Yesterday I published I Am Trying to Remember What I Lost — a piece about finding a church history video and breaking down crying at my desk before sunrise. I didn’t expect what came next.
By evening, my sister confirmed the year of the youth group trip to Disneyland — 1992. She remembered the earthquake from west Phoenix, water sloshing out of the pool.
My cousin Michael confirmed it too. He was in 8th grade during the Disneyland trip. His family left for Rio Rancho, New Mexico in January or February of 1993.
Caricatures of cousins Michael and John at Revlon picnic with Grandma Wilma Stout in 1990.
Reading his comment, it came back to me — in the first week of January 1993, before they left, we sat together at my mom’s two-story house and wrote interview questions for Phoenix Suns head coach Paul Westphal. A “What If?” scenario we began to plan out. I interviewed Westphal alone in March.
The title of that post is a question I thought I was asking about a church, about faces in a video, about names I couldn’t place. Why did I have a difficult time trusting church institutions? What was it about that season that changed my childhood forever?
It turns out I was asking about Michael. My cousin. My childhood best friend. The one I lost when his family moved to New Mexico in 1993.
I didn’t have words for what that meant. The gratitude I have for those at St. Paul and those within my family living locally had been blocked by one bad story on repeat in my head. I had to get beyond the story to see what was really missing.
It didn’t take much for me to begin acting out after that. By the summer of 1993, I had moved from my mom’s house to my dad’s house, less than three miles away. New school. New church. New friends to meet. A story for another day.
I looked up St. Paul Lutheran Church to research and remember this morning.
I didn’t expect to break down crying.
I am a grandson of Jim and Wilma Stout. I was baptized as a baby at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Maryvale, a west valley suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, by Pastor “Art” Irmer in 1980. Mrs. Corky Hecker was my teacher. I left halfway through Pastor Blau’s confirmation classes in 1992 or 1993 — and I didn’t look back for a long time.
Watching this video, I kept seeing faces I hadn’t seen since my grandmother passed in 1994 and my grandfather in 2009, one month before I began my enlistment into the United States Army. I kept watching — familiar faces I could no longer name. Their names were lost somewhere in my childhood memories and were now flooding back.
Over halfway through the video, I was stopped in my seat. A memory from Lindalee Martinez:
Knowing I had left St. Paul by 1993, I knew Lindalee’s memory was off by a few years. I recognized the names she shared instantly, my cousin Mike Stout being the most obvious. His family had moved to New Mexico around the same time, confirming the 1997 mistake.
My best friends, Josh, Mike Adams, and Jim’s names jumped off the screen. I remembered still carrying pictures of Cassey, Mary, Laurie, Nanette, Jennifer, Tammie, Jesse, and Bucky from the trip to Disneyland, too. So I dug out an old photo album, thinking it might have the date imprinted on it. Unfortunately the date wasn’t there, but the image showed many more people not mentioned, albeit a blurry picture.
St. Paul Lutheran Church Youth Group – Trip to Disneyland and Christ College Irvine, California.
I remember the early morning earthquake, preparing for the day in a college locker room. It was the first earthquake I can recall experiencing, though not in fear. I later found out that it was also felt in west Phoenix, or at least tremors. It was the last memory of innocence, joy, fun, Christ-filled community I have from St. Paul Lutheran Church.
Seeing John Wayne “Jack” Nase’s name angered me. Seems he died in 2018. My mother had allowed him to talk to me over the phone. He wanted me to testify against my friend whom he had hurt. A 13-year-old myself, I listened to his alleged lies, stood shaking, declined and hung up. My mother consoled me. I reached out to my friend to lend him my support, but a short conversation with his dad was the end of the friendship.
I am now 46 years old, and I have a difficult time walking into a church. I have a difficult time trusting people inside one. I was told that my parents had been excommunicated from St. Paul for their divorce when I was three. I attended with my grandparents as a child on purpose, as a choice. Away from home. Closer to Jesus.
