Charlie Kirk's widow said “ her "cries" will "echo around the world like a battle cry" in a tearful first address since the fatal shooting of her husband.
Erika Kirk spoke from the office where her late husband hosted his podcast saying that "the movement built by my husband will not die”.
She also thanked the ranks of law enforcement "who worked tirelessly to capture my husband's assassin."
She promised that his radio and podcast show and campus tours would continue.
In a moving tribute to her husband she said he loved America, nature and the Chicago Cubs.
"But most of all, Charlie loved his children and he loved me with all of his heart," she said.
Addressing her husband's killer, she said: "You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife.
"The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry."
The broadcast from Turning Point USA's headquarters in Arizona on Friday night began with several minutes of silence, as the camera framed the late MAGA influenceer’s empty chair.
As his widow started speaking, she looked upwards and whispered a silent prayer.
She then thanked first responders who tried to save him, her husband's staff, and the White House.
"Mr President, my husband loved you. And he knew that you loved him too," she said tearfully, also thanking Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha for accompanying the casket back to Arizona.
The address came after a 22-year-old man was taken into custody on Thursday night suspected of killing the killing the conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a university in Utah.
Tyler Robinson, 22, was held about 33 hours after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Robinson was captured after a relative and a family friend alerted the local sheriff's office that he had confessed to them, or "implied that he had committed" the murder, the governor said.
"I want to thank the family members of Tyler Robinson who did the right thing in this case and were able to bring him into law enforcement," Utah Governor Spencer Cox said. "Through some process, the family came to know that this had happened."
Security camera images, some previously released to the public, and evidence gathered from the suspect's profile on the chat and streaming platform Discord also helped investigators link him to the crime, the governor said.
Kirk, 31, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump who helped build Republican support among young voters in 2024, was killed by a single gunshot fired from a rooftop as he spoke onstage during an outdoor campus event attended by 3,000 people. Trump called the shooting a "heinous assassination."
A bolt-action rifle believed to be the murder weapon was later found nearby, officials said.
The killing has stirred outrage among Kirk's supporters and denunciations of political violence from Democrats, Republicans and foreign governments.
"It is an attack on all of us," Utah's governor said, calling Kirk's murder a "watershed in American history" and comparing it to the rash of U.S. political assassinations of the 1960s. "It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals."
