For more on Kirk's life and legacy, I'm joined now by Benji Backer. He's the CEO and founder of

Nature is nonpartisan, and he worked with Kirk when he launched Turning Point USA. Benji, welcome to the

show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. First of all, let me just say on behalf of all of us

how sorry we are for your loss, for everyone else who lost a friend and a family member

in Charlie Kirk, but you have known him from the very earliest days of Turning Point USA.

You shared a photo online of the two of you all those years ago. Just tell us why you

joined that effort, what it was about Charlie and the message that spoke to you.

Well, how you just explained Charlie, a friend and, you know, a family member is how he'll

be remembered by those who cared about him the most.

And, you know, when I was in high school, he was drawn to me and I was drawn to him because

we were two high school activists, conservatives pushing back against some of the stuff that

we were seeing in the classroom, bias in the stuff that we were seeing in the classroom,

bias in the classroom that we were seeing.

And I grew up in Wisconsin, he grew up in Chicago, so we'd drive up to see each other or drive down to see each other pretty often when he was starting to think about launching Turning Point USA.

And a really pivotal moment of my life was in high school. I was getting death threats from

my own high school colleagues because of my political activism, getting phone calls and tweets

and all sorts of different things. And he was really supportive. He was really the only person

that stood up for me at the time and just reminded me always to stay resilient, to stay strong, and that these threats were baseless and that nothing would ever happen because of it.

And so it just, it's painful to see being on the receiving end of that, those threats and not having that happen to me and having someone

like him pushed me through that time at a pivotal time my life, you know, seeing him get

killed this way, the same way that it was threatened of me just is really painful. And,

you know, he was one of the strongest people. and I didn't agree with him on a lot of

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