The church I attended from 13 years old through 18 didn’t fare much better. A senior pastor and worship leader having an affair. A church in my twenties falling to the same, senior pastor commits adultery with secretary. An Army chaplain in Iraq who didn’t show up. There are years of damage I am still sorting through.
And yet.
The foundation I received from St. Paul — from my grandparents, from aunts and uncles, from cousins, from the people in this video — held. It held through all of it. My faith in the Lord has never left me. I have always prayed. I have always sought God. Not because the institutions were safe. Not because everyone in them was good. But because specific people planted something real in me before I was old enough to know what it was worth.
Pastor Irmer. Pastor Blau. Mrs. Hecker. My grandparents. My aunts and uncles. So many more faces in the video, disconnected from names, allowed my spirit to respond with a release of a childhood long buried. Their smiles. Their love. Their care. The Holy Spirit and love of Jesus Christ came pouring out of them in my memory.
Thank you to the remaining family of believers at St. Paul Lutheran Church. While the video is a few years old, it means more to me this morning than you could ever realize.
I want it on the record that I am grateful. What they put in me survived what came after. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
I published my first book last month — What Was Meant for Harm — and if you’ve read it, you’ll understand why I ended up back here, in this video, looking at these faces, crying at my desk before sunrise.
“May the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
The Daily Wire announced mass layoffs last week. Ben Shapiro’s YouTube channel has shed somewhere between a third and nearly all of its audience since 2023, depending on whose numbers you trust and what baseline you use. The company that once dominated conservative digital media is restructuring, bleeding staff, and drawing fire from former allies and mainstream outlets alike.
I watched The Daily Wire from its rise to this moment. I wrote about it. And I have a perspective that isn’t available to media critics who were never inside the audience they’re now eulogizing.
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Where It Started
The memoir documents an era when The Daily Wire represented something genuinely new. Ben Shapiro had left Breitbart and built something that felt more rigorous than the tabloid right, more honest than the institutional press.
The Daily Wire was emerging as a powerhouse from Los Angeles. Ben Shapiro left Breitbart after he cofounded The Daily Wire with Jeremy Boreing in 2015. He embodied thoughtful analysis with his Sunday Special interviews and conversations with the Intellectual Dark Web.
That’s an accurate description of what it felt like from the outside at the time. The Sunday Special was appointment viewing for my early morning routine. Shapiro was treating ideas seriously hearing Christian perspectives. The platform was building something.
And then the building started outrunning the foundation.
The Break That Mattered Most
The Daily Wire’s trajectory changed visibly when Candace Owens left in 2024. The memoir captures the aftermath:
Candace Owens had taken her viewers from The Daily Wire, continuing to ask questions and reviewing books forbidden by mainstream accepted narratives. Brett Cooper later followed Owens’ exit as they tried to replace her on The Comments Section with her former producer and maid of honor. A mistake that would cost the channel a large drop in viewership and trust.
That last sentence is the tell. The Daily Wire’s response to Owens’ departure wasn’t to acknowledge what had driven her audience — questions the platform had decided were too costly to ask — but to find a replacement. It didn’t work, because audiences aren’t interchangeable and trust isn’t transferable by personnel swap.
A 34% viewership drop from Shapiro’s channel between April 2025 and April 2026 is real, whatever the baseline debates. A company-wide restructuring with confirmed layoffs is real. The audience that built The Daily Wire didn’t disappear — it redistributed to voices willing to go further than the institution allowed.
What Corporate Conservatism Actually Costs
By early 2026 the memoir had reached its diagnosis:
Corporate conservatism had failed its audience.
That’s not a hot take. It’s an observation earned across years of watching platforms make institutional choices — about which advertisers to protect, which debates to avoid, which hosts to silence — and then wonder why their audiences concluded the institution mattered more than the truth.
The Daily Wire’s early credibility came from appearing to operate outside that logic. Shapiro built a brand on facts not caring about your feelings. That posture works until the facts become inconvenient for the brand. Then the question is whether you follow the facts or protect the brand. The audience noticed the answer with three letters: NDA.
