In the fall of 2015, a student government colleague hustled me into a private room in the University of Oregon library to meet a visitor I “had to meet” before his flight out of Eugene. Tall, skinny, and with a grin from ear to ear, Charlie was in Eugene to flip our student government conservative. At a place like Oregon, just scraping together a slate of non-liberals was a stretch. But Charlie was ambitious and wanted to use Oregon as a trial run for flipping student governments at deeply progressive universities across the country.
I was involved in student government, ran recruitment for the Interfraternity Council, and once liked Mitt Romney’s Facebook page. At Oregon, that was enough to make me a recruit.
I told him I was a sophomore without the résumé or reputation to co-lead a student government slate. He told me to stop disqualifying myself, that I could lead and must try. He treated responsibility as something to be grabbed, not given.
Charlie scraped together enough funds to seed a slate and then stayed with us for weeks, often on the floor with a notepad, building the race from scratch. He cut our platform down to what students actually lived every day: bring Uber back to Eugene and support Greek life. We probably did not have the power to bring Uber back after a local ordinance banning it, but he was deeply strategic and understood the zeitgeist, even then. He started with what people worried about: getting home safe after a night out and having a sense of belonging on campus.
He flew in canvassers, drilled us on messaging, and set the pace. He was up before everyone, did not drink coffee, and still had more energy than the room combined. We argued a lot about the meaning of life, including a long dinner where the two of us debated euthanasia, abortion, and religion.
Charlie Kirk’s energy and debates shaped students far beyond politics
He quoted Scripture from memory, but what stayed with me was not a verse. It was his conviction that moral truths exist outside of us, that God is an objective reality, not a construct. He forced me to ask whether I was living as if God was real, and whether I was honoring a tradition I barely understood. He never tried to convert me. What he said instead changed my life: “It’s important that you be Jewish.”
Only later did I learn he was just 22. To me, he was larger than life, with the knowledge and wisdom of someone twice his age.
Not everything we tried on the campaign worked. In a move that was very Charlie, he had stacks of pizza sent to a pop-up canvassing site for voters. It broke the rules and a student elections complaint cost us two days in a weeklong campaign. Then word spread that a “right-wing extremist” was bankrolling our race. Charlie was anything but extreme, but the campaign collapsed.
His influence did not. He made a 19-year-old take first principles seriously: why we are here and what we are here for. I began attending Shabbat dinners, meeting weekly with my rabbi to try to understand the covenant Charlie told me about. One conversation led to another, and then to two years in yeshiva at Machon Shlomo, where Torah study became daily practice. I joined the Altneu Synagogue in Manhattan. I read more widely and more carefully, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand. Thanks to Charlie, I treated life seriously and my relationship with God became primary. That shift carried me through college and, eventually, to Harvard Law School (likely to Charlie’s chagrin).
The irony still makes me smile: a Christian activist sent me down the path to becoming an Orthodox Jew. On his last night in Eugene, one of my running mates dropped Charlie at his hotel before an early flight. At check-in, his card was declined. He had spent it all on our race for travel, outreach and food, and had not even left enough for his own room. The mission came first.
I have since met others who tell versions of a similar story. Different campuses, but the same imprint: he believed in them first. If you knew Charlie only from social media clips, you saw the debates and the noise. If you met him, even for ten minutes, you saw a man with unyielding faith who cared for and respected people he disagreed with. He admired my covenant with the God of Israel, and he wanted me to honor it. He loved Jesus. He loved the Jewish people. He believed truth exists and that we are responsible for it.
I will always be grateful for Charlie and his influence on my life. May his memory be a blessing.
The author is a Harvard Law School graduate, a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, and a gabbai at the Altneu Synagogue.