This afternoon, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking onstage at an event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk, 31, was one of the most influential figures on the contemporary American right. In the below essay, Adam Rubenstein remembers Charlie Kirk, the subject of his 2018 profile, Kid Trump. Here he is on “The Charlie Kirk I Knew.” We’ll be bringing you more on this story in the coming hours and days. —The Editors

In 2019, Charlie Kirk and I were, by complete coincidence, on the same flight, Denver to Chicago. I was going to visit my girlfriend in law school, and he was going home to visit his family in Lemont, a Chicago suburb. He technically still lived with his parents—for the few days a year he wasn’t on the road building his organization, Turning Point USA—and was returning home after a campus visit in Colorado.

While walking down the aisle, Charlie spotted me, sitting in a middle seat at the back of the plane, and asked the person next to me to switch seats so we could catch up. She obliged, and Charlie sat down next to me. It had been about a year since I’d seen him last. We knew each other because I had written a profile of him in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that was shuttered later that year—a sign of how the conservative movement was transforming in the age of Trump. While we closed our doors, Charlie was raising millions and speaking in front of sold out audiences.

The profile I wrote ended up on the magazine’s cover in August 2018. “Kid Trump” was its headline. To deliver the story, I had spent a week with Charlie, then 24 years old, in Washington, D.C., backstage at a summit he put on for high schoolers in Turning Point USA, on George Washington University’s campus. Five members of the cabinet appeared, as did Mark Cuban, Kellyanne Conway, and Fox News’ Jesse Watters. Students traveled from across the country to attend. Parents came with their children, thrilled by the prospect of seeing Charlie up close.

In the months before publication, I’d meet him periodically at “The Trump,” as he called it—the old post office where President Trump had a hotel.

He was always mobbed. Hotel guests and Trump-adjacent figures would come up to him as we talked. They’d introduce themselves, ask for a selfie, and thank him for his work bringing conservative ideas to America’s youth.

In the profile, I described the movement Charlie was building and what motivated him. He had decided at age 18 against going to college so that he could build Turning Point, to fight back against left-wing excesses—and would tell his audience of adoring, mostly young men and women things that we used to take for granted. Things like “America is the greatest country in the history of the world.” And “The Constitution is the greatest political document ever written.” And “Free market capitalism is the most moral and proven economic system to lift the most people out of poverty into prosperity.”

It is a sign of our times that such messages are now considered radical or fringe.

His talent for public oration, and his infectiously good attitude, propelled him forward. He would say yes to—or try to make happen—any request of him that he could: a student asking him a question about Murray Rothbard (a libertarian economist), an activist asking for a photo (the answer was always yes), a reporter asking about the latest Trump tweet (that was me).

In the week I spent following him around, what I found most striking was how someone at such a young age could command the attention and respect that he did—and in such a short period.

The profile was fair, and by no means a puff piece. And while his flack reached out to me to tell me that I was a Never Trump reptile (or something like that), Charlie texted me a link to my own story and said, “Well done!”

That was Charlie. If I had to use a single word to capture him, it would be gracious. We could disagree about anything—and we did—but he would, without fail, engage civilly and explain his point of view. He did not do this, as many do, to make himself feel smart. He did it so he could share the other side of something he cared about. And he cared deeply.

That’s the spirit he took to the hundreds of campuses he visited. Not denunciation. Not shouting down. Never an insult. He sought to debate ideas, and did so in hostile territory. Charlie all but recreated the public town square on these campuses with a tent and an irrepressible smile in an era where many people of his generation can’t look up from their phones.

Today, upon news of Charlie’s murder at the hands of a still-unknown shooter at a university in Utah, Donald Trump said that “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.” It was more than that. I saw it. He had a mission. It filled him with meaning. And that, above all, was why he convinced countless young people to listen to him, to change their lives for the better, to stand up for things that used to be called common sense.

Charlie Kirk was not naive. In the video after he is shot, you can see a security team of at least half a dozen bodyguards surround him and spirit him away. Like anyone speaking their mind in public these days, he knew there was a risk.

He had the courage anyway. And today he died under one of those tents where he defended freedom—his, and all of ours.