The Deeper Lesson — For Me
The memoir isn’t a media autopsy. It’s a personal reckoning. But I watched The Daily Wire closely because I was building something of my own — Quinn’s Next Step, the memoir, the platform — and I needed to understand the failure modes.
What I saw in The Daily Wire’s decline was a cautionary tale about building an audience around a personality’s certainty rather than a community’s honest inquiry. Shapiro’s greatest asset — the rapid-fire, debate-me confidence — became the ceiling. It attracted people who wanted to be told they were right. It repelled people who wanted to be helped to think. Shapiro simply stopped debating in good faith.
I came home from Iraq with too many questions to trust anyone who claimed all the answers. The institutions that earned my long-term attention were the ones willing to say: I don’t know yet. Let’s find out together.
The Daily Wire was never that. It was very good at what it was. And what it was had a shelf life.
What Lasts
The memoir ends with a question I’m still living: what does it look like to build something that doesn’t depend on institutional protection, algorithmic favor, or a personality’s ability to stay ahead of the story?
Charlie Kirk pointed toward an answer. Patrick Bet-David called him a combination of Reverend Billy Graham and Rush Limbaugh — not because he was a celebrity, but because he understood that the work was bigger than the platform.
The Daily Wire built a platform. Kirk built a mission. That difference is now visible in what survives as TPUSA joined the decline after his death.
I wrote a memoir about a veteran trying to figure out which one he was building. The answer, I believe, is in the book.
Charlie Kirk’s former security chief filed a federal defamation lawsuit last week against Candace Owens, alleging she falsely accused him of conspiring in Kirk’s assassination. The suit names Brian Harpole. He claims he was in Dallas when Owens placed him at a secret meeting at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and accuses her of running a months-long campaign to destroy his reputation. Owens responded on her podcast, welcoming the subpoena power the lawsuit would give her.
The machinery of that dispute is now in the courts. What interests me — and what’s in the memoir — is what it reveals about a person I was watching closely long before any of this.
She Showed Up Early in the Narrative
The memoir isn’t a fan account of any media figure. It’s a record of what I was consuming, thinking, and processing as a veteran trying to make sense of a fracturing country. Candace Owens kept appearing in that record — not because I went looking for her, but because she was there.
She was at the intersection of culture, faith, and political commentary in a way few others were. She left Turning Point USA, BLEXIT, PragerU, and The Daily Wire. She built her own platform. She was asking questions that the mainstream media was either ignoring or actively punishing people for asking.
By 2024, the memoir records:
Candace Owens had taken her viewers from The Daily Wire, continuing to ask questions and reviewing books forbidden by mainstream accepted narratives.
That sentence is not praise or criticism. It’s observation. She had an audience that trusted her more than the institution she came from. That’s a significant thing.
She Was Doing Something Harder Than Most
After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, the landscape broke open in ways that were ugly and fast. The memoir describes it plainly:
After a bizarre response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Candace Owens questioned the narratives surrounding what she described as a Kennedy/King-level assassination and cover-up of one of her closest friends. The media landscape would attack her immediately, choosing to vilify her rather than debate her claims.
I wasn’t tracking her because I agreed with every curiosity she gave her audience. I was tracking her because she was willing to ask common sense questions in search for the truth. Whether her specific imaginations prove out in court or collapse entirely, the pattern she identified — the media’s refusal to engage the questions on their merits — was real and visible to anyone paying attention.
The Personal Dimension
The memoir also captures what happened inside the conservative media ecosystem after Kirk died:
TPUSA went one way. Candace Owens went another.
Charlie’s life was not pointed toward himself or how big TPUSA could get, but toward Jesus Christ. Truth. Hope for the youth of America.
That’s the frame I was working from. Not “who’s winning the media war” but “who’s actually serving the thing Charlie said he stood for.” The battle for his legacy wasn’t just institutional. It was spiritual. And Candace Owens, whatever her perceived errors of method or fact, was at least asking: what actually happened, and why are people afraid to answer?
Those aren’t illegitimate questions. They’re just inconvenient ones.
