Only something sublime can explain the stunning feats of Charlie Kirk.
He was a handsome boy, tall and strong. He had an open and friendly face and a welcoming manner. These are not enough. His epic tirelessness is not enough. He was smart and quick. He had a wonderful memory. Still not enough. Even his courage is not enough. These rare gifts were vital, but it took something more.
Charlie was a prophet to a lost generation. How did he show them the way home? We have hidden the truth from the young. We have hammered the instinct for it out of them. Charlie first hammered it into himself, and then he became a teacher.
Charlie learned into the night and at the crack of dawn, at home and on the road, wherever he was, despite everything else he was doing.
He put together in his own soul the most beautiful argument that has ever been made. The argument revealed in the Bible. Ringing from the classics. Echoing through the Founding of our beloved nation.
It is the great truth that all real things are good, proved by the fact that we can call them by their names; that evil things are nothing, only the absence of a good. Charlie’s assassin was not a man; he had deprived himself of his very humanity. He was only a good man spoiled.
The good things, Charlie learned, are ordered in a hierarchy that reaches up to the best thing of all, the perfect thing, God. Charlie knew the God described by Aristotle, perfect intellect, but he worshiped the God that is Love Itself.
By learning and loving, Charlie showed a generation the way home, the way to happiness and freedom. He showed them what Jefferson meant by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. He showed them that man is a real thing, endowed by his Creator with rights that nothing on earth can rightfully take. I have the sublime privilege of watching young people learn these things.
Charlie is unsurpassed.
One must look far back to find a young man who accomplished what Charlie accomplished in 13 years from a standing start. To build a great institution. To woo and win Erika and father two children. To help elect a revolutionary president.
Precedents may be found in Churchill and Lincoln, two young men who taught themselves the classics and used them to save the world. When he was 19, I told Charlie that Lincoln had mastered all the proofs in the six books of Euclid to learn to make an argument. Charlie resolved right there to be ambitious in this exalted way. Just like Lincoln.
An assassination is only a wicked, negative thing. Charlie did the most positive thing that can be done on this earth.
I was intending to give Charlie the degree he so richly earned. I today invite Erika to receive it for him and with him on May 9, 2026, in Hillsdale, when the college will be offering them both the highest respect it can give: Drs Charlie and Erika Kirk.