Reagan Hurly, the president of Texas A. & M.’s political-science club, was at his apartment in College Station, Texas, when he heard that Charlie Kirk had been killed while speaking on a college campus in Utah. Hurly went “deep in prayer,” he told me, and began organizing a vigil. He enlisted the help of his best friend, the head of Texas A. & M.’s chapter of Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative nonprofit. Then he began to invite other students. Pols Aggies, as Hurly’s club is known, is nonpartisan, and he had already decided that his mission for the semester was “to depolarize.” He reached out to every political group he knew of on campus, most of which were conservative, and he also asked a member of his own club—who had debated Kirk when he visited the campus this past April—to be on the program. He invited the Aggie Democrats to come and speak, too. They seemed “pretty nervous,” he said, because of “how unstable and divisive it’s been recently.” But, ultimately, they said yes.
The next day, a group of volunteers spent hours collecting thousands of battery-operated candles from churches and stores in the area. They had no idea how many people were going to show up at the event. Texas A. & M. is one of the biggest universities in the country, with more than seventy thousand students, and it regularly appears on lists of the most conservative campuses. Kirk’s visit to the school in the spring had drawn a crowd of twenty-five hundred, filling an auditorium to capacity.
Kirk’s murder prompted a tremendous outpouring of grief, fear, and anger. On social media, people shared instructions for how to turn off auto-play in order to avoid accidentally encountering what amounted to a snuff video. There was no known motive for the killing, and the suspected shooter—later revealed to be twenty-two year-old Tyler Robinson, according to investigators—had not yet been apprehended. That had not stopped some figures on the right from calling for war against their political enemies. The left was, according to Elon Musk, “the party of murder” and, according to the far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, a “national security threat”; Loomer called for the Trump Administration to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” Hurly and other volunteers reached out to churches in town and across the state, and asked them to pray over the event.
Hundreds of people showed up to the vigil—young men sweating under their blazers, young women clutching plastic-wrapped bouquets of flowers. It was a breezeless, stifling night. At the edge of the crowd, a man waved a flag with a picture of a pine tree and the phrase “Appeal to Heaven.” The flag, which dates back to the American Revolution, has more recently been associated with Christian nationalists. “It just says, when we can’t find our answers through government, we find our answers through God,” the man waving it told me. The assembled Aggies, students who are typically known for their exuberance, were uncharacteristically hushed. “Tonight is not a night for politics,” Hurly said, when it was his time to speak. “Violence can happen on both sides of the aisle and it is up to us for the future to change it.” He asked for prayers for the teen-agers who had been wounded at a school shooting in Colorado the previous day, and for the Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, who were murdered earlier this year. “People want to see change. From my experience as an individual, change comes with love,” Hurly said. “Our generation has the potential to be a force for good. It is up to us to make that happen.” When a group with a guitar took the stage and began singing worship songs, the two women standing in front of me linked arms and leaned against each other as they began to cry.
Kirk, who was thirty-one years old, made a name for himself as a kind of MAGA whisperer to young people, many of whom discovered him through social media and campus events where he invited students to debate him. Kirk’s visit to Texas A. & M. had been part of his American Comeback Tour, for which he visited colleges to celebrate Donald Trump’s reëlection and advocate for conservative culture on campuses; videos of the event showed the packed auditorium swaying with revival-meeting enthusiasm. An out-of-state freshman I spoke with told me that she had come across videos of the event at the time she was deciding which college to attend. Kirk, she said, was “a big reason” she ended up choosing Texas A. & M.: “Just, like, the power and light that the students brought for him, and his love for this school.”
Kirk’s evangelicalism inflected both the tone and content of his message. He was open to talk with anyone, but steadfast in his confidence that his path was the correct one. “If you do not have a religious basis, specifically a Christian one, for your society, something else is going to replace it,” he said at the Texas A. & M. event. He and his followers were locked in a battle with an enemy that was not just ideologically opposed but unwell, possibly evil. Democratic leaders, Kirk said, were “maggots, vermin, and swine”; transgender identity was a “middle finger to God.” Fresh-faced and tall, with seemingly boundless reserves of energy, Kirk approached politics less as an argument over competing policies and more as a meme-driven competitive sport, with the spectacle of owning your enemies deployed as a surefire way to drive engagement. He built an impressive infrastructure both online and offline that got young people to volunteer and their grandmothers to donate. He was, above all else, a superb fund-raiser. For Kirk, politics were inseparable from faith, and his fans sometimes invoked the language of religious conversion to explain his effect on them. A freshman named Elizabeth told me that she had been “on the other side” until Kirk, whom she first encountered via social media, “opened my eyes and opened my ears, not only to politics but to Christ.”