What the Defamation Suit Reveals
The lawsuit will determine whether Owens’ specific claims about Harpole were defamatory. That’s for the courts. What the suit reveals to me — as someone who wrote about all of this while it was unfolding — is that the chaos following Kirk’s death was real, not manufactured. People who were close to the situation were in genuine conflict. Trust had collapsed. And in that vacuum, information — accurate or not — moved at a speed no institution could control.
I watched that from Fischer, Texas, in real time. I wrote about it. And I put it in a memoir that launched the same week the lawsuit was filed.
Why This Matters for the Book
What Was Meant for Harm is not a political book. It’s a memoir about a combat veteran who couldn’t stay in the military, couldn’t get the VA to move, stopped believing what the media said, and found that the church building mattered less than the people inside it — and found his way back to purpose through faith, family, and honest reckoning.
But the cultural landscape is part of that story. The media figures I was watching were not just entertainment. They were the people narrating the country I came home to. Candace Owens is in the book because she was part of that narration — and because watching what happened to her after Kirk died revealed something true about how quickly the ground shifts beneath people who step out of line.
Whether that’s a cautionary tale or a testimony depends on what happens next.
I just wrote down what I saw.
Read the full account in What Was Meant for Harm — available now on Amazon:https://a.co/d/05juIdfJ
Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.
John-Quinn Mulquin Jr. is a U.S. Army veteran, author, and founder of Quinn’s Next Step. He lives in Texas with his wife and son.
Dave Rubin and Candace Owens went to war publicly in the past couple years — accusations of dishonesty, betrayal, old grievances aired in front of millions. Rubin claimed Owens had spent an hour ranting against Charlie Kirk during a 2022 visit to his home. Owens called it fiction and accused Rubin of lying to protect his pro-Israel position. It was ugly, fast, and predictable to anyone who had been watching both of them for years. And I had.
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How Dave Rubin Entered My World
The memoir documents a long journey through the independent media ecosystem — the commentators, podcasters, and thinkers who filled the space mainstream outlets left empty. Rubin was early and significant in that space.
Fox had tapped into the online world for commentary from Steven Crowder’s Louder with Crowder to Dave Rubin’s Rubin Report. They would give Jordan Peterson and Charlie Kirk bigger audiences, among others.
That’s not a small thing. Rubin’s platform was a genuine bridge — a place where the Intellectual Dark Web took shape, where ideas outside the Overton Window got a fair hearing. He described himself as a classic liberal who had been mugged by the left’s new orthodoxy. For a while, that framing worked. He had credibility with people who weren’t reflexively conservative but were watching institutions fail.
The Visit
By the time the Kirk assassination had upended everything in September 2025, relationships that had seemed stable in the independent media world were cracking. The memoir goes there directly:
During our two-week vacation in Florida, I had discussions with three people that would help reorient my return. A sister I hadn’t seen in over ten years talked about the spirituality of it all. A friend from our time in New Mexico and I discussed timelines in the Book of Revelation. And even though I’d left The Rubin Report community, I had kept in touch with one person through X. I used this opportunity to visit his farm and reconcile the changes we’d seen in media, politics, and life.
That visit was real. It mattered. Not because it resolved anything about Rubin’s later public feuds or perceived changes, but because it was a human conversation between two people who had watched the same landscape change from different vantage points.
I had left the Rubin Report community. Not with hostility — with discernment. There’s a difference.
What Discernment Looks Like in Practice
The memoir is built around the question of who to listen to, who to walk away from, and why. Faith is central to that discernment. So is pattern recognition built over a lifetime — as a combat medic, as a father, as someone who has watched institutions reveal their true nature under pressure.
Propaganda is information, but information without discernment becomes manipulation. I’ve learned to rely on the Holy Spirit’s discernment as my guiding heuristic: to choose who I listen to, who I reject, when I peek into opposing viewpoints, and when I step back from voices that seem to exchange authenticity for groupthink, wealth, or deception.
