At a ceremony in Arizona on the eve of Turning Point USA’s 2025 America Fest, a crowd cheered as Erika Kirk announced that the organization’s headquarters would be renamed the “Buckman Campus.”

Nelda and Karl Buckman donated $10 million to TPUSA this past summer, the largest gift in the organization’s history. Before he was assassinated in September, founder Charlie Kirk told the Buckmans he would rename the campus he built in recognition of their generosity.

“You know what I loved about Charlie was he wasn’t afraid to ask,” Nelda Buckman told The Daily Wire. “I know that it’s well invested, and I know that it’s gonna be well used. I just am so excited to have that opportunity.”

Buckman said she and her husband were waiting for the sale of their company to close before making the multimillion-dollar donation. She said she’s thankful it happened this summer, so Kirk received the money before he was murdered.

“We were able to give it in June, so he knew,” Nelda said. “It’s a joy to be able to do it, really and truly.”

Charlie’s relationship with the Buckmans goes back years.

“The thing about Charlie that was fascinating to me is I would get text messages, and I would think, ‘Oh, how neat, he’s got a great intern sending me a Bible verse.’ Then I found out, no, that was Charlie. Sometimes I would send him a verse back or maybe something funny, but I always thought it was very interesting that Charlie was not too busy to reach out to the people he cared about.”

Now the philanthropist is spending more time with Erika. They talk TPUSA, expanding the high school division called Club America, but what Nelda says they really enjoy bonding over is motherhood.

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“Erika and I talked about womanhood and what our culture has been teaching our young women and what we want to teach our young women.”

The two met privately in Florida ahead of America Fest and the dedication ceremony, where Nelda said she offered Erika personal support and spoke with her about the challenges of navigating her new reality as a single mother, leading the organization, and carrying forward her late husband’s legacy.

“We’ve met several times before, but this was just, just different,” Nelda said. “She shared where she’s putting her boundaries.”

Credit: Josh Thifault

At the December 17 dedication ceremony, three months after Kirk was fatally shot, Nelda and Erika embraced onstage. Nelda later said she noticed a change in Erika’s eyes, shaped by what she described as the unimaginable experience she had endured.

“The most beautiful thing to me was seeing her soft eyes again,” Nelda said.

Buckman noted that Erika has had to be fierce in the face of tragedy, attributing her ability to protect her family and company to her maternal instincts.

“We as mamas and we as women sometimes have to have those fierce moments, and to be criticized for it is the [saddest] thing.”

Erika has kept TPUSA going. The college tour continues, and AmFest was the biggest to date. She has promised exponential growth for the organization in honor of Charlie.

“One of the things that Erika said at the investors meeting in Palm Beach was ‘We’re gonna stay on the path that Charlie had us going on, but we will elevate,’ and I just thought that was such a beautiful way to put it. We’ll elevate, and we will grow,” Nelda said.

To say the $10 million donation will help TPUSA grow is an understatement. The Buckmans placed no restrictions or conditions on the gift, saying they simply wanted to see an organization that keeps faith at the center of every decision continue to thrive.

“We didn’t put any strings attached to it. It’s a gift.”

Nearly 250 years ago, hundreds of Patriot soldiers were killed or wounded fighting in the pine woods of Camden, South Carolina, in one of the worst defeats for the colonists during the Revolutionary War. Today, one organization is working to identify the remains of those who fell fighting for liberty and share their stories with the country. 

Using DNA sequencing, the Historic Camden Foundation is working to identify the remains of 12 of the Patriot soldiers killed during the August 16, 1780, battle. The remains of the 12 were recently discovered during archeological excavations at the battlefield. In 2023, they were given a proper funeral and military honors, but not before DNA samples were saved from teeth and a bone at the back of the skull. 

So far, the Historic Camden Foundation has secured funds for DNA sequencing of two of the fallen Patriots. Stacey Ferguson, the deputy director of the organization, told The Daily Wire that they plan to continue their work until they have sequenced all of the DNA and narrowed down the details of the soldiers. 

“This is an ongoing project. We had the funds available to run those first two soldiers, but we have every intention of continuing on the work with the other soldiers,” she said. “We may or may not get to a point where we can actually put an exact name on the remains, but it’s very possible. We’ve really narrowed it way down.”

Figuring out who the soldiers were is “the oldest John Doe case in the country that we know of based on what’s in public record,” Ferguson said. 

One of the soldiers they have determined is a teenage male between the ages of 14 and 18 from Maryland. He was buried alongside other soldiers in a mass grave at Camden and is believed to have been from Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

The other soldier is an adult male over the age of 20 from the Jamestown, Virginia area. Researchers believe he was related to the original Jamestown settlers and even shares some DNA with Pocahontas. He was likely an artilleryman based on where he fell in the battle. 

The two heroes could have over 20,000 living relatives, according to Ferguson. Matching them to an exact name is a more difficult task because muster rolls from that time often were not the most accurate. 

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The battle of Camden was a disaster for the Americans, as the Patriot forces under Major General Horatio Gates clashed with British and Loyalist forces under General Charles Lord Cornwallis. An undisciplined American army had 1,900 casualties to the British’s 324. 

However, the battle did pave the way for the more competent Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, who would go on to earn the moniker “the savior of the South.” Greene orchestrated the great patriot victory at Cowpens soon after the disaster at Camden, which followed on the heels of a great patriot victory at King’s Mountain.

Ferguson said she hopes their work to remember the fallen of Camden will help Americans identify more with their past. 

“It feels like ancient history to most Americans,” she said. “These soldiers that fought and died for their freedom, but being able to say, ‘you are related to this soldier, who fought and died at the battle of Camden,’ really makes that story personal for a lot of people.”