Kirk’s Biggest Legacy Will Be Inspiring Young People To Marry

Charlie Kirk posted thousands of times over more than a decade. Making a book out of those posts meant reading back through the whole record and sorting it into the subjects he kept returning to, and one of the largest was family.

That did not surprise me. Donald Trump Jr. introduced us when Charlie was 19, and for the decade we spent in each other’s lives, what he was really looking for was love. What surprised me was how much of that search he put in public, and how little of that ever made the news.

People picture him on a campus lawn arguing with a line of students, because that is the footage that traveled. The Charlie I knew was from earlier. The rooms he worked then were full of donors he was trying to convince, and full of young people with wide eyes who had finally found somewhere it was acceptable to be conservative out loud. My own children were once in those rooms.

He wrote about fathers standing up for their daughters. He wrote about parents being treated as an obstacle by their own schools. On his anniversary, he wrote that marrying Erika was, second to following Jesus, the best decision he had ever made, and he said it plainly where anyone could read it.

Charlie understood that the ideas a culture rewards eventually decide how people date, whom they marry, and how they raise their children. He also understood which direction that runs: Families change first, and the culture follows them.

Love That Lasts

I know something about the middle of that. Before I ever sat on a board or made a book, I spent years as a matchmaker, working with a small group of clients and arranging 22 marriages that are all still intact. Not one divorce. What made those marriages work came down to whether two people had been honest about what they wanted before they got attached to each other, whether they had waited long enough to find out what they wanted, and whether the man had been made to court the woman properly instead of being handed everything on the first evening.

The other thing I learned is that men know. Almost every man I worked with used the same words, and he used them early: this is her, this is the girl I am going to marry. They know it in their souls, and they know it long before anyone expects them to.

Charlie called me after his second date with Erika. He told me he had met the woman he was going to marry, and that her name was Erika. My own son called me with almost identical words about the woman he later married, right down to telling me to check my phone. I looked at her picture and started crying, because I knew, and because I understood I had just handed my son over to somebody else, which is exactly how it is supposed to go.

Love is euphoria, and there is nothing in this world more exciting. Those are the days you remember on your deathbed. The day you fell in love. The first kisses. The days your children were born. That is what a life is actually made of.

A Lonely Generation

Almost everything about the way people date now works against getting there. The apps are built to keep you swiping rather than to get you married, because they are subscription businesses and a subscription business earns nothing from your wedding. The incentives run in that direction and we followed them.

Charlie saw what that was doing to the young people he spent his life in front of, a generation sold total freedom that ended up lonelier than any before it. He told them there was another way to live and that it was still available to them.

I made the book out of his own words and let him speak for himself. It is his posts, sorted by subject, set beside photographs from ordinary days and the messages that came in from around the world the day he died, from the president and the first lady to strangers overseas who simply needed to say something. I also asked a number of people who loved him to write something of their own, and what came back brought me to tears more than once. That part turned out to be my favorite section of the book.

I keep none of the proceeds. All of my author proceeds go to Carry the Torch, a nonprofit organization that I started to fund young leaders who are attempting at 19 what he attempted at 19.

The temptation now, for people who loved him, is to make his memory about the manner of his death. I have felt it myself. He spent his own time on something more ordinary and more difficult than martyrdom, telling young Americans to get married, stay married, have children, and raise them with purpose.

That advice was unfashionable when he gave it — and it is becoming more fashionable now, thanks in part to his legacy. The section of the book I keep going back to is the one on family, because it is the part still doing work. What he said about elections and campus speech belongs to its moment. What he said about marriage and children will read the same in 30 years, when his own son and daughter are old enough to find out what their father thought a life was for.