Rubin didn’t fall into the category of voices I rejected with contempt. He fell into the category of voices I stepped back from — men who had done real work and then, under pressure, revealed that their positions were more tribal than they’d advertised.
His public feud with Owens over Charlie Kirk wasn’t a surprise. It was a confirmation.
The Larger Pattern
By early 2026, the memoir records what had happened to the broader landscape:
Commentators drifted off my radar, occasionally resurfacing on X or YouTube: Tim Pool, Steven Crowder, Brandon Tatum, Ben Shapiro, the injured Dennis Prager’s PragerU, the bed-ridden Jordan Peterson, the new direction of Turning Point USA, Alex Jones, NBC, Fox, Glenn Beck, and The Blaze. Disappointingly, the PBD Podcast lost their nuanced curiosity. Corporate conservatism had failed its audience.
Rubin isn’t named in that list. He had already drifted before the list was written. Some departures are loud. Some are quiet. The quiet ones are often more telling.
What I found at that farm in Florida was a person navigating the same grief and disorientation that the Kirk assassination had triggered across the entire landscape. The specific disagreements — Israel, Owens, Kirk’s legacy — were downstream of something deeper: the collapse of trust, the pressure to pick sides, the cost of maintaining independence when everyone around you is choosing a tribe.
I wrote about that. Not to adjudicate who was right in the Rubin-Owens feud, but to witness what it looked like from the outside, in real time, in the life of one Army veteran in Texas who was paying attention.
The full account is in What Was Meant for Harm, available now on Amazon:https://a.co/d/05juIdfJ
Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.
John-Quinn Mulquin Jr. is a U.S. Army veteran, author, and founder of Quinn’s Next Step. He lives in Texas with his wife and son.
A Utah judge ruled last Friday that cameras will remain in the courtroom for the trial of Tyler Robinson, the man accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk. The preliminary hearing has been pushed to July 6. The proceedings continue. The media cycle churns. And somewhere in a Hill Country farmhouse, a veteran and author is watching all of it — because he lived it in real time, and put it in a book.
What Was Meant for Harm launched May 8, 2026. The timing is not lost on me.
I Didn’t Plan to Write About Charlie Kirk
Attribution: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons
When I started writing this media memoir, Charlie Kirk was one voice among many I was tracking in a shifting media landscape. He showed up in my life the way he showed up in a lot of people’s lives — through a college campus speech, a podcast clip, a debate highlight. I was a combat medic who’d come home from Iraq, rebuilt his life from scratch, and was trying to make sense of a country that seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
By 2021, the picture had sharpened. The memoir records what I observed:
Charlie Kirk built Turning Point USA into a powerhouse, showing how the Fruit of the Spirit could be applied to American values in the political youth landscape.
That’s not flattery. That’s what I saw from the outside looking in — a man who understood that the culture war was first a spiritual war, and who organized accordingly.
He Kept Showing Up
The memoir spans years of American turbulence. Kirk keeps appearing — not because I engineered it, but because he was there. By 2024:
Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA were credited with their Get Out the Vote campaign. Kirk was also credited with bringing former Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement into the MAGA Trump administration.
Whether you agreed with his politics or not, Kirk was doing something that mattered: he was building, connecting, and showing up. He was a bridge-builder at a time when most people were burning them.
And I was watching. Taking notes. Living my own version of the American story — the veteran who couldn’t find his footing, the father trying to hold his family together, the man who believed God wasn’t done with him yet.
Then September Came
I was tearing down a porch roof on September 1st — literally, physically dismantling something broken so something better could be built. That’s also what the memoir is about.
I was uploading footage when the news broke.
I was uploading the video for editing, simultaneously listening to YouTube and scrolling on X, when the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination appeared. One shot. One hit. One dead.
What followed was grief I didn’t expect. I reposted his words. I prayed publicly on X. I wrote out a prayer that I still stand behind — and included it in full in the book, because it captures what that moment revealed in me:
“I am sad. I am angry. I did not personally know @charliekirk11, but like many of you, trust that God has used Charlie to great effect. An American Patriot, but more importantly, a soldier for Christ.”
