Charlie Kirk was only 31 years old when he was taken from this Earth, but his time here has undoubtedly left a lasting imprint on not just the nation’s youth — whom he was dedicated to reaching — but all Americans.

Blaze News editor in chief and BlazeTV host Matthew Peterson, BlazeTV host Jill Savage, and Blaze Media Washington correspondent Christopher Bedford are devastated by the tragic loss.

“Charlie Kirk built an organization and helped build a movement that ultimately propelled him to the very heights of American politics,” Peterson says on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“And what we saw today was unspeakable evil, really, a political assassination of someone who was a political leader. This was someone who is a bright light, who I first met at the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowships,” he continues.

But Charlie wasn’t your average leader.

“Famously, Charlie didn’t go to college. Incredibly smart guy. He sought out wisdom. He sought out knowledge. He was a very sharp student, and he constantly adjusted and changed when he learned new things or saw new things as he was building and helping to make America great,” Peterson says.

“He was an incredible, incredible human being who never stopped doing, who never stopped learning, and who never stopped building,” he says, adding, “And ultimately I think that what he wanted to be was a statesman. ... This is what he wanted to become: an American statesman who changed things for the good. And that is what he did.”

Bedford agrees, though he notes that there was “a strange side” of Charlie that he “didn’t expect.”

“Sweetness. Humility, which really surprised me. Soft-spoken, kind. He had taken personal interests in people. You knew him through Claremont. I knew him through some hunting and fishing trips that our late friend Foster Friess put together and then later on through podcasts and events,” he explains.

While Bedford recalls that the events were “big, glitzy, glamorous, shiny, light-filled things with all kinds of celebrities,” he says Charlie “was not like that.”

“Not in person. Someone who’s married, someone with two children,” he says.

And Bedford has noticed that Charlie’s passing has stirred something in Americans, regardless of how political they are.

“One woman I know, who’s not — she just follows politics tangentially, one of my friends’ wives, she texted me and said, ‘I’m feeling really delicate right now. Not delicate like a flower, delicate like a bomb,’” he says.

“They’ve just killed a cultural figure,” he continues. “Not a politician, not a businessman, but a cultural figure who touched a lot of lives and was in a lot of living rooms with people and was on their personal devices and was on their Instagram feeds and TikToks and came into their classrooms and talked to them on campus and touched a lot of people.”

Peterson couldn’t agree more with Bedford’s friend’s wife, commenting, “Delicate like a bomb is right.”

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