On October 14, 2025, President Donald Trump made the following proclamation:

NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR CHARLIE KIRK

On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 10, 2025, pure evil struck when the legendary Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight in a campus courtyard, triggering a groundswell of righteous fury all across our land.  Today, our Nation honors the immortal memory of Charlie — a father, a husband, a Christian martyr, and a titan of the American conservative movement.  We honor his life, we send our condolences to his beautiful family, and we pledge to advance the values for which he laid down his life.

Every day, Charlie devoted himself to a set of simple causes:  Defending the truth, encouraging debate, and spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  He was gracious and articulate beyond measure, always welcomed opposing perspectives, and never deviated from his noble goal of bridging our political, cultural, and philosophical divides.

As we mourn this extraordinary loss, my Administration will continue to do everything in its power to end this devastating wave of political violence.  No civilized country can endure a culture where open debate is met with gunfire, the pursuit of truth is met with bloodshed, and love of country is met with seething hatred.  In Charlie’s absence, we are now tasked with continuing his mission of giving voice to our cherished American ideals with confidence and clarity.  Like him, we must not flinch in the face of darkness and hostility — and we must never waver in speaking the truth with joyful and steadfast resolve.

Today, on what would have been his 32nd birthday, our Nation honors the loving memory of Charlie Kirk.  We offer our condolences to his beautiful wife, Erika, and two precious children.  We call on every American to pray for peace in our public square.  Above all, we renew our resolve to always defend our principles of truth, faith, and the open exchange of ideas.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 14, 2025, as a National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk.  I call on the American people to assemble on this day in their respective places of worship, there to pay homage to Charlie’s memory.  I invite the people of our Nation to pray for the advancement of peace, truth, and justice all across our country.

For Adults

1. What do you think Charlie Kirk got most right about American politics or culture—and why?
2. What do you think he got most wrong (or overstated)—and what’s the strongest case for that critique?
3. He focused heavily on reaching young people. What are the best and worst effects of political movements aimed at youth?
4. How should we evaluate his campus approach—debate and persuasion vs. provocation and conflict? Where’s the line?
5. What’s the most constructive way to interpret his emphasis on faith, family, and personal responsibility? What’s the most charitable disagreement?
6. What responsibilities do prominent political voices have to lower the temperature, especially after political violence?
7. How should we think about free speech on campuses and online: maximal openness, or time/place/manner limits to protect learning and safety?
8. What role do outrage incentives (clicks, virality, fundraising) play in shaping political commentary—and how did Kirk navigate that?
9. How should friends and critics talk about a polarizing public figure after their death—what feels respectful without becoming hagiography?
10. If you were advising a 20-year-old today, what pieces of Kirk’s message (or an alternative) would you want them to hear most and which pieces would you want them to know and reject?

12 discussion questions for all ages

1. What does it look like to disagree respectfully with someone you care about?
2. Can you think of a time you changed your mind after listening to someone? What helped?
3. What are the rules of a good conversation: no interrupting, asking questions, “I” statements—which matter most?
4. What does courage mean in everyday life (not just politics)?
5. How can we tell the difference between a strong opinion and a proven fact?
6. What does patriotism mean to you? (Is it love, criticism, service, gratitude—or all of these?)
7. What’s one way young people can help their community that isn’t about politics?
8. Why do people sometimes talk past each other, and how can we do better?
9. What are good ways to respond when something terrible happens—kindness, prayer, volunteering, checking on neighbors?
10. What’s one value you’d want everyone here—left, right, or in-between—to practice more often?

Charlie’s Vision for Gen Z and the Future of Our Country

This is an address by Charlie Kirk to over 1,000 student leaders at Turning Point USA’s Chapter Leadership summit.

Audio box: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/charlies-vision-for-gen-z-and-the-future-of-our-country/id1460600818?i=1000742763137

“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg: This iconic Beat-era epic is perhaps the most famous poem in the context of free speech law because its publisher was criminally prosecuted for obscenity in 1957. The judge in the case, Clayton Horn, ultimately ruled that the poem was not obscene due to its “redeeming social importance,” a decision that helped lay the groundwork for First Amendment rights as they are understood today.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

“Freedom of Speech” by NK Prasad

https://allpoetry.com/poem/12651465-Freedom-of-Speech-by-NK-Prasad

“Bite Your Tongue” by Norma Pain

https://www.classicalpoets.org/a-poem-on-the-loss-of-free-speech-bite-your-tongue-by-norma-pain/

“Die Gedanken Sind Frei”

The composer and lyricist of this traditional German song dating back to 1870 are unknown.  The title means “Thoughts are Free.”  In 1966, American musician Pete Seeger released an adaptation on his album Dangerous Songs!?

https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/pete-seeger/die-gedanken-sind-frei-chords-3181679

The following article was published in The Nation on September 12, 2025, shortly after Kirk’s death.

