The following is adapted from remarks delivered at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21, 2025.

I have one short story to tell you about Charlie Kirk . . . my friend.

Charlie became a friend of mine because I interrogated him when I first met him as a 19-year-old. Questioning 19-year-olds is my specialty. I asked him some questions he couldn’t answer. He was already becoming famous at the time, and I noticed his reaction.

He asked, “What should I do?”

I answered, “Well, you have to suffer. If you want to grow, you have to suffer. It’s hard to learn—into the night, crack of dawn in the morning. Start with the Bible. Read the classics. Study the founding of America. In those places you will find that there’s a ladder that reaches up toward God. And at the bottom of it are the ordinary good things that are around us everywhere. If we can call them by their names, they have being, and the beings of the good things are figments of God. You will find this teaching in Aristotle. You will find it in the Bible. You will find it in Madison and Jefferson.”

“How do I learn that?” Charlie asked. “You have to suffer,” I said. “You have to study. You have to think.”

I thought I’d never hear from him again. But within a month, he got ahold of my cell phone number and texted me a copy of a certificate of completion of a Hillsdale College online course. He would go on to do that 31 times.

I keep a list in my head of the six or eight young people—and I’m very privileged to get to know many inspiring young people—who are the best I ever saw. Charlie is the only one on that list who was never a full-time student at Hillsdale College. We will miss him dearly. He can’t be replaced.

You know, a good thing is a thing that has being. An assassin is not a thing that has being. The assassin must give up his humanity to destroy something that has being. Charlie lives on. The assassin will die.

My wife, who’s here with me today, and I have set up a scholarship in the hope that Charlie’s children will go to a good college. I have one in mind. And this May—Erika doesn’t know this yet—we are going to give Charlie and Erika the greatest respect a college can give: an honorary degree.

Charlie, you see, has suffered enough. He’s gone to the Lord. He deserves his reward.