Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, interacts with attendees at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas, on June 14. Kirk, a former Miss Arizona winner and entrepreneur selling biblical streetwear, played a critical role in her husband's image. Photo / Jake Dockins, The New York Times
A rosary thrust out the tinted window of a car. Hands resting on a casket.
The images of Erika Kirk in the days since her husband, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated have been wrenching.
Erika Kirk has now lurched into a new and harrowing spotlight as she grieves in public.
For four years she has stood on convention stages alongside Charlie Kirk and built her own following of young conservative admirers, while helping her husband build his.
“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife,” Erika Kirk said, standing in a white blazer at a lectern at Turning Point USA headquarters on Saturday NZT, in her first public speech since her husband, a right-wing force and key ally to United States President Donald Trump, was killed at a college event in Utah.
“The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
Kirk also shared images on Instagram, where she has more than four million followers, of her hands folded together with Charlie Kirk’s in his coffin and herself embracing Vice-President JD Vance with his wife, Usha Vance.
She has braided the personal and the political, the vulnerable and the operational, as she finds herself a widow on a national stage.
“If they thought my husband’s mission was big now,” she wrote, “you have no idea.”
This is the blueprint that she and Charlie Kirk created together since marrying in 2021.
The public image of their marriage deeply appealed to young people in the right-wing movement they were building, drawing in those who wanted the family life they put on display.
Charlie Kirk’s politics and worldview were inextricably wound together with his personal life, and his marriage was a core part of his public reputation.
And Erika Kirk, 36, a former Miss Arizona winner and entrepreneur who made biblical streetwear, played a critical role in projecting that image.
She left many political topics to her husband, who was known for views that were anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights and anti-Islam.
She also boosted his inflammatory rhetoric on transgender people, same-sex marriage and other issues, and made her own condemning statements about the political left.
“The spiritual battle — I know you guys feel it. It’s so deep in the soul. You can walk into a room and feel the enemy,” she told a Turning Point crowd recently.
Just three months ago, at a hotel convention centre in Dallas, the Kirks jointly headlined the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, the largest gathering of young conservative women in the country, a Turning Point USA event.
When Erika Kirk took the stage on opening night, before an audience of 3000, she emerged in a rose-pink dress and a puff of pink smoke.
Audience members applauded and raced to snap videos as she talked about marriage and motherhood, while criticising left-wing perspectives on both.
“Before I met Charlie, I was not on the path of ‘I want to have six kids, and a white picket house fence’ — that was not my mindset,” she told the room.
“But this is how amazing God is. When you meet the right man, everything shifts. When I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about a career.”
This last point elicited an ecstatic cheer from an audience member.
When Charlie Kirk joined his wife onstage — “How great is Erika, by the way?” — the room burst into more applause. University-aged women in the audience put their hands over their hearts and broke into a chorus of side conversations about how enviable their marriage seemed.
“I really enjoyed that conversation about marriage and relationships,” said Ella Guidry, 22.
Charlie Kirk told the room that they would answer questions but avoid politics for the night — though it was a crowd largely receptive to even his inflammatory comments, whether about immigration or race.
Instead, they wanted to talk about their relationship and raising children — “the fun stuff”, Charlie Kirk said.
The two discussed making time for date nights despite Charlie Kirk’s travel schedule and observing the Sabbath every weekend to have time to read the Bible.
Together, the couple presented a unified message to the room: Get married early, have children.
“You’re not wasting a degree when you’re raising your children with wisdom, love, and truth,” Erika Kirk advised. “I don’t want you to chase a pay cheque.”
Charlie Kirk was the more emphatic foil to his wife, the two of them beaming playfully at each other while she softened his messaging.
“Young ladies need to be willing to submit to a godly man when you met one,” Charlie Kirk said. “The hypertoxic feminism is very off-putting to young men.”
“For the women who are getting married after 30, that’s okay,” Erika Kirk said.
“I’m trying to bridge the gap here. Because it is okay. It’s not ideal. It’s not probably the best statistical odd position for you. But God is good.”
Many Turning Point members had long wanted to emulate the seemingly glamorous model that they saw in watching the couple.
“I like how they talked about how you can have everything, just not at the same time,” said Kieran Cunningham, 27, who came to the Dallas conference from Bedford, Texas.
To some young women at the Turning Point USA women’s event, Erika Kirk represented contradictions that they see woven broadly into right-wing messaging about family and professional life.
She was a successful entrepreneur but urged her followers to put motherhood before career. She was a public face for a movement but advised sublimating ambition to faith and family.
This emphasis on submission seemed at odds with Erika Kirk’s high-profile public reputation to some of her followers.
As high school student Nicole Hadar put it: “There was a lot of talk from Erika about being submissive toward your husband — I do want to be married one day, but I also want to pursue a career.”
For others, it was a comfort that Erika Kirk didn’t seem torn between the two. “Erika does have her own business,” said Cunningham.
And after all, Erika Kirk has company in the large and fast-growing coterie of conservative women — from Phyllis Schlafly to wellness influencer Alex Clark — whose careers are spent urging women to be dubious of certain feminist messaging about women’s ambitions for public life.
That Erika Kirk embraced a public role in her husband’s movement is unsurprising given the story of their union.
Charlie Kirk messaged her on Instagram in 2018 wanting to meet. They went to dinner at a Bill’s Bar and Burger, in New York, and Erika Kirk thought she might be interviewing for a job at Turning Point USA.
Fifteen minutes into dinner, Charlie Kirk said, he “pivoted from wanting to hire her to wanting to date her”.
“You should absolutely interview for your spouse,” Charlie Kirk advised at a Turning Point conference a year ago. They got married in 2021 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
In her speech two days after Charlie Kirk’s death, Erika Kirk pledged to take on the mantle of her husband’s work.
She discussed the pain of figuring out what to tell their two children and reflected on the force of their faith and the strength of their marriage.
That was while promising that the Turning Point USA campus tour would continue and that the group’s large December gathering would go forward as planned.
“To everyone listening right now across America, the movement my husband built will not die,” Erika Kirk said. “It won’t. I refuse to let that happen.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emma Goldberg
Photograph by: Jake Dockins
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