One Year Passed, What Charlie Kirk Would Want From Us Now

It has been one year since the world lost Charlie Kirk, and the nightmare has not been lifted. I still reach for words that do not exist. Being in Charlie Kirk’s presence was not like being around most people in politics. When he spoke to a room, they hung on every word. When Charlie made a promise, large or small, he kept it. For the early years of Turning Point USA, I worked beside him when almost no one knew his name. That proximity still feels like a privilege I did not fully understand until he was gone.

I first heard of Charlie Kirk on May 7, 2015, in a Bloomberg article called “This Boy Wonder Is Building the Conservative MoveOn.org.” I was a recent Flagler College graduate working on Lenny Curry’s mayoral campaign in Jacksonville. The article inspired me to search his name on YouTube and watch some of his speeches. Everyone who ever worked with Charlie remembers the first time they heard him speak. I went to the Turning Point USA website (still a .net address then) and found seventeen job openings. I applied to all of them.

A few days later, Charlie called, with one of his early staffers on the line with him. They were impressed not only by my application but also by the fact that I had applied for every single opening. I told them I did not care which door I walked through. I only wanted in. At 22 years old, I believed this was my chance at the American Dream.

We talked for maybe ninety minutes. Our conversation covered economic theory, education, the 2016 field, and who we each supported. Then he offered me my choice of the seventeen cities. I was born in Northeast Florida, but Ohio was the place my family came from. My parents were born and educated there. My grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles still lived there. My older brother had already moved back after graduating from Case Western. I asked to move home to Ohio. So I loaded my 2006 Hyundai Sonata with everything I owned and left Florida with less than $2,000 in the bank. I was determined to help Charlie change the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and the country.

Friends and family thought I was crazy. I was abandoning the prospects of law school and employment opportunities within the Florida GOP to follow an unknown 20-year-old who had little backing and no formal education, when I was two years older and had already graduated from college. Charlie had that rare ability to make other people see the thing he saw. I believed he would find a way to make his dream a reality, and I wanted to be there when he did.

The moment I arrived in central Ohio, I knew I was home. It is difficult to explain to people who did not grow up split between two places. Most Florida families I knew spent summers at Disney and rooted for the Gators. Mine drove north every year to Cedar Point, to Indians games, and rooted for THE Ohio State Buckeyes. Ohio was never just a destination. It was a place that felt like an inheritance to me. Charlie is the reason it became my permanent home instead of the ancestral one I loved and visited. Without him, I might still be a Floridian who returned for holidays. I am a Floridian by birth. I am an Ohioan by blood and by choice.

In July 2015, I started as a Field Director in Columbus. Charlie was running TPUSA on a modest budget with a scattered team across dozens of states. Few recognized his name. Fewer had heard of his organization.

Our first training was at the old (now defunct) Pheasant Run Resort in St. Charles, Illinois. It felt like half startup, half summer camp. Charlie sat behind a folding table in the lobby with colorful binders, surrounded by the handful of people who had been there before 2015. For four days we studied conservative policy, campus tabling, recruitment, and social media. Charlie loved debate, not only across the aisle but inside our own ranks. He delighted in playing devil’s advocate. We would frequently debate each other for hours: politics, faith, sports, everything. Staff had to break it up, or they would have gone all night.

Those years were lean. Almost no pay. I lived in a three-bedroom townhouse in a hard part of town. Breakfast food and pasta were what I ate because that stretched farthest. 60-hour work weeks because the only way Turning Point would survive was if we outworked everyone in the field. The GOP, College Republicans, and nearly every established group in the movement wanted nothing to do with us. They made us jump through hoops. They quietly sabotaged us behind closed doors. We did not succeed because of them. We succeeded in spite of them.

Charlie and I bonded over our love for debate, our work ethic, and the shared sense that the thing we were building was worth the cost. I was promoted three times in less than eighteen months. Before I turned 25, I was traveling the country with Charlie, managing more than 100 staff, taking on donor projects, and speaking to rooms of Members of Congress, U.S. Senators, and major funders. I remember the late-night walks in Buffalo Grove, mapping the next phase of the organization. Pickup basketball and football at the park, where his team almost always won. Endless amounts of sports trash talk, specifically when his Cubs broke my Indians’ heart during the 2016 World Series. Hotel lobby dinners. The all-hands meetings about hostile journalists and problem staffers.

I loved the travel and the work. I loved watching the organization more than quadruple in budget, staff, and campus chapters. I also knew Ohio was where I was meant to be and that I had to return home.

To millions, Charlie became a rising luminary and a champion of free speech. To me, he was an old friend and the mentor who pushed my career forward when it needed it most. When I eventually left, he remained loyal. Even in his busiest years, he answered quickly and was eager to help the people who had been there at the beginning.

I came home to Ohio and started a firm with my business partner and fellow TPUSA colleague, now Representative Tex Fischer. We took the principles, the mission, and the work ethic Charlie had taught us to build H&F Strategies. It has grown into one of the leading digital and political shops in Ohio and beyond. All of it traces back to him. And I was content to stay in the background, growing my business.

Then came September 10, 2025. A day that will live in infamy. Something in the chemistry of the bodies of those who knew Charlie best changed that day. I still struggle to think and talk about it. In the days and months that followed, I understood that remaining in the background was no longer an option. It was time to pick up the microphone again. That is what Charlie would have wanted.

In our last conversations, he spoke of gratitude to God, especially for Erika and his two children. He had always been a committed Christian. Fatherhood changed him. It still breaks me that his young children will come to know their father’s courage and devotion mostly through the memories of those who knew him.

What the last year without him has taught me is simpler, and harder, than any strategy memo. We have to get back to the basics of politics. Not the performances. Not the social media algorithms. The conversations.

Charlie built Turning Point in rooms, on sidewalks, at folding tables, and on late-night walks. He debated with people face-to-face. He asked questions. He played devil’s advocate until the other person had to think. That is the work we have abandoned. In a post-COVID, AI-saturated age, we spend more hours than ever looking at screens and fewer hours looking at one another. Party elites and social platforms profit from the distance. They tell us we have nothing in common. I do not believe them. I never did. Charlie did not either.

Americans still share more than talking heads who profit off division will admit: a desire to be left alone and safe, a love of country, and a hope that their children will inherit something better than a shouting match. Ohio taught me that long before politics did. It is a state of neighbors who still talk across fences, of summer nights at the ballpark, of people who will argue with you and then help you in a time of need. That is the country Charlie was trying to reach, one campus and one conversation at a time.

The work now is the same work it was in 2015, only the stakes are clearer. We have to stop relying on social media feeds. We have to sit across from people we do not already agree with. We have to recover the patience Charlie had while debating with those who vehemently disagreed with him. If we do not, the movement he built will become another institution that talks about the people instead of talking to them.

I remain grateful that he brought me home. I remain grateful that Ohio became not just the place I visited but the place I chose. And I remain convinced that the only tribute worthy of him is to do the unglamorous thing he did at the beginning: show up, speak plainly, and refuse to let the country forget how to talk to itself.

My prayers are with Erika and their two children, with Charlie’s parents and sister, and with the entire Turning Point family. The rest of us still have work to do and a country to save.

Thomas Hern is the Co-Founder and Partner of H&F Strategies, an Ohio-based political and digital consulting firm. Thomas formerly served as the National Field Director for Turning Point USA.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.