Like millions of Americans, I have been experiencing a range of emotions following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, age 31, on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. The reality that a civilian—who wasn’t a politician or an elected official—would even be targeted, much less assassinated, has hit hard. For the past 10 days, I have felt off my game, unmotivated to pursue my normal work activities. My creativity has stagnated. When a nation grieves, the cycle feels like an endless ocean of shock, sadness and anger.

I never met Charlie Kirk in the green room of Fox News or at a conference, but I have watched many of his interviews. Upon occasion, I caught an episode of his show, the Charlie Kirk Show on Real America’s Voice or Rumble. Given his Scottish name, I thought it was fun that he used a Scottish bagpipe song as bumper music. Because Kirk wanted to be remembered for courage and faith in God, I thought it was fitting that he embodied his last name. The Scottish word for church is kirk.

Kirk’s assassination is almost unprecedented in American history, especially when looking at recent history. When political assassinations have tragically occurred in America, assassins have primarily targeted elected officials, especially presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln in 1865, John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the two vivid but unsuccessful attempts on President Trump’s life in 2024. That’s why presidents need the Secret Service. We don’t usually think civilians are at risk while exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of speech.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King is the most well-known non-elected official who was assassinated. He was killed 57 years ago in 1968, before my time and thus, before my memory. Just as my children do not have first-hand memories of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 like I do, so the baby boomers and older generations are the only ones who have a memory of the shocking violence against the man named King who asked “Let Freedom Ring.”

Rather than give a holistic look at Kirk’s life and legacy—which others who knew him are doing quite well—I want to highlight Kirk’s views on American history. Kirk wanted Americans, especially young adults, to discover the goodness in America’s story, particularly the writings of the founders.

Kirk eloquently discussed his concerns about society’s weakening knowledge of America’s historic founding in a Fox News Channel interview with host Mark Levin. Though the show originally aired on March 1, 2020, Levin replayed the entire interview the Saturday after Kirk’s death.

Levin and Kirk discussed Marxism’s rise in American politics through the self-described Democratic Socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). At the time, Sanders was running in the Democratic primary for president, which former Vice President Joe Biden ultimately won. Levin adamantly believed that the terms democratic and socialist did not go together.

Describing America’s culture as broken, Kirk observed to Levin that conservatives had been successful in the political realm but had failed to engage the culture, specifically educational institutions.

“We’ve been winning politically as conservatives the last 10 to 15 years but losing, tragically, culturally,” Kirk reflected. “The university system in particular and the thousands of professors that occupy most of the history departments and humanities departments have been teaching the next generation to hate our country.”

In Kirk’s view, professors were not teaching American history properly, if at all. ‘They’ve not been teaching them [students] the founding of our country.” As a result, students do not understand economics or the actual meaning of liberty. The result is grievance, not gratitude.

“When you’re not thankful for something, Mark, why would you want to conserve that something? If you’re not thankful for our country, of course you would want to support a revolution to overtake it,” Kirk pointed out,

“So what I do every single day is to try to bring the ideas of freedom and liberty and the Constitution to these college campuses,” Kirk explained of his work in founding and leading Turning Point USA. Through this organization, students start and host a Turning Point chapters on college campuses. Kirk frequently traveled to these colleges, where he gave students an opportunity to debate him and prove him wrong. Those who disagreed with him were encouraged to be first in line to ask questions. At the time of this 2020 interview, Turning Point had 2,000 chapters operating on high school and college campuses.

“There’s an extraordinary amount of young people that are waiting for this message to be heard because they have been silenced by the intelligencia, if you will, on college campuses that believe that there should only be one set of ideas on these university campuses,” Kirk relayed.

My husband and I saw the early days of this one-political-viewpoint trend during our higher education administration graduate program at Texas A&M University in the mid-1990s. We were not allowed to quote President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, the prolific William Bennett, or the brilliant thinker, Ivy League educated and Reagan appointee Dinesh D’Souza in our papers. But had we quoted a Democrat president’s education secretary, that would have been just fine with our professors. We realized that although these professors were tasked with teaching us to become university administrators, they were not tolerant of our opinions. Despite its name, diversity did not mean diversity of viewpoint. We could have used Turning Point USA.

