When Luke Brown first discovered Charlie Kirk, he said, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, through a YouTube video that just came up on his phone.

“It was in the like, you know, ‘Conservative guy destroys libtard student,’ whatever, you know, something silly like that,” Brown said. “And so it got your attention. But I watched it. I was like, ‘This guy has some good ideas.’”

Today, Brown is co-president of American University College Republicans. On Sept. 15, he helped organize a vigil for Kirk on campus after the conservative political commentator was assassinated five days earlier while speaking in Utah.

Kirk’s willingness to debate anyone influenced his mindset and the club, Brown said.

“We try to embody what he was doing and be like that at American, so he’s definitely influential for me and for our club,” Brown said.

Kirk’s online videos shaped the early political thinking of the conservative student leaders who organized the event, Brown and other students said. Having been influenced by videos of Kirk debating college students, they said they have faced backlash for upholding his memory. Still, Kirk has amassed a following on AU’s campus.

The vigil took place behind closed blinds in the School of International Service Founders Room. It featured remarks from multiple student speakers and AUCatholic Chaplain Ivan Pertine. A student read a statement on behalf of Anita McBride, a former high-ranking White House staffer under President George Bush and AU College Republicans’ faculty advisor.

In the hallway on the other side of the Founders Room blinds, two protestors quarreled with the AU College Republicans members taking event attendance. Outside SIS, people blasted music, including “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.

Brown said AU College Republicans received many hateful messages for hosting the vigil, with some threatening to crash and disrupt it, but the event went on successfully with a large turnout. He said the organization believes in free exchange of ideas on campus, like Kirk did.

“I think Charlie would be proud of what our club is doing, which is to spread conservatism in the most hostile places, like American,” Brown said. “And in a school that prides itself on being a bastion of civil discourse: well, you gotta have two sides when you have civil discourse.”

Brown said he was only a little politically conscious when he discovered Kirk, but he took a liking to his ideas. After he saw him live-debating the crowd at an event in 2021, he said, Kirk became an inspiration.

“I saw there was a long line of people there,” Brown said. “You know, they didn’t vet any one of them. They just went up and questioned Charlie Kirk, debated him. It was a really inspiring event, and I think, to his social media reach, it definitely influenced my beliefs.”

AU College Republicans Vice President Alex Austin said he, like Brown, discovered Kirk online during the pandemic. Austin grew up in Missouri, he said, where his father was a farmer and his mother was a former staffer for former President Bill Clinton. He said he grew up hearing liberal and conservative viewpoints.

“CNN, Rush Limbaugh, both of those sides,” he said.

Prior to finding Kirk, he said, he would have described himself as a liberal.

Austin said he admired Kirk’s bravery in going to speak in places where he knew he was disliked.

“But he knew that the message that he brought with him was more powerful than the voices that would shout him down,” he said. “And I think that’s what drew me to him, in sort of a low place in my life.”

Many of Kirk’s videos are recordings of events he hosted on college campuses where he invited students to debate him.

In a May 16 video, “Feisty Tree Hugger Gets Exposed for Science Ignorance,” Kirk sits under a canopy tent strung with banners reading “Prove Me Wrong.” A debater at a microphone asked him why he supports President Donald Trump promoting the usage of fossil fuels, which release greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to climate change.

“Don’t you see it’s making oceans much more polluted?” she asked.

“No,” Kirk said.

“Absolutely. Do you know what carbon dioxide is?” she asked.

“Yes. You wanna see it?” said Kirk.

He blew onto his microphone, drawing laughter from spectators behind his opponent, who were wearing pro-Trump tops and hats. Kirk went on to say that while global temperatures are rising, the extent to which humans are causing climate change is unclear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a climate-focused United Nations body, said human influence is the main driver of climate change in a 2021 report.

One of Kirk’s target audiences was his opponents, whom he hoped to provoke embarrassing reactions from, said Scott Talan, an assistant professor of public and strategic communication at AU.

“He is targeting them to trigger them, to upset them and get a reaction and hopefully do or say something that will prove that they’re incapable of governing or reasoning or having a cogent argument, that they’re afraid of free speech,” Talan said. “So he’s sort of intentionally going after them.”

Kirk’s other audiences were his ideological base who agreed with him and centrist students whom he could sway to his side, Talan said. The videos, Talan said, continue to influence people today.

