Charlie Kirk

The founder of Turning Point USA, and for thirteen years a man who made his living standing at a folding table on university lawns and arguing with whoever came.

He was born Charles James Kirk at Arlington Heights, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago, on the fourteenth of October 1993, to Robert and Kathy Kirk. The family settled at Prospect Heights.

He wrote his first newspaper piece at seventeen, about the economics textbooks at his high school, and it put him on television. The following year, at eighteen, he and an older man named Bill Montgomery founded Turning Point USA. He did not go to university in any ordinary sense; he went to campuses instead, and kept going to them for the rest of his life.

The organisation he built became the largest conservative youth movement in the country and one of the most argued-about. What he did with it, and what it did, is contested by people who agreed with him and by people who did not, and that argument is not settled and is not this page's to settle.

He met Erika Frantzve at one of his own events in 2018 and married her in Arizona in May 2021. He called the marriage the central commitment of his adult life outside the work. They had a daughter in 2022 and a son in 2024, and did not publish their names or their faces. They are not published here.

The format he was known for was the open microphone - prove me wrong, come and take the chair. On the ninth of September 2025 he spent the evening on a call with a rabbi, working through the questions on Israel he expected to be asked the following day.

He was answering a question when he was killed. He was thirty-one.

His wife Erika and their two children.