The New Yorker:

Students at Texas A. & M. organized a vigil for the conservative activist, just months after he visited the university.

By Rachel Monroe

Reagan Hurly, the president of Texas A. & M.’s political-science club, was at his apartment in College Station, Texas, when he heard that Charlie Kirk had been killed while speaking on a college campus in Utah. Hurly went “deep in prayer,” he told me, and began organizing a vigil. He enlisted the help of his best friend, the head of Texas A. & M.’s chapter of Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative nonprofit. Then he began to invite other students. Pols Aggies, as Hurly’s club is known, is nonpartisan, and he had already decided that his mission for the semester was “to depolarize.” He reached out to every political group he knew of on campus, most of which were conservative, and he also asked a member of his own club—who had debated Kirk when he visited the campus this past April—to be on the program. He invited the Aggie Democrats to come and speak, too. They seemed “pretty nervous,” he said, because of “how unstable and divisive it’s been recently.” But, ultimately, they said yes.

The next day, a group of volunteers spent hours collecting thousands of battery-operated candles from churches and stores in the area. They had no idea how many people were going to show up at the event. Texas A. & M. is one of the biggest universities in the country, with more than seventy thousand students, and it regularly appears on lists of the most conservative campuses. Kirk’s visit to the school in the spring had drawn a crowd of twenty-five hundred, filling an auditorium to capacity.

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