By: Skylar Ribotsky
Dear Charlie,
It was an ordinary Wednesday at my first job out of college.
I saw the first notification with your name out of the corner of my glasses, but I knew your campus tour was starting, so I kept working. Then another appeared: a text from my boyfriend, I saw your name and immediately got that sinking feeling when you know something is wrong. I picked up my phone. Then I saw the video.
I remember staring at what I was supposed to be doing on the computer in front of me and having no idea what to do next, as if a foreign language was staring back at me, even though five minutes before I knew what I was doing. I remember walking to the bathroom and crying, then attempting to return to an ordinary workday when nothing about the day felt ordinary anymore.
As I walked toward the subway, a text from my friend appeared on my phone, “Are you okay?” I facetimed her. For nearly thirty seconds, we just looked at each other in horrified silence. Neither of us could find anything to say. There was nothing to say.
One year later, those fragments remain painfully clear.
I had no personal claim to you or to the grief of the people who truly knew and loved you. Yet as I stood crying in that bathroom, and sat silently on that call, I could not explain why losing someone I had never met felt so personal. I am still trying to explain it now.
For nearly seven years, your voice was a constant in my life. I watched your campus debates, listened to your show, and stopped whatever I was doing whenever a new video appeared on my feed. Your name came up so often in my home that, in some strange way, you began to feel like a part of it.
One year ago, I wrote to thank you for being my hero. Today, I am writing because the passage of time has only made me understand more clearly how much of my own voice was shaped by the one I spent countless hours listening to and learning from. Yours.
I found you during my sophomore year of high school. At an age when I was still figuring out what I believed-and whether I was allowed to say it -you made conviction seem possible. You spoke about politics, faith, family, and America with a certainty that never required you to close yourself off from those who disagreed.
“If you disagree, come to the front of the line.”
Those words remain the first thing I hear when I think of you.
You did not ask people to remain safely within their own political corners. You handed a microphone to the people most eager to challenge you. You listened to their arguments, answered their questions, and trusted that ideas could withstand scrutiny. At a time when so many people treat disagreement as proof of evil, you treated it as the beginning of a conversation.You would have engaged in any debate or dialogue with the man accused of taking your life.
Being a young conservative often means learning two things: how to be a skilled actress and when to stay quiet. It means sitting in classrooms where everyone assumes you agree with them. It means measuring every word before speaking and wondering whether honesty will cost you a grade, a friendship, an opportunity, or simply the way someone sees you.
Long before I found the confidence to use my own voice publicly, you showed me and thousands of others that our views were nothing to be ashamed of. That we did not have to apologize for loving America. That for all of its faults, this is still the greatest place on Earth and the greatest idea man has ever had. You taught us that America was worth defending, loudly and often. But you also taught us how to defend it: with facts, with an honest recognition of its hardest truths, and with an enduring belief in its potential, not with personal attacks or cruelty.
I wish I could say that America understood what it lost, when we lost you.
For a brief moment, it seemed impossible that anyone could witness the assassination of a husband and father in front of thousands of young people and respond with anything other than abject horror. But almost immediately, your humanity became secondary to your politics. People qualified their condemnations. They repeated the customary phrase that they disagreed with nearly everything you believed, as though recognizing your right to live required a disclaimer. Some joked. Some treated the violent end of a human life as another piece of content. Some celebrated. Some still are.
That response exposed something darker than political division. Something I couldn’t will myself to look away from or unsee. As if cancel culture wasn’t toxic enough, your assassination revealed that many had become all too comfortable with assassination culture. That once someone has been declared hateful, dangerous, or beyond redemption, cruelty toward that person becomes easier to excuse. Violence against them becomes something to contextualize. Compassion becomes conditional. As though some self-appointed elite has been given the authority to decide who’s “in” and who’s “out,” whose voice is legitimate, and whose humanity no longer has to be recognized, based solely on whether that person holds the ‘approved opinions.’
You spent your life warning us where that road leads.
You understood that when people stop speaking to one another, they stop recognizing one another. When disagreement disappears, dehumanization takes its place. When we convince ourselves that the person across from us is not merely wrong but evil, it becomes easier to believe that ostracizing or silencing them for their opinions is not enough. That taking their life is somehow a plausible option.
One year later, I am still not convinced that we learned that lesson.
The anger remains. The labels remain. The instinct to destroy rather than debate remains. Too many people still believe they can “defend democracy” while deciding which voices deserve to be heard. Too many claim to support free speech only when the speaker says something they approve of. Too many forget that the entire purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the speech that we would prefer to suppress.
Your life proved why that freedom matters. Your death proved how fragile it is.
In the months after your assassination, I began sitting behind a microphone of my own. My dad and I started a podcast built around the kinds of questions that brought you to college campuses: How did America arrive at this moment? Why have we become incapable of speaking to one another? Can people from different walks of life, with different experiences and different views, still sit together, ask difficult
questions, disagree … and continue the conversation? I would be lying ifl said your example was not present every time we hit record.
You awakened in me the belief that truth matters, and that it must be defended, especially when it is unpopular. You always said that courage is one of the only attributes that requires zero talent. It is not a skill to hone or a craft at which some are naturally gifted. Courage is a choice, one we are given the opportunity to make every day. That courageous people are not devoid of fear. They are intimately aware of the risk, and they proceed anyway because they have decided that the risk is worth it. It is a sad reality that even engaging in debate or conversation now carries risk. But the courage you exhibited every day, whether on the campaign trail or a college campus, inspired people like me to find that same courage within ourselves.
Beyond politics, what made your loss feel unbearable 365 days ago-and what still makes it unbearable now-is the knowledge that you were a husband and a father. I did not need to know you personally to know that no title could ever come close to being Erika’s husband and GG and Mack’s dad. They lost what the rest of us had no right to claim. In the split second it took to pull a trigger, we lost a leader, a teacher, the voice of a generation. But they lost their whole entire world.
No public legacy, however extraordinary, can replace the ordinary moments stolen from them. No movement can return the birthdays, holidays, conversations, and years they should have shared with you. For the past year, I have continued to think of Erika and your children, of your parents and your sister, and of the strength required to carry a grief so private, while the entire world believes it is entitled to discuss it-and to judge how they navigate it.
One year ago, I promised that those of us you inspired would carry your legacy forward. That we would not forget what you taught us. At the time, those words came from shock and grief. A year later, I understand that a promise like that cannot survive on emotion alone.
It means continuing to speak when silence would be more comfortable. Knowing what I believe and being willing to defend it. Refusing to reduce an entire person to an enemy simply because their ideas are different from mine. It means remembering that courage and compassion are not opposites. That conviction does not require cruelty. That being tough and straightforward does not require anger.
Most importantly, it means never allowing fear to accomplish what your assassin intended.
Your voice was silenced, but the generation you awakened was not. The young people who listened to you did not disappear. We grew older. We found microphones, classrooms, campaigns, organizations, and platforms of our own. We carry your lessons into rooms you will never enter and conversations you will never get to have.
I do not know how to end a letter to someone who will never get to read it. I do not know how to say goodbye to someone I never had the chance to meet. So I will not say goodbye. I will only say thank you, for seven years of your voice, and your courage.
I still miss you. Every time something happens, I still find myself refreshing X, looking for your thoughts, waiting to hear your take, before remembering that there will be nothing new.
You were my hero then.
You still are.
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