Charlie Kirk, known for his passionate and often controversial conservative views, decided to challenge what he saw as a stronghold of opposing ideas: university campuses in America.

As an activist and social media personality credited with swaying young voters towards Donald Trump in the previous election, Kirk believed students were indoctrinated with leftist views and that these institutions were in dire need of free speech.

Although his opinions, which included opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and criticism of Martin Luther King, were often divisive, he preferred engaging in calm debates with his critics rather than silencing them.

However, in an unexpected and tragic twist of fate, Kirk was shot dead at Utah Valley University shortly after addressing a question on mass shootings.

His death, now resonating across a nation grappling with increasing political violence, is deeply felt, especially as Kirk was admired as a key figure in engaging America’s youth on the Right.

Throughout his brief yet impactful career, Kirk thrived on debate and entered Trump’s close circle, recognized as an expert in capturing the hearts of young voters.

Some pundits believed it might have been a prelude to a White House run but Kirk, though highly ambitious, made it clear he was happier being an activist on the ground, working to defeat a ‘wokeism’ that he believed was destroying his country and needed rooting out at its source.

He co-founded conservative youth movement Turning Point USA in 2012 when he was 18, later dropping out of university to start touring college campuses to try to get a conversation going with his target market. By 2023, the total revenue of Turning Point and associated enterprises had soared to £68million.

Kirk was initially concerned about economics – supporting small government and free markets – but, after becoming an evangelical Christian, he turned into more of a culture warrior.

In 2021, he married a former Miss Arizona, Erika Frantzve, and became an exponent of traditional family values, including the woman’s place in marriage.

‘Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge,’ he once advised pop star Taylor Swift.

Setting up home in Arizona –although temporarily relocating to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago base in Florida – the Kirks started a family with a daughter, now three, and a boy aged one. Their names have never been made in public.

If Kirk and Erika have insisted on strict privacy when it comes to their home life, he seemed to relish his public notoriety. An unashamed provocateur, Kirk soaked up what his critics said about him.

Branded racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic by the Left, he championed myriad controversial views – opposing abortion even for rape victims and claiming that an anti-malaria drug could treat Covid-19 (for which he was temporarily banned from pre-Elon Musk Twitter).

Kirk argued that white men were the people who were truly oppressed in today’s America.

In 2021, he described George Floyd, the black man whose murder by a Minneapolis police officer sparked the Black Lives Matter unrest, as ‘a bad man’. A ‘Christian Nationalist’, Kirk opposed immigration on the grounds that it was part of a plot – dubbed the Great Replacement Theory – to displace white Americans.

While he admitted he wasn’t immediately drawn to Trump –and had actually supported some of his Republican challengers for the White House – Kirk was won over by Trump’s children, particularly Donald Trump Jr, to whom he became close after working for him during the 2016 election. Becoming a devout Trump loyalist, he eventually believed the President was heaven sent: when Trump came close to death in Pennsylvania last year, Kirk suggested that a ‘gust of wind’ sent by God had pushed the bullet ‘ever so slightly’.

Kirk himself was not so fortunate. Yesterday, commentators said they fear the US now faces a dark and dangerous moment – one which can only be overcome if Americans come together.

There is little sign of that happening, however. Easily available guns, the poisonous level of debate on social media and an increasingly polarised population have all fed in to a toxic mix.

Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly reject the idea of political violence but politicians from both sides have been targeted in recent months and years.

In June, a Democratic Minnesota state congresswoman and her husband were murdered in their home.

Trump himself came within inches of being shot at a Pennsylvania rally in July last year.

Love him or hate him, Kirk was at least prepared to sit down and thrash out his differences with his opponents.

It was, tragically, this very openness that cost him his life.