Turning Point USA is continuing its college campus tours in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s passing with the newly branded “This is The Turning Point Tour.”
The first tour stop in this series took place at the University of Minnesota on Monday, featuring Daily Wire personality Michael Knowles.
Knowles walked onto the stage and paid homage to a chair, tributing the TPUSA Founder featuring the Freedom t-shirt he wore the day of his assassination, a 47th presidency hat, and a vase filled with white roses on a stand beside the chair.
Knowles then gave an address honoring the legacy of Kirk prior to a series of “Question and Answer” with the audience.
Knowles told the audience that the stop was originally supposed to feature him and Kirk dialoguing at the university. Instead, the event must take a different course, honoring the late Kirk in an atmosphere of free speech.
“This event was originally supposed to be a conversation between me and Charlie. Now, it will be a conversation about Charlie,” Knowles said of the tour stop. “It will be a conversation about his life and what his assassination means for our country. The enemies of civilization, the assassin, as well as the people who excused and cheered him on, thought that they could stop Charlie Kirk’s movement. In reality, they have not even stopped his lecture tour.”
Knowles described Kirk’s uncommonly bright personality and the impression it left on him and others.
“I am not talking about any of Charlie’s accomplishments, be they in broadcasting, publishing, coalition building, debate, or any of the other many things that Charlie had mastered. Charlie’s brightness came not primarily from his professional accomplishments. They came from his character. You did not have to be a personal friend of his to notice it. You could see it in everything he did. There was simply a light and a levity to the man. And it was constant. Even when he was stressed, even when he was arguing, which was frequent, even when he suffered setbacks, that light and that levity stem from one fact. Charlie’s savior lives.”
“What the assassin took was not even Charlie,” Knowles commented. Continuing, he noted the frailty of human plans.
“[The assassin] could not have taken Charlie. Charlie belongs to God as do we all. What the assassin took from us more precisely is what we imagined Charlie’s future would be. That is part of what makes death so shocking. The realization that our plans are not guaranteed. Man plans and God laughs… We were going to speak at the University of Minnesota together. We weren’t actually. We do not have ultimate control over those things. Everyone who knew Charlie and many people who did not know Charlie personally knew that he would be president one day. We knew it. We knew it.”
One person in the audience questioned Knowles on the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show due to comments claiming Charlie Kirk’s murderer was a MAGA Republican, finding Kimmel’s comments a matter of free speech that didn’t deserve any suspension. Knowles challenged this claim, saying Kimmel’s statements were false and that public airways have the right to censure those who demonstrate any form of misconduct on the air.
Knowles thanked the audience for their courage as the event concluded.
The next “This is The Turning Point Tour” will take place on Wednesday at Virginia Tech, which will feature Megyn Kelly and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin.
