Charlie Kirk never received a formal education, at least not in the conventional sense. Of all the details of his short life, the most surprising is that, unlike the overwhelming majority of his classmates, and unlike most American high school graduates, he never went to college.
He did begin one year at a public college in Illinois, but he dropped out - not because of money, and not because he lacked intellectual ability, but because he saw the college system as a fraud, designed to impose woke indoctrination and restrict free thought.
At a remarkably young age he embarked on a new yet old mission. Old, because frontier conquest and taming the wilderness are deeply rooted American ideals. New, because the frontier Kirk set out to conquer was the minds and hearts of America's youth.
He abandoned the classroom and traveled across US campuses, determined to persuade his peers of the validity of common sense and of the values he cherished: family, nationalism, Christian faith, American pride, and unwavering support for Israel. Like most Israelis, I could not agree with all of his positions, but that pales in comparison with his absolute devotion to defending Israel's good name.
Dozens of clips appeared on my social media feeds, showing angry students demanding that Kirk condemn "genocide" or prove that Israel truly allows humanitarian aid into Gaza. He never backed down. While amused crowds cheered around him, he always responded with his trademark mix of determination, ease, and humor.
What drove Kirk, paraphrasing the British philosopher G.K. Chesterton, was not hatred for the angry youth before him, but a fierce love for the things he set out to defend. He loved America, he loved Israel, he loved his God, he loved his people, and he transformed that love into a mission. How many people in the world can say they turned love into a calling?
In ancient Rome, crowds gathered to watch gladiators fight one another or wild beasts until one killed the other. What seems to us today like horrific barbarism was then regarded as mass entertainment.
In a world where the pen aims to replace the sword, Kirk was a gladiator. He was part of a culture, flawed but vital, deeply American (and often entertaining), of people who refined the art of debate into machine-like speed. A culture of sharp, punchy lines delivered with the force and swiftness of sword strikes.
Like Kirk, dozens of American gladiators, most of them young, create these arenas and step into them eagerly, convinced of their ability to behead an opponent with the power of their tongue. Kirk, as I always perceived him, did not seek to behead anyone, but to put their heads in order by appealing to logic and to shared ethos. How tragic that his pioneering effort ended with him bleeding in the arena like a Roman gladiator.
It is difficult to predict how, and to what extent, the assassination of Kirk will affect America's political agenda in the long term. But it cannot be separated from the public storm over the random and horrific murder of Iryna Zorutska, a young Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death on a light rail train in North Carolina by a released convict while she sat in her seat.
The attacker had 14 prior convictions, yet the local mayor rushed to declare that he appeared mentally ill. The murder did not make headlines until surveillance footage from the train, capturing Zorutska's harrowing final moments, was released. She bled for a minute and a half before any passenger approached her, a victim of a lenient justice system and of public indifference.
Beyond Kirk's tangible impact on the opinions of millions of Americans, in a world where blood stains a train floor while no one looks up from their phone, the legacy of a man who put his own life's course on hold in order to influence the lives of others remains more relevant than ever.
