At the Turning Point USA Women’s Conference, Kirk presented her vision of a more Christian nation: “It’s not political, it’s biblical.”
Claire Hoffman at Rolling Stone:
San Antonio, Texas — All these Christian ladies are trying to do is get inside the Marriott. And yet outside, dark forces abound. On one side of the building, a cluster of women and children in calico are shouting on bullhorns about the “true Jesus.” Across the street, a group in red-cloaked hoods are re-enacting the Handmaid’s Tale to shame them about their anti-abortion agenda. Somewhere on the fringe, people in masks shout about Erika Kirk enabling pedophiles. “I’m not taking that,” says the young woman on the corner next to me as I examine the authentic-Jesus pamphlet. “It’s deception. That’s the devil.”
It’s a crazy world out here but these ladies are purpose-filled and here at the annual Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit for a good time. They won’t let their mood be dampened as they teeter in waves toward the conference center in espadrilles, in cowboy boots and Keds, in sensible wedges and sparkly summer slides, in billowing floral dresses and blouses, cheeks rouged, hair cascading down their backs in barrel curls. They make their way to the corporate safety of the automatic doors, which slide open with a mechanized welcome. Pop music plays as they are at last among thousands of other women who want to be the best, Christ-filled version of themselves.
Nine months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Erika Kirk finds herself at the front of Turning Point USA, a non-profit that has become a national movement. Her husband started Turning Point as an 18-year-old high school graduate with the goal of winning the culture war on college campuses. He infused a charged urgency, divisive language, and a grim vision of what life would look like if young people moved away from God. Now with more than $85 million in revenue, his widow has taken over and softened it, made it more capacious and transcendent like the billowing floral blouses she favors.
Up the escalator the ladies go, leaving the protestors behind, making their way through several layers of security. At last, they slip on their Turning Point USA badges which they’ve been told to remove for safety purposes outside in the world. But once inside, this convention is 100 percent fun! There’s a shaved poodle painted in red, white, and blue and places to take selfies with glow lighting and more merch than you could imagine. Women of all ages are here but many are young, pinning themselves with buttons that say “Cute Girls are Conservative” and “Pretty Girls Don’t Vote for Socialists.” They can buy baby-Ts that read “Proverbs Over Algorithms,” or some of Erika Kirk’s own brand of biblical streetwear, with sayings like “Make Heaven Crowded.” This isn’t just a conference, it’s a lifestyle. “It’s not political, it’s biblical,” is the catch phrase repeated throughout the weekend. These are cute-servatives, a faith-based sorority that is equally at home at a Brandy Melville store as a suburban megachurch.
Inside the vast conference hall, its concert-dark, with pink and purple lights overhead, and at the front of the room, the stage is luminescent and white. A girl with sausage curls wears an American flag around her body, as she dances to Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes and Taylor Swift. There’s a sort of mosh pit at the front, made up of members from the Turning Point USA hype crew, a tight cluster of young women who have been helping build the energy over the last hour as people stream in to secure seats.
By the time Erika Kirk walks onto the stage at 5 o’clock, every seat is full, every wall lined with people. Three thousand women watch as a jumbotron plays her walk-on video, which situates her in history: “Before America was a nation, it had women of faith who carried their conviction across a fragile new nation. They taught their children that freedom was not a gift from government but a blessing from God. When the world demanded more from America, America demanded more from its women.”
Ear-drum shattering screams greet Erika as she enters the stage in a soft grey pantsuit. She is silken and sophisticated, no pioneer dresses for her. She tells a devastating anecdote about her daughter imitating her late father with his microphone. I hear soft moans from the women seated around me — her heartbreak is unimaginable, the grief in the room palpable. Her husband, Erika tells us tenderly, sometimes stumbling on the words of her speech, was a visionary for creating this conference a decade ago. “He could see young women being sold a vision of life that looked empowering on the surface but left many of them increasingly dissatisfied underneath.”
