RFK Jr. commemorated Charlie Kirk on Sunday, September 14, after the conservative media personality was fatally shot on Wednesday, September 10.
He gave a speech on Kirk
At a ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, 71-year-old health secretary RFK Jr. gave a commemorative speech on 31-year-old Kirk who was shot last week.
In his speech, RFK Jr. recalled when he first met Kirk, saying, “I think we approached each other with a lot of trepidation at that time.”
But they quickly became ‘soulmates’
The health secretary added that despite not getting along at first, he and Kirk quickly became ‘soulmates’.
“We were spiritual brothers, and we were friends,” he said, adding that Kirk was ‘the primary architect of my unification with President Trump.’
They had previously talked about being in the public eye
The politician went on to share that they had had a conversation about the risks of living in the public eye. He said that they ‘were talking about the danger that we both faced from challenging entrenched interests.’
“And he asked me if I was scared to die. I said to him, ‘There’s a lot worse things than dying.’”
He went on to list things he believes are worse
RFK Jr. continued, “Chief among them is losing our constitutional rights and having our children raised in slavery. And I said to him at that time, I said, ‘Sometimes our only consolation is that we can die with our boots on. We can die fighting for these things.’”
RFK Jr. said Kirk was dedicated to ‘free speech’
The health secretary added that Kirk viewed ‘free speech’ as ‘intertwined’ with his faith.
“He thought conversation was the only way we were going to heal our country, that we had to learn to talk to each other without vitriol, without poison, without anger,” RFK Jr. said of Kirk.
The health secretary continued his praise
RFK Jr. went on, “We had to be able to listen to ideas. We had to be able to say what we mean without being mean and to talk to each other across this divide.”
“It’s the only way to end the polarization that’s driven now by these algorithms and by all these other forces in our society.”
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He shared advice on loss
RFK Jr. shared advice he received from his mother, Ethel Kennedy, on the topic of loss.
He said, “I asked her, I said, ‘Does the hole that they leave in you when they die, does it ever get any smaller?’ And she said, ‘No. It never gets any smaller, but our job is to build ourselves bigger around the hole.’”
RFK Jr. advised ‘taking the best virtues’
“We do that by taking the best virtues and character traits of the person that we lost and using discipline and restraint and practice integrating those character traits into our own character,” the health secretary added.
“And in doing that, we make ourselves larger, and the hole gets proportionally smaller. And we also give the person a kind of immortality because the best parts of them are now living on us.”
