What Did Charlie Kirk Stand For?

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There within that day was one of his closest mentors, Christian Apologist and author Frank Turek. This episode we sit down in studio with Turek 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, and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire. Our sponsor Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery, with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. Think of it as your local nursery available anywhere, with the bigger selection than you'll find anywhere else. From fruit and privacy trees to flowering varieties, shrubs and house plants, every plant is grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Simply click, order, and grow to create your dream yard with options that fit your climate, space, and lifestyle. 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If losing weight has been sitting on your to-do list for a while, this could be a simple way to add some extra support to the healthy habits you're already working on. Let's get you started with 20% off and free rush shipping so that you can add lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit TakeLean.com and enter wire for your discount, that's promo code wire at TakeLean.com. Joining us now is Frank Turek, 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 you know 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 over 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. So on one hand it's traumatic, but when I start thinking about it more and more, the 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 slandering 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 roles were reversed, tragically you had been murdered and Charlie was left behind, I don't think Charlie would have done as best 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 of the events I've done on college campuses. Now, as you know, it can 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 that 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 that? Well, I think that that campus needs to be reclaimed for something good because obviously most of the people there were find upstanding 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 could 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 happen 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. 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 saw record number of new charters going up. Chapters going up. How has it been? How is the health of that organization if I'm not an employee of TPUSA? Sure. on the outside and I just know people there and they've grown dramatically due to this event. 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." She said, "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 maybe you've seen in the wake of it? Charlie was the 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. He's going to replace Charlie. We'll see 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 his age, but I'd 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, and 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. 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, 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 post-modernism. What is post-modernism? Well, the central tenet of post-modernism 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 asked 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 is 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. 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. Like I don't have my laws of gravity and you have your laws of gravity or I don't have my laws of logic, you have your laws of logic. There's not a law that says thou 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 rebele against reality to the point that we'll even say that a man is not a man or a woman's not a woman or a child has to be castrated for some sort of ideology or abortion is healthcare is 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 as 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. Just say prior to 10 years ago, people might say certain things, but they wouldn't try and 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? And 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. Thomas Sol 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. More often than not. It feels like writing this and, you know, doing the research for this book and thinking through this, 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 Bregozian and Helen Pluckrose, I think her name was where atheistic scholars made a story where they invented all these crazy woke studies and got half of them approved. And one of them had to do with dog rape, you know, in a dog park. And this was somehow illustrative of human sexual interaction, you know. 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 hey day of the new atheist, we would get a lot of pushback on issues like, oh, are you sure that their universe had a beginning? Are you sure they're gods behind it? Are you sure about the fine-tuning argument and 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 is 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. Okay? That's really what's motivating this. So it's like the LGBT is the thing. Yes. Yes. And strangely, many of the people who are supporting such movements are atheist and they claim that there are certain rights, but if there is no God, there are 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. wrong. And this is actually a right that you have. 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. 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 where 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 certain, available rights. Governments are instituted to protect rights, not to grant rights. If government gives you your rights, they're not rights, they're preferences. Which is how most countries are actually. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And new government comes in and changes the law. You don't have rights in it. No, you have rights regardless to 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 morality? I guess this is how you would say it, identity morality, morality that actually stems from my identity. And my identity in realizing that is the ultimate moral good. 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 brought into cultural Marxism, that if you have certain qualities, you're automatically an oppressor. If you're a white Christian male, who is a heathorosexual and a United States citizen, you're automatically an oppressor. Notice Charlie Kirk had 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. What 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, a 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 tide turning on college campuses with regards to allowing more free speech? Or do you think they're still very much stuck in 2018? 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 way 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's 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 quest or on a happiness quest. And they're just going to believe whatever they think is going to make them happy. That's the problem. But at least, asking the question, all the objections are off the table then. 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 it at least forces the. Yeah, there's not much you can do, other than I pray, and I maybe 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. Why wait? Because sometimes people only look up when they're on their back. When a tragedy strikes, then they call you. Oh, your person, Georgia, your person of spiritual depth. Can you tell me why this happened? What can I do now? They're not going to call their atheist friend. That's a atheist friend going to say, there's no rhyme or reason any of this, right? No, they're going to call you. When the student's ready, the student will summon the teacher. So until a tragedy strikes, sometimes nothing's going to. And even then, they may not. And sometimes being forced to say something out loud. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe not in the moment, but down the road has an impact. Reality, as 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 is undefeated. It's undefeated. But sometimes it takes decades. You know, 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. And 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 kind of 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 right 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 of their 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, wow, maybe there is a good side. There has to be a good side if you think about it because evil is a lack and a good thing. Evil is anti creation. Evil tears 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 degrades what is good. It's not a thing in itself. And so when people start seeing evil up close, tragically, we saw it 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 enter the world, he came to take it upon himself. And by trusting 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 over 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's, 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 call Satan, a murderer, a liar, a accuser, and slanderer who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. We had a murder last year. What have we had since then? Lies, accusations, and slanderer 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. 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 happened on several occasions. On the positive side, you know, I get, I can get pretty depressed, doom 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 Lindsay. I think that shows that the intellectual climate is changing. I mean, you look at Ion Hercielli. I mean, certainly the the intellectual class as always. going to be a decade or more ahead of regular people or behind in some cases, but I feel like the weather is changing a little bit and there's more openness to, I mean, I was one of those people 10 years ago that, you know, it was a pebble in my shoe that someone put there 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 a atheist for decades now kind of turning. Yeah, there is some of that. You're absolutely right. Justin Browley over in the UK calls it 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. Yeah. 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 moving even incrementally, it's something, yeah. Yeah. That's the good thing. There's always a ripple effect. The effect of Charlie's murder, sexiest tsunami has been a lot that's happened since Charlie's murder, an 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 it. In fact, I submit to you if we could bring Charlie back to it 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 in coming in. I've been a fan a long time and yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was Frank Turek, 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 Weekend Edition of Morning Wire. [BLANK_AUDIO]