I first met Charlie Kirk in 2021, when he was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where I am a senior fellow. By that point he was already a conservative movement celebrity, and unquestionably the most prominent conservative youth leader in America, though he had not yet ascended quite all the way to the Olympian heights he had achieved at the time of his tragic assassination.
The Lincoln Fellowship is for mid-career professionals. It is intellectually demanding and comes with a huge amount of reading that attendees were expected to do in advance. I was very impressed that Charlie, whose schedule was so insanely busy and planned to the minute, had made the commitment to attend, and, as evidenced by his comments and questions, had clearly done the reading as well. That was maybe the first indication I got that Charlie was “built different,” as they say.
I delivered a talk to the fellows. Though I can’t remember exactly what I said, an hour or so later, I got a text from Charlie—I am not sure how he got my number—thanking me for my talk and asking me some insightful questions about it.
At first, I was surprised. I was somewhat amazed that he took an interest in me and my ideas. That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Charlie’s death—though I was just one of thousands of people Charlie would call “friend,” a great many of whom were far closer to him than I was. I have no idea how he found the time to interact with all of us.
He was a big supporter of my book The Unprotected Class, which touched on the controversial topic of anti-white racism—a topic that would have been too controversial for a lot of major conservative hosts to engage with, at least when it came out. Yet, he not only had me on his show, he paid to fly me from my home in Montana to Arizona so we could do an extended interview in his studio. Beyond that, he provided a dust jacket endorsement, allowing the book to become a big success.
In the run-up to the election, I worked with Jennica Pounds, then little known but now the proprietor of the popular X account @DataRepublican. I texted back and forth with Charlie dozens of times daily, letting him know what we were seeing in the early voting data so that he could decide how best to deploy his resources. Later, Charlie was kind enough to weigh in with President Trump and his team in support of my recent nomination as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, and while I was fortunate to have several other very important supporters, I am sure that none of them carried more weight with the president and his staff than Charlie did.
Beyond our personal relationship, Charlie was arguably the most important figure in the conservative movement other than President Trump himself. Each of his talents was rare, and together they were almost unprecedented in one individual. He was smart and genuinely interested in ideas. He always loved being sent some new reading material that he could absorb. He was a phenomenal organizer of both events and political movements—certainly second to none among his generation of advocates.
He was a skilled talk show host and an excellent listener. When I once appeared on his show, there was a sensitive aspect of our topic that I didn’t want to discuss. I told his producer about it minutes before the show, and Charlie brilliantly avoided it without sacrificing anything in content quality. When I thanked the producer afterward for Charlie’s skillful diplomacy in conducting the interview, he simply wrote back: “We specialize in that here!”
He was an incredibly dynamic public speaker and debater, which is how he made his public name. And he had a work ethic that was one of the greatest I have ever observed. His potential was limitless. He’s the only person I’ve ever tried to convince to eventually run for president. And while I didn’t know it at the time, many who were closer to Charlie than I was very much saw that in his future.
But most importantly, Charlie put his full faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that became the dominant force in his life. As JD Vance wrote of Charlie in a touching eulogy on X, “Charlie genuinely believed in and loved Jesus Christ. He had a profound faith. We used to argue about Catholicism and Protestantism and who was right about minor doctrinal questions. Because he loved God, he wanted to understand him.”
Or, as Daily Wire host and committed Catholic Michael Knowles put it while discussing Turning Point USA’s Faith division, a highly influential network of pastors and other Christian religious leaders that Kirk had assembled to fight “wokism” in America’s pulpits: “There too, Charlie’s enthusiasm for open debate set the tone, as he invited atheists and even Catholics to take part. But he didn’t need a specific religious conference to convey his faith. Charlie Kirk’s religion bore fruit in everything he did.”
Charlie was fully capable of engaging in serious apologetics, and he did so at many of his university stops, but just as powerful were the simple messages that he regularly sent his over five million followers on X, proclaiming that “Jesus is the Answer” and “Jesus defeated death so you can live.”
It was this faith that sustained Charlie, and it should sustain those millions of us who admired him. Charlie, ever the happy warrior, would no doubt understand why so many of us are mourning his loss today, but he would insist on reminding us that we do not mourn without hope.
Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
