In the moments after an assassin’s bullet claimed Charlie Kirk’s life, the unspeakable, up-close video of his final moments was likely the most-viewed clip in the world.
But in the hours that followed, another video emerged, and it’s likely the video that will persist as Kirk’s memory crystalizes into legacy.
He shared it himself, just months ago. It shows his young daughter, clad in a gingham dress and ruby-red hair bow, stepping unsurely onto the Fox & Friends set. When she sees her father on the couch, she breaks into a run. They smile, laugh, and embrace.
“Get married, have kids,” Kirk wrote in the heartwarming post that accompanied the now heartbreaking clip. “Leave a legacy, be courageous. God Bless all the parents out there.”
Charlie Kirk appeared on Fox and Friends with his family just weeks before he was shot in Utah. Prayers are continuing to pour in for the Turning Point USA co-founder. pic.twitter.com/DuHDjaHP22
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 10, 2025
In the wake of his assassination, Charlie Kirk is being remembered not only for the movement he built and his relentless efforts to foster open debate, but also as a devoted husband and father. This is due, in part, to the mechanics of remembrance: we often call to mind the family left behind after someone dies, particularly when those survivors are a young wife and children. Especially, when the death was a gruesome assassination..
But there’s another reason Charlie Kirk is being remembered as a father, and that’s because of how he saw himself in his final years. Married in 2021, he and his wife, Erika, welcomed their daughter and, just over a year later, a son in 2024.
“Becoming a father has radicalized me in the best way possible,” Kirk said at a TPUSA event last year. “It’s made me realize that what I’m fighting for is beyond even yourself.”
Fatherhood, he said, was “a source of immense joy and meaning and beauty.”
Every parent would surely echo those sentiments. But Charlie was speaking not just as a grateful parent, but as the head of a movement of young people. And so he also assured his audience that fatherhood was “a source of motivation and purpose” and encouraged “more young people to get married and have kids.”
This, as much as his support of President Donald Trump and political activism, was a major theme of Charlie Kirk’s final years.
“If we as conservatives stand for anything, it should be to tell our young people that one of the most beautiful things you can do is get married and have kids,” Kirk said in December 2022, just four months after the birth of his daughter.
People listened. Just days before he was assassinated, an NBC survey found that Gen Z men who voted for Trump ranked “having children” as the single biggest sign of success in life.
The push to get young conservatives to embrace family life was not ancillary to Charlie Kirk’s political project. It was its next chapter.
When Kirk began Turning Point USA in 2012, he was an 18-year-old firebrand with a mission to galvanize and organize other young conservatives. He grew up with his movement and the people who comprised it. Eventually, he became a mentor for the younger members of TPUSA, but he never lost sight of the fact that he was leading a group of his peers. As they grew older, he made sure they set their sights on the higher things.
It’s easy to take this for granted, to assume that young conservatives have always wanted to get married and have children. But that’s hardly the case.
As Ross Douthat wrote this week in The New York Times, before the tragic death of Kirk, “conservatism on college campuses…tended to attract nerds and dorks and oddballs, campus outsiders, the inherently uncool.” Kirk, meanwhile, “built his career and reputation organizing a different kind of campus conservatism — fun-loving, masculine, rowdy, mainstream, even faintly cool.”
Charlie Kirk didn’t simply offer an alternative to awkward campus conservatism. By showing that young people could lead their own political movement without the help of the bow-tied, curmudgeonly professors and professional organizers who traditionally formed the backbone of campus conservatism, he rendered obsolete the overly intellectual, self-isolating conservatism of the past.
It’s hard to imagine, for instance, fraternity houses at the University of Missouri or Oklahoma State unfurling memorial banners for William F. Buckley. But unfurl them they did for Charlie Kirk.
Powerful.@oldrowmizzou pic.twitter.com/KKzJfP4oiz
— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) September 11, 2025
Today’s college students didn’t know a campus without TPUSA, a conservative movement without Charlie Kirk. The impact they’ve had, even more than Kirk’s recent encomia to marriage and children, helped pave the way for a resurgence of the family.
The movement Charlie inaugurated is saving young conservatives from a life of lonely toil as childless think tankers, and giving direction to apolitical college students who might otherwise have fallen prey to the selfishness and despair that so often discourage young people from settling down and starting families.
It was his life, even more than his words, that offered young people hope. Unlike so many young people who become active early in politics, Charlie Kirk wasn’t the son of politicos. He didn’t grow up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., absorbing his parents’ politics through dinner table debates and readily available stacks of National Review on the coffee table.
He was from the Midwest. He was an Eagle Scout. His parents, he recalled, “didn’t talk about Democrat or Republican. They just told me America is great.”
Charlie got into politics, in large part, thanks to Twitter, back when it was still Twitter, before it was a given that social media was the primary byway through which young people became politically active. He volunteered for a failed Senate campaign. He tweeted approvingly at Donald Trump in 2011 and had reservations about his first campaign before coming around to support him.
That’s about as normal a political journey as you can have. And it’s worth remembering, as people rightfully celebrate all that was exceptional about him, that Charlie Kirk was, at his core, a normal guy. It’s what made his success so exceptional, and what makes his assassination so unfathomable.
It’s also, ultimately, what made his calls for young people to “be fruitful and multiply” so convincing. He was a Christian, but this wasn’t a religious mandate. He was conservative, but this wasn’t a political strategy. He didn’t urge young people to have kids in service of some broader ideology. He did so because he knew it was good — good for him, good for them, good for America.
That, more than anything else, may prove to be Charlie Kirk’s legacy. He not only led young people — and young men, in particular — to Trump, but to family life. His own time as a husband and father may have been cut unjustly short. But he leaves behind a world full of young men ready to follow in his footsteps — not just in politics, but at home.