I meant every word. I still do.
What His Death Unlocked
There’s a moment in grief — if you’re honest enough to stay in it — where the loss stops being just loss and starts being a mirror. Kirk’s death did that for me. The book goes there:
A part of me was jealous. I wished I could have taken that bullet. His life was worth more than mine. I might have deserved to die, but Charlie did not. I knew in my spirit that I was learning something I hadn’t learned before. I didn’t have the words yet, only the sense that something in me had changed.
That’s not performance. That’s what it felt like in my home studio on a Tuesday in September. My wife and I cried. We told our son. I prayed with the youth group that evening.
His death became a turning point for me — not in spite of my faith, but because of it.
The Bigger Picture
Patrick Bet-David called Kirk a combination of Reverend Billy Graham and radio icon Rush Limbaugh. That framing is in the book, and I think it holds. The number of lives touched — thirteen years on college campuses, millions of podcast listeners, strategic influence over presidential politics — staggers the imagination when you sit with it.
And yet what the book ultimately argues is that Kirk’s greatest work wasn’t political. It was personal. It was the witness. It was the man who could have become a media personality who instead chose to be a servant of Christ in public life.
His death re-awakened my spirit to the evils of this world, truth behind conspiracies, and the importance of open free speech and conversation. God would use Kirk’s death in my life as a springboard into a season of tremendous sorrow — but one that would lead to restored faith and future hope.
That’s the arc of What Was Meant for Harm. And it’s why I wrote it now, rather than ten years from now when the edges had softened.
This Book Is For You If…
You watched the Kirk coverage and felt something shift inside you. You’re a veteran trying to find language for what the civilian world doesn’t understand. You’ve been following the conservative media landscape and wondered where faith fits into all of it. You’ve had a turning point you haven’t put words to yet.
This memoir puts words to mine — combat, divorce, fatherhood, faith, failure, and the slow, grueling work of becoming who God made you to be.
Summer 2020. I didn’t realize it was the last visit.
Yesterday was Mother’s Day.
I didn’t post. I didn’t share. I sat with it.
My heart is heavier as two mothers of loved ones recently passed away. Both women were kind to me and my family. Our prayers of God’s peace go out to their families during this time of grief.
There are some years where the day lands differently — not louder, just deeper. This was one of them.
My mom passed away in late October 2020.
The last time I saw her in person was that summer. I wrote about it in my memoir, What Was Meant for Harm, in a chapter simply titled The Loss:
“The last time I visited with my mother in person was in the summer of 2020. We talked about her retirement in three years. We discussed her relationships with her parents, and how her soul personality developed. We reflected on relationships with my father and the stepfathers that had affected our journeys. We cried when we laughed at our own ridiculousness. We cried when we grieved for each other’s pains and losses. Her wrinkles showed a life lived with love.
I didn’t know it then, but that summer conversation would become one of the most important memories of my life. It felt like a final moment of understanding and reconciliation before the world grew even more chaotic.”
If your mom is still here, call her. Tell her the thing you’ve been meaning to say.
If she’s not — you already know. You carry it the same way I do. Especially on days like yesterday.
What Was Meant for Harm is available now on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Chapter 5 is the one I wrote for her.
What Was Meant for Harm: A Media Memoir of Faith, Fracture, and the Fight for Truth is now available in ebook and print editions.
It’s my honest account of navigating media chaos, personal grief, and spiritual reckoning — and finding that God uses every season for the good of those who love Him. It covers everything from Iraq to the Texas Hill Country, from mainstream media to independent creators, from loss to renewal, from searching to surrender.
If you’ve walked any part of this road with me, if you believe in what I’m doing — please share. You can grab your copy on Amazon, or visit quinnsnextstep.com.
“… The world locked down, burned, argued, censored, and unraveled. And in the middle of that chaos, I lost people I loved, questioned the path I was on, and found myself being drawn back to the only foundation that doesn’t shift.”
— excerpt from What Was Meant for Harm
Official release tomorrow. Pre-order at quinnsnextstep.com. ♠
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