“We have so many bad philosophies, ideologies, politics … his was basically just good. He talked about family … go ‘get married’ … it sounds old fashioned when you think about it, but he’s right.”
President Donald Trump paid tribute Friday to Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, who was assassinated at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.
Kirk was 31, a married father of two young children, and was building the most influential movement of young conservatives in the country. As head of TPUSA, he frequently hosted free and open public debates on college campuses, inviting anyone with a question to “prove him wrong.” He won a massive following on social media in response and is widely credited with swaying the youth vote toward Trump in the 2024 election.
In the wake of his shocking assassination, video clips of Kirk’s life and work have zoomed across the internet. But one has been shared more than others: his 3-year-old daughter, with a bow in her hair, hop-skipping across the Fox News studio floor to hug her dad. Kirk was filling in as a guest anchor on “Fox & Friends” — the very show on which the president would later honor Kirk’s commitment to marriage and family.
In many ways, Kirk was an anomaly: brilliant, charismatic and already the bold leader of an immensely powerful political movement by the time he’d turned 30. He never went to college. He’d earned the ear of political strategists, presidents and — perhaps most impressive — Generation Z. His events on college campuses — informal debates under a canvas tent — were about as low-tech as they were wildly popular.
But one of his most profound contributions to the Gen Z imagination was the example he set, in word and deed, as a husband and father — and as a man who relished those roles.
Just two days before he was killed, Kirk spoke about falling marriage and fertility rates on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News.
Young women, he said, are prioritizing “careerism and consumerism” at the expense of more meaningful pursuits. “Having children is more important than having a good career … my kids matter more than how many social media followers I have,” Kirk said.
He was right: Data consistently show that marriage and children confer compounding benefits to both men and women. Married men and women ages 25 to 55 are almost twice as likely to report they are “very happy” with their life than their unmarried peers, according to the 2022 General Social Survey. Married people enjoy more financial stability and better emotional and physical health outcomes.
Kirk was speaking primarily of young women on Ingraham’s show, highlighting a new survey in which progressive women ranked their career, making money and home ownership as higher goals than marriage and having children.
“This is not about shaming, this is not about ridiculing, this is not about moralizing,” Kirk told Ingraham. “It’s about lifting up what is beautiful.”
Earlier this year, the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute sponsored a YouGov survey of 3,000 American women aged 25-55. We found married mothers are among the happiest in the country. They report less loneliness, more physical touch and deeper meaning and connection in their relationships than their unmarried and childless peers.
These marriage benefits aren’t exclusive to women. For his part, Kirk spoke often about the central role his family played in his own life. In an Instagram post celebrating his young daughter’s birthday just three weeks ago, he wrote, “Having a family will change your life in the best ways, so get married and have kids. You won’t regret it.”
By giving voice to the value of marriage for men, and by manifesting such devotion to his wife Erika and their two kids, Kirk was a powerful counterweight to the anti-marriage message from another influencer popular among young men, Andrew Tate.
Tate, of course, is notorious for saying things like: “The problem is, there is zero advantage to marriage in the Western world for a man,” adding, “If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married, there are absolutely none.”
But we have growing evidence that Tate’s anti-marriage messaging is losing ground among right-leaning men. According to the same NBC survey Kirk referenced in his conversation with Ingraham, young, conservative men who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 said they valued “having children” as the highest marker of personal success, followed by financial independence, a good job and marriage. Conservative young men rated parenthood and marriage markedly higher than their progressive female peers in this survey.
If those numbers are an omen, it’s possible that Kirk is directly responsible for rebranding marriage and family life as positives for young men, even as influences from both the feminist left and the manosphere right purport to warn them against it.
“What young people are screaming is, they say, ‘Give me a structure that I can live my life by,’” Kirk said in a speech at a church recently. “Especially young men … (they want) more saying, ‘Stop being a boy and become a man.’” For Kirk, that meant going to church, getting married and having children. Kirk promoted this family-first way of life in both word and deed.
Kirk and his wife Erika shared often about their relationship. The two met in what each believed at first to be a job interview. Telling the story later, Erika said she accepted Kirk’s invitation to dinner in New York City under the impression she was being considered for a position at Turning Point USA. Fifteen minutes in, Kirk later said, he’d realized he didn’t want to hire her — he wanted to date her, with an eye toward marriage.
Research shows marriage and fatherhood aren’t just good for women and society. They are good for men, too. Married fathers make more money, commit fewer crimes, report greater happiness, and are far less susceptible to suicide and other self-destructive behavior than unmarried men. Sociologists reason that marriage and children give men a mission, grounding their lives in responsibility and meaning in something bigger than themselves.
This is why the videos now being shared most widely of Kirk are not of his most viral “takedowns” on college campuses, but the moments he shared with his wife and children. We feel the tragedy of his brutal death most acutely not when we think of the political movement he left behind, but of the wife and children.
That was, ultimately, Charlie Kirk’s most important message. He advocated fiercely for political and economic conservatism. But behind his policy prescriptions was a deeper conviction: that not only is freedom good, but that marriage, children and family are the goods which freedom is for.
Brad Wilcox is Distinguished University Professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and author of "Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization." Maria Baer is a journalist and co-host of the “Breakpoint This Week” podcast with The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.