Over the course of the next 17 minutes, Kirk’s speech is rhetorically powerful, as she moves from her husband’s prescient vision to the desires of women to the horrors of what she has endured — both in the assassination of her husband and the fallout of madness and conspiracy that has been the aftermath. Kirk, once Miss Arizona 2012, is by turns polished and stoic, angry and sad. Her nuance made her a household name last year when she forgave her husband’s assassin during a televised memorial service watched by over 100 million people.
But unlike her husband, Erika doesn’t focus too much on the politics and problems that plague society. Maybe she’s seen too much. Instead, she illustrates her vision of what life and the future could be when one lets go of worldly judgement and surrenders to God. Erika tells the crowd that they are all there because they have a higher purpose than the earthly illusions of career and ambition. It is a “deeper, more thoughtful question, a moral and spiritual question: what life’s vision will you pursue?”
There’s an echo of JFK here, of calling on a generation to give, not get. Kirk is masterful. If her husband called out the darkness and the divides of this nation, Erika is uniting her audience in warmth and purpose. In her telling, the feminist movement has failed women by denigrating motherhood and men, and elevating working for others at all costs. “Feminism is a competing force against manhood,” she tells them. “Rather than something that is complimentary.” “Amen,” says the woman behind me. It is a spiritually distinct version of leaning in — prioritizing faith and family and pushing back against both the femi-nazis and the corporate overlords.
But just as she paints her vision of a worthy life for the audience — one that includes work, children, suffering, tragedy, legacy, and final judgment — she is interrupted. From the VIP section, of all places, a single shrill voice calls out: “Erika Kirk protects pedophiles.” Kirk looks over, with sadness and a touch of disgust. Quickly, the wiry, young female protestor is carted out as the audience stands and claps away her darkness. Erika wishes her well because you know, “Eternity is long.”
WHILE ERIKA IS THE MOST WELL-KNOWN OUTSIDE the conference, inside the Marriott, it is Alex Clark who is the real de facto MC for the weekend. (Kirk, I was told when I asked for an interview, flew out after giving her speech). Clark, a petite, silken-harried brunette, hosts the Turning Point podcast, Cultural Apothecary. She has hundreds of thousands of subscribers devoted to her and her quixotic combination of wellness and conservative Christianity.
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But for all the slick branding and polish — the celebration of women in the workforce, the spiritual version of women having it all — there were still some ideas that felt more fringe. There was plenty of talk denouncing feminism, cancel culture, woke-ism and trans people woven throughout the weekend. The things that are aspirational inside here are easier to swallow than the things that are reviled and judged. Every movement has its wild side and there was plenty of that on display. The fieriest talk came from two Australian sisters-in-law, who each took the stage separately and had lots of denouncements to share. While I felt myself nodding along when Millicent Sedra said that women pushing dogs in strollers was the sign of Lucifer on earth, I had a harder time following Noleen’s logic that feminism was actually a Satanic cult created by the Devil to kill babies. Or that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, because he is Muslim, was lying to trans people who he secretly wanted to push off a building. I had not read that coverage.
Health and wellness were a big piece of the convention, from the vibrating plates and red-light therapies for sale in the sponsors hall to the speakers on the inside talking about the dangers of vaccinations and toxins in the food supply. Having grown up in a “new age” community, this was familiar terrain for me. There was a lady who talked about butter and a doctor who talked about supplements. But I was surprised when Zen Honeycutt ended her speech by talking about her 22-year-old son killing himself last year.
She placed the blame of his suicide on “the toxic burden in his body from the vaccines and the food.” She told the audience of young women that she was sorry he couldn’t have been there. “He never got to date a fine young woman like I’m sure most of you are. He wanted an unvaccinated vegan virgin.” I noticed a lot of women exchanging glances — that felt a bit less aspirational for this crowd.
As women tried on preservative-free blush and took an online quiz to figure out which biblical figure they were most alike, you could feel the morphing of this movement, expanding to fit the next generation of young conservative Christian women. In religious movements, next generation leaders who take over from charismatic founders usually only succeed if they expand and widen the doctrine. These women would follow Erika Kirk’s advice to be focused in their faith even as they lived life to the fullest in all the ways they could choose.
