I first met Charlie Kirk in 2021, when he was a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where I am a senior fellow. By that point he was already a conservative movement celebrity, and unquestionably the most prominent conservative youth leader in America, though he had not yet ascended quite all the way to the Olympian heights he had achieved at the time of his tragic assassination.
The Lincoln Fellowship is for mid-career professionals. It is intellectually demanding and comes with a huge amount of reading that attendees were expected to do in advance. I was very impressed that Charlie, whose schedule was so insanely busy and planned to the minute, had made the commitment to attend, and, as evidenced by his comments and questions, had clearly done the reading as well. That was maybe the first indication I got that Charlie was “built different,” as they say.
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