My husband and I left the education administration field to work in government. In hindsight, it is clear that higher education only grew worse over the decades, leading to the crisis of socialism and Marxism that Kirk confronted through his college tours and Turning Point organization.

“Look, we have to understand that whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen on the halls of Congress. And we should not be cheering on the rise of a Marxist in our country in any form or shape whatsoever,” Kirk simply but eloquently explained to Levin.

“We defeated communism when the Berlin Wall fell down [in 1989], but then we fell asleep at the wheel and we’ve allowed the same Marxist ideas to infiltrate the minds of our most prized possession in our country, which is our young people.”

Kirk told Levin that he is often asked this question: “Do you think America is going to be more or less socialist in 10 years?”

“The only correct answer to that question is what’s happening in culture. What are our students reading? Are they reading the founding fathers? Do they understand American history? Are they appreciative of this gift that we’ve been given from God?”

Because the answer is usually no, Kirk explained that he ran Turning Point USA with a sense of urgency. Just as the nation’s first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton famously wrote lengthy and well-conceived essays as if he was, “running out of time” as Hamilton’s Broadway song Non-Stop declares, so Kirk also worked tirelessly. He galvanized the youth vote for President Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

“What does the word liberty mean?” Levin asked Kirk, who once again took a historical view.

“It means that first and foremost we have natural rights from our Creator—the right to your own consciousness, the right to your decisions, the right to make good decisions and bad decisions,” he replied.

“But also the idea of liberty is quite honestly a new idea governmentally in the last couple hundred years. Very few societies actually allowed citizens to have liberty in human history. In fact, the norm was typically the absence of liberty. The norm was tyranny. The norm was a permanent serf class and a despot, dictator or ruler exploiting the citizenry and people dying from some war by the age of 30 or 35,” Kirk, who was 26 years-old at the time, explained.

“You either have liberty or you don’t. You don’t get to pick and choose what kind of liberty you want. It’s not some sort of buffet option.”

Kirk also acknowledged a challenge that comes with a free society. “Here’s the problem with liberty though, is that liberty breeds apathy. One of our genius founding fathers articulated that. When people have liberty, over a couple generations, you are going to have hierarchies be created. So let’s pretend there actually was enough money to be confiscated from all the billionaires. It still wouldn’t be moral. It still wouldn’t be correct, and that would be a violation of the tenant of liberty.”

Noting that the year 1776 was important because of the Declaration of Independence, he concluded that when people are allowed to make choices, people’s lives actually get better.

Both Levin and Kirk rejected Senators Sanders’s view that America is a racist country from top to bottom. One proof are the thousands of immigrants of color seeking to come to the United States.

“It is one of the great lies and it is taught in our university systems. What it does is create self-loathing, self-loathing among students in their view of America. Because if you believe that America is a racists, bigoted, homophonic backwards-looking country, of course you would want to try to create a revolution within that country.”

Concluding the opposite, Kirk once again put America into the context of history. “This lie that America is a racist country is so perverse and it is so widespread. We are the least-racist, multiethnic, multilingual country ever to exist in the history of the world. We have assimilated successfully immigrants from every single country, from every single corner from around the world,” he said, noting that America voluntarily takes in about half of the world’s immigrants every year.

“If America is so racist, then why does the [migrant] caravan go north for America and not south for Venezuela?”

He concluded this portion of the interview by praising the American trinity of freedom, the phrase in God we trust and e pluribus unum, which means out of many one.

As Americans say goodbye to Charlie Kirk, it is fitting to remember that he literally wore his belief in liberty on his sleeves when he was killed. During Turning Point’s American Comeback free speech tour at Utah Valley University, he wore a signature white t-shirt with only one word emblazoned on the front: FREEDOM.

After his assassination, the t-shirt sold out on his website and is available for pre-orders. The new edition now features the Turning Point logo on the left sleeve next to the date of Kirk’s assassination: September 10, 2025. Not only have more than 60,000 students requested information on starting or joining a Turning Point chapter at their high school or college, but they are also buying Charlie’s t-shirt as a reminder of his commitment to liberty.

The Kirk army wears the uniform of freedom as they march together in solidarity with the man in a humble t-shirt who lost his life while exercising his right to free speech.

Order Jane Hampton Cook’s 2026 America 250 calendar, which features quotes and original images of America’s founders along with battle dates from the American Revolution and the War of 1812.