The TPUSA under Erika Kirk is leaning ever more into Christian nationalist theming.
News broke yesterday that the United States and Iran have reached some sort of agreement that may or may not end President Trump’s disastrous war.
Details remained scant as this newsletter was finalized Sunday evening, but significantly, Trump wasted no time moving the goalposts on when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen.
Trump, of course, has claimed to be on the verge of a peace deal dozens of times before, only to back away when he realizes that ending the war inevitably means admitting the US lost.
It’s notable that the administration has been very leery of revealing the actual details of the agreement to the public. But it appears to involve the United Arab Emirates unlocking billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, which is especially humiliating since Republicans have raged for more than a decade about the Obama administration releasing a measly $1.7 billion in Iranian assets to secure a nuclear agreement.
To add insult to injury, it’s unclear that Iran will commit to ending its nuclear program; it has agreed to continue to talk about it over the next 60 days, but nothing more. All Trump seems to really be getting is a pinky swear that the Strait of Hormuz will open at some point in the future — which was open before the war started, and which Iran can now close again whenever it’s threatened or wants concessions.
Iran’s victory has been a disaster for the US. The shuttering of the strait has pushed gas and fertilizer prices into the stratosphere and inflation hit a three-year high this month. US credibility globally has been shredded.
But the worst effects of Trump’s viciously erratic foreign policy have been born by those subjected to it overseas. Americans are, like everyone, mostly focused on their own worries — worries which now include a seemingly endless fascist assault on our liberty and lives. But the bloodiest and most painful costs of fascism are inflicted on the fascist’s neighbors, and when you’re talking about a global power like the US, “neighbors” here means “everyone on earth.”
Authoritarians disregard the voices and needs of their own people, but they are even less constrained when they deal with people that are not their own. If you want to see what Trump would like to do at home, you have only to look to the misery he has unleashed in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Africa. It’s a bleak and terrifying picture.
War crimes in Iran
Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran is itself an illegal war of aggression under international law. In addition, the war has been conducted with breathtaking disregard for the rules of war and little concern about civilian casualties.
The war began in February with a horrific bombing of an Iranian girls’ school. More than 160 people, most of them children, were killed. US officials have tacitly acknowledged American responsibility, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump refuse to admit it publicly.
Experts estimate that Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran war as led to as many as 10,000 deaths and more than 48,500 injuries across the Middle East. These have mostly occurred in Iran and Lebanon, where Israel launched simultaneous (and ongoing) attacks.
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War crimes in South American waters
The evidence that military leaders ordered war crimes in Iran, and that troops carried out illegal orders, is disturbing. It is not, however, exactly surprising.
Since the fall of last year, the US has been carrying out unprovoked strikes on boats in South American and Caribbean waters. As of earlier this month, 200 people have been killed.
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USAID and Cuba
Trump’s shooting adventures are dramatic, illegal, and ugly. But he has done even more damage by demolishing US soft power might in other ways.
The first example here occurred at the beginning of Trump’s term. Trump allowed Elon Musk and his supposed efficiency experts at DOGE to illegally shut down USAID programs that provided nutrition and healthcare resources around the globe. By November of last year, experts estimated that the withdrawal of aid had already resulted in 600,000 deaths, of which 400,000 were children. That number is expected to balloon to 14 million dead if aid cuts are not reversed by 2030.
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A danger to us and to the world
Trump’s use of US power to indiscriminately target and immiserate civilians has a huge range of potential downsides for Americans.
Experts worry that Iran War may lead to an increase in terrorism in the US — such as a shooting at Old Dominion University this March by a man with ties to Islamic State. Cuts to global disease control have made the US less safe; the recent screwworm infestation in Texas, for example, may have been caused in part by cuts to USAID, which funded screwworm detection and prevention at the US-Mexico border.
And when Trump pushes the military to follow illegal orders and accustoms them to participating in war crimes, the domestic threat is very clear.
The USA under Trump: a global pariah to much of the world.
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