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning

The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn’t a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division.

Elizabeth Spiers

Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Friess, and his own father, also a prolific right-wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.

It is rude of me to say all of this, because we live in a culture where manners are often valued more than truth. That is why a slew of pundits and politicians have raced to portray Kirk’s activities, which harmed many vulnerable people, in a positive light—and to give him the benefit of the doubt that he did not grant to anyone who wasn’t white, Christian, straight, and male. California Governor Gavin Newsom framed Kirk’s project as a healthy democratic exercise: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate.” This downwardly defines both “discourse” and “good faith.”

There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long as you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama, whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

It’s true that we cannot know what was in Charlie Kirk’s heart, because we are not telepathic. But we can make reasonable inferences based on the things he said and did publicly because we are also not colossally stupid. He built a large following, and acquired real political power saying these things—to young people, to the president and his minions, to deep-pocket right-wing donors—and there are far too many people who have been ready to suggest that he was able to do this through a combination of natural charisma and good old-fashioned hard work. Speaking about and addressing the late Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who is Black, he said, “It’s very obvious to us you are not smart enough to be able to get it on your own. ‘I could not make it on my own, so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving.’” Kirk was smart enough to ask his father for a check when he wanted to found Turning Point, and had always been happy to curtail opportunities for more deserving people when they failed to conform to his own ideology.

It’s this that makes it particularly galling to see him cast by some as a free speech warrior. He created a professor watchlist explicitly designed to get academics fired who dared talk about the right’s usual assortment of verboten topics—anything to do with race or gender, in particular. He also offered the standard right-wing plaint about left-wing indoctrination in American universities even as he went on campus tours trying to indoctrinate young people into his hard-right Christian nationalist worldview.

When we decline to speak ill of the dead, it’s because we have compassion for the living. In this respect, I am sorry for Kirk’s children. I don’t know if Kirk was a good father, but if he was, that does little to mitigate the damage he did to other people’s children. I can only hope for the sake of his kids that they have role models who will teach them that it is wrong to profit off the dehumanization of people because of who they are.

When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

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On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don’t believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done. I am against the death penalty, pro–gun control, and believe war is a failure of humanity, not a necessary byproduct of it. Kirk was fine with murder as long as the right people were dying.

Some of the people valorizing Kirk insist that all of his toxicity was acceptable because at least he was open to debate—a bar so low, you’d have to dig into the Mariana Trench to get to it. And he certainly paid lip service to it. “We record all of it so that we put [it] on the Internet so people can see these ideas collide,” he said of his own streaming operation. “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.”

But Kirk’s actions undercut that notion every day. His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.

Chicken and Cabbage Diablo

Charlie Kirk is reported to have preferred a fairly spartan diet and in particular was a fan of cabbage with grilled chicken and hot sauce.  Here’s my version of a chicken and cabbage stir fry.

Ingredients:

• 2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, diced
• 1 cup shredded cabbage
• 1 cup grated carrots
• 1 bell pepper (any color)
• 1 yellow onion, diced
• Olive oil or avocado oil, for sautéing

Sauce ingredients

• ½ cup soy sauce
• 1 tbsp. honey
• 1-3 tbsps. sriracha (or hot sauce of your choice)
• 3 tbsp. sesame oil
• 1 tbsp. rice wine vinegar

Start by mixing the sauce ingredients in a bowl, then add in your diced chicken. Let that sit while you prep your veggies.

Next, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add chicken pieces to the pan. Let the chicken cook undisturbed for 3–4 minutes to get a nice golden brown sear. After that, toss the chicken and let it cook another 3 minutes or so, until most of the pink is gone and the edges are browning.

Then it’s veggie time: Add in the diced yellow onion, sliced bell pepper, and the shredded cabbage and carrots. Sauté everything together for about 4 minutes over medium heat, until the veggies are soft and the tender cabbage wilts down. Double-check that the chicken is cooked through by cutting into a piece – it should be juicy and white in the center.

That’s it! Serve your stir fry as-is for a low-carb option, or spoon it over cauliflower rice.

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