HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke Sunday at a memorial service for Charlie Kirk:

Charlie’s overarching passion was his Christianity and his devotion to his God. He believed what St. Francis taught us almost a thousand years ago – that we should strive to live our lives in perfect imitation of Christ, that we should turn every day and every moment and every interaction into a prayer. And Charlie understood the great paradox: that it’s only by surrender to God that God’s power can flow into our lives and make us effective human beings. Christ died at 33 years old, but he changed the trajectory of history. Charlie died at 31 years old, but because he had surrendered, he also now has changed the trajectory of history. [APPLAUSE] Charlie’s other passion was free speech. He understood that the free flow of information was the soil, the water, the sunlight for democracy. He understood democracy’s great advantage was that our policies were formed by ideas that had triumphed in a marketplace – in conversation. He thought that conversation was the only way to heal our country, and this was particularly important during a technological age when we are all hooked into social algorithms that are hacked into the reptilian parts of our brain and amplify our impulses for tribalism and for division. He felt that the only way to overcome that impulse is with a spiritual fire and by developing community, and that the only way of doing community was through conversation. So he always gave the biggest microphone to the people who were most passionately aligned against him, because he knew that we needed to talk to each other and we needed to say what we mean without saying it mean. A few years ago my brother David died, and I asked my mother, Does the hole that they leave in you when they die ever get any smaller? She said to me, It never gets any smaller. Our job is to grow ourselves bigger in the hole. And we do that by taking the best qualities, the most admirable character traits of the person that died and integrating them with strength, discipline, and practice into our own character. By doing that, we make ourselves larger and the hole gets proportionately smaller. We also give a kind of immortality to the person who left us because their work continues through others. A couple of days ago my niece – or my granddaughter – left for college in Europe. Her mother noticed that she packed a Bible. Her mother asked her why she made that choice. She said, I want to live more like Charlie. [APPLAUSE] One of my first conversations with Charlie in July of 2021, we were talking about the risks that all of us take when we challenge interests – the physical risks – and he asked me if I was scared of dying. I said to him, There are a lot worse things than death, and one of those things is if we lost our constitutional rights in this country and if our children were raised as slaves. [APPLAUSE] I said to Charlie, Sometimes the best consolation we can hope for is that we get to die with our boots on. Well, Charlie died with his boots on, and he died to make sure that we didn’t have to undergo those fates that are worse than death.

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