlie’s memory to fund the young people coming up behind him.

People ask what I miss. I miss racing through airports beside a prodigy. I miss having his show on for three hours a day while I worked, the way I once listened to Rush Limbaugh. But what I miss most is my future. I will never know what Charlie would have said about the midterms, or 2028, or the bill a governor signed last week. I cannot text him an article and ask. In a lawsuit they call it future wages lost. Charlie’s number was incalculable, and I believe in my soul that is why he was killed.

My party used to keep a rule, the 11th Commandment, written by California Republican chairman Gaylord Parkinson in 1965 and made famous by Ronald Reagan: thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It was never meant to shut down honest debate, only to stop us from tearing each other apart in public. Charlie lived by it. He had decorum. Heading into the midterms, I would ask some of the loudest voices calling themselves conservative to ask themselves whether they still believe in the Republican Party’s principles. If they do not, there is a party better suited to them.

Charlie’s legacy asks more of us than a candle and a hashtag every September. Read him. Have the real conversations. Show up. Speak plainly when it costs something. Build families with intention. Carry the torch, and live like Charlie.

Christy Edwards is a former Turning Point USA board member and the author of “Charlie Kirk: In His Own Words.”