“You have to keep in mind he’s no longer doing this, but then again, he is, because his recordings and videos and YouTube is still around,” Talan said. “So he’s still speaking from the grave.”

On the day of Kirk’s murder, he was debating members of the crowd at an event at Utah Valley University when he was shot from a distance, according to video of the incident. A suspect is in custody, according to the FBI’s page for the murder.

AU College Republicans released an Instagram post that day, saying the killing was the culmination of unwarranted left-wing rhetoric labeling Kirk as fascist and racist.

“In light of this despicable act, our club has received numerous disparaging insults, with many of our fellow students celebrating Kirk’s murder, and encouraging violence to be taken against other conservatives, such as our President,” the post said.

AU College Democrats also made an Instagram post, condemning Kirk’s killing as well as all forms of political violence. It noted that a shooter at Evergreen High School in Colorado injured three high school students on the same day. AU College Democrats President Anna Livingstone declined to comment in an email to AWOL.

A petition against the vigil written by a junior and sent to administrators on Sept. 12 also condemned political violence but said Kirk’s murder did not justify posthumously honoring him, according to a Sept. 26 Eagle article. 336 people signed the petition, which condemned the vigil and called on President Jon Alger to cancel it.

“American University is a heavily queer university, nearly half of its campus is non-white, and is majority female–all groups that Charlie Kirk encouraged violence towards,” the petition reads.

Kirk was known to make inflammatory statements about marginalized groups. On his podcast, he used an antitransgender slur and the word “freaks” to refer to a queer influencer and government officials in December 2022. Kirk said “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people” in American cities, according to a Media Matters article. In a November 2023 podcast episode, he affirmed a statement by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”

Brown said the criticism of Kirk’s rhetoric brought on by his death was in poor taste. He said Kirk’s statement about “prowling Blacks” targeting white people was an important fact to point out, and a claim Kirk made about “demonic activity” occurring in Haiti in March 2023 was a joke. He also said Kirk’s call for former President Joe Biden to be imprisoned or executed was probably hyperbole, although Brown said he believed Biden’s immigration policies were tantamount to treason.

“What does his statements have to do with anything?” Brown said. “The fact that a man was just murdered, a very prominent political figure just murdered and we’re saying, ‘Well, let’s take a look at some controversial things.’ I mean, that’s not how we should function in a democracy or in a society.”

Austin said the vigil was meant to be apolitical. AU College Republicans planned to host it outside Kay Spiritual Life Center, he said, but the university helped the organization move it indoors over concerns of possible disruption from other students.

“We didn’t want anything to take from the love that was shared in the room tonight,” Austin said.

Nicholas Youngquist, a senior who spoke at the vigil, said he attended to stand against political violence. He said he had never identified with Turning Point, but Kirk’s youth outreach had driven him further right.

In his speech, Youngquist said humans naturally sympathize with victims of tragedy, even those that they hate or disagree with.

“When you encounter someone who is not sympathetic, it reveals a profound darkness in their soul,” he said. “It reveals their true hatred for humanity.”

He said it would be right for lack of sympathy to be punished but said God commands people to repay evil with good. In an interview, Youngquist said he included the statement to discourage people from seeking revenge.

“I’m saying we need to go beyond that,” Youngquist said. “Like Gandhi says, if we go eye for eye, the whole world goes blind, essentially.”

Youngquist and several other attendees stayed after the vigil to speak with the two protestors outside of the Founders Room.

Javier Benzan, a sophomore and AU College Republicans chief of staff, said two protestors approached the check-in table during the event, insulted him and said Kirk’s wife and children should die and go to hell. He said they stood at the table for over an hour.

The protestors declined an interview with AWOL.

After the vigil, Brown left the Founders Room carrying a box of electric candles. The protestors asked Brown for his thoughts on the killings of Palestinian children in the Israel-Hamas War. Brown countered, accusing them of not genuinely caring about innocent deaths.

“Was Charlie Kirk murdered?” he asked them.

A protester said he was.

“Was he unjustly murdered?” he asked.

“No,” the protestor replied.

The room broke out into argument, and Brown picked up his box and moved to leave.

“You don’t have the right to kill us,” Brown said. “Like, sorry, we’re not gonna sit by when liberals like you celebrate the murder of a conservative.”

Edited by Kyle Galvin, Will Sytsma, Kalie Walker and Caleb Ogilvie