By Josh Marcus

Copyright independent

Erika Kirk, the widow of the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, will take over his Turning Point USA organization in the wake of her husband’s assassination on a Utah university campus last week.

“We will carry on,” Turning Point leadership wrote in a letter made public on X, announcing the unanimously approved change. “The attempt to destroy Charlie’s work will become our chance to make it more powerful and enduring than ever before.”

The organization, which was founded in 2012 and focuses on recruiting young people into conservative politics and the Christian faith, added that Erika Kirk serving as CEO and chair of the board was what Charlie Kirk had wanted in the event of his death.

Speaking during a memorial broadcast of the late activist’s show, Erika Kirk vowed to carry on Turning Point’s work and grow the organization.

“If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea,” Kirk said. “You have no idea what you just have unleashed across this entire country.”

The group has reportedly been deluged with thousands of student requests to join in the wake of Kirk’s death, and its Arizona headquarters faced a potential bomb threat this week ahead of Kirk’s planned funeral later this month.

Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk are credited with helping swing a growing number of young people politically to the right through campus events and Kirk’s visible presence across political summits, social media, and conservative podcasts.

Erika Kirk, a former Miss Arizona USA pageant winner and founder of various faith-based initiatives and companies, takes over the organization as her husband’s assassination continues to roil the country.

Officials have captured and charged a suspect in the killing, Tyler Robinson. Police say the 22-year-old confessed to the shooting in messages with loved ones and targeted Kirk because he believed the activist was “evil” and spread “hate.”

Beyond the immediate impact of the shooting on the Kirks and their young children, the sniper-style killing has upended U.S. politics, with critics alleging the administration is using tensions following Kirk’s death to limit free expression.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has vowed to crack down on “hate speech,” business employees protesting Kirk, and violent rhetoric related to the late activist in the wake of the shooting.

This stance has alarmed free speech advocates, who point to the First Amendment’s wide protections for a range of offensive and even aggressively threatening speech so long as it doesn’t represent a true or immediate threat of violence.

ABC, meanwhile, indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show this week, after the comedian claimed during a monologue that Trump allies were “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

The decision came shortly after Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened ABC with federal scrutiny over Kimmel’s remarks, raising alarms that the network was forfeiting its free expression rights to align with the administration’s chosen viewpoints.

The president and Kimmel are frequent critics of each other, and Trump claimed in July he heard Kimmel would be “next” to lose his show, after CBS announced it was ending The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The network said ending the Colbert-fronted franchise was a purely “financial decision,” but critics attributed the decision to Colbert’s frequent criticisms of the administration and his claims that CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump to grease the wheels of a merger needing federal approval.