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Mother Jones illustration; Gerald Herbert\/AP; Alberto E. Tamargo\/Sipa USA\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are sensitive<\/span> ways to interview a bereaved person, and intelligent ways to interview the CEO of a powerful and socially consequential political organization. When the two improbably overlap, as they do in the figure of Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, the wife of assassinated TPUSA co-founder Charlie Kirk, things become a lot more complicated. <\/p>\n Erika Kirk began making public appearances soon after her husband\u2019s September death; a former beauty pageant winner, she\u2019s tremendously poised and eloquent on camera and on stage, and gives the impression of being a natural leader. In recent events hosted by the mainstream press, Erika Kirk has continued her ascent into the media spotlight, where she\u2019s appropriately being given compassionate and careful treatment as a recent widow and victim of a shocking act of violence. <\/p>\n Turning Point shows signs of becoming even more powerful and remains dedicated to a sweeping policy agenda.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But Kirk has also been allowed to use those recent appearances to whitewash her husband\u2019s often inflammatory public statements with little pushback and to avoid real questions about Turning Point\u2019s radically regressive policy agenda. To date, her interviewers\u2014including, in a Saturday evening \u201ctown hall\u201d event, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss\u2014haven\u2019t tried to get Kirk to clearly lay out what Turning Point\u2019s goals are under her leadership, even as the organization experiences a fundraising boom and a notable expansion following her husband\u2019s death.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kirk used her CBS appearance with Weiss (who, fittingly enough got her start as a campus activist<\/a> protesting what she saw as anti-Israel bias before becoming a right-wing media mogul) to challenge conspiracy theories about her husband\u2019s death, many of which have been promoted<\/a> by former TPUSA contributor Candace Owens. As she did in another recent conversation<\/a> with Glenn Beck, Kirk used the on air event to speak at length about her faith and how it has buoyed and comforted her during a difficult time. But by and large, Kirk\u2019s focus has been to defend her late husband\u2019s public legacy. She has held him up as a model of how to productively and respectfully disagree with political and ideological opponents, a \u201cpeacemaker,\u201d as she\u2019s put it.<\/p>\n \u201cMy husband did something very simple,\u201d she told Weiss. \u201cHe talked to people.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that Charlie Kirk often modeled a version of that in his on-campus debates, where he\u2019d argue amicably with a line of college students. But TPUSA wasn\u2019t and isn\u2019t a debate club: its purpose is to train conservative student activists, who often go on to become full-grown culture warriors. (It also paid or provided platforms to figures in that mold, growing their audiences much more than they could have done alone; those figures include Owens, Riley Gaines<\/a>, and conservative Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey.) Charlie Kirk was also more combative and inflammatory in his speeches and online than his widow has portrayed, calling <\/a>Islam \u201cNot compatible with Western civilization,\u201d posting many tweets insisting<\/a> that Black people disproportionately commit acts of violence targeting white people, or are unfairly given jobs they don\u2019t deserve due to affirmative action<\/a>.<\/p>\n During Saturday\u2019s CBS broadcast, Weiss brought in a few people to ask questions, including Angel Eduardo, a senior writer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group. Eduardo\u2019s role was to ask Kirk about a FIRE survey which found, he said, that \u201c90 percent of undergraduates believe to some extent that words can be violence.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor the people who say that my husband might have incited violence,\u201d Kirk responded, \u201cI\u2019m going to put a squash on it before anyone else can attach to that. My husband never incited violence. He never once said, \u2018Go after them because they\u2019re saying XYZ and they deserve to die.\u2019 My husband never once said that and he never would.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that Charlie Kirk didn\u2019t incite direct violence with his commentary, nor would he have \u201cdeserved\u201d to die, even if he had. But someone who attacked<\/a> Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (calling him, among other things \u201can alleged rapist\u201d and a \u201crace Marxist\u201d), who platformed white nationalists<\/a> on his podcast, and who in so many other ways helped deepen<\/a> already bitter divides in American life cannot be recast as an uncomplicated peacemaker, no matter how ardently his wife or his fans in legacy media would like to make it so.<\/p>\n Kirk\u2019s new role<\/span> running Turning Point seem to clash with the organization\u2019s longstanding aspirations for women. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported<\/a>, at a TPUSA conference for young women this past summer, before Charlie\u2019s death, he and Erika both stressed the importance of young women choosing to have families and leave the workforce. \u201cI don\u2019t want you to be chasing a paycheck and a title and a corner office and sacrifice such a short window\u201d to have children, Erika told the audience, while Charlie told young women to \u201cbe clear\u201d that the reason to go to college is to obtain an \u201cMRS degree\u201d\u2014that is, to find a husband.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kirk was invited to explore that contradiction at the New York Times<\/em>\u2019 DealBook conference<\/a> earlier this month, where she was interviewed by finance columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin disclosed that he\u2019d asked Erika Kirk to appear because he\u2019d befriended her husband before his death and had invited him to the conference. \u201cHe was supposed to be part of a task force that we\u2019d been talking about for quite some time,\u201d Sorkin said, sounding near tears; he didn\u2019t disclose what the supposed task force was meant to address.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sorkin asked Kirk about the tension between her being a new CEO and a mother because, he said, some of his female colleagues were curious about how she squared her past statements with her new role.<\/p>\n \u201cThere really is no such thing as balance,\u201d Kirk responded. \u201cThere is really no blueprint of what I\u2019m going through. It\u2019s really a one-of-one type of situation.\u201d While that may be true, there are millions of working women in this country with young families, and it could be said that each one is in a unique situation.<\/p>\n As Vanity Fair<\/em> pointed out<\/a>, the Times<\/em> confab was full of similar missed opportunities, moments where Sorkin could have pressed Kirk to clarify statements she made during the appearance about her husband\u2019s legacy. For instance, he didn\u2019t follow up after Erika failed to respond coherently to a question about one of Charlie Kirk\u2019s most inflammatory past statements: that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed.<\/p>\n How Kirk understands her mantle running the organization\u2014and what she\u2019ll do with it\u2014has been left unclear.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cMy husband, just because he would make certain statements, did not mean that he was trying to rile up a certain part of people,\u201d Kirk responded. \u201cHe was trying to, again, go after ideas, not people. He was trying to get people to think a little bit differently.\u201d\u00a0(The Civil Rights Act outlawed major forms of discrimination; it would follow, then, that the idea Charlie Kirk was \u201cgoing after\u201d was the existence of anti-discrimination laws.)<\/p>\n Kirk also had a strangely reductive response to a question about Zohran Mamdani\u2019s victory in the New York City mayoral race, suggesting that Mamdani\u2019s \u201ccareer-driven\u201d female voters \u201calmost look to the government as a replacement for certain things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I don\u2019t want to have happen is young women in the city look to the government as a solution to put off having a family or a marriage because you\u2019re relying on the government to support you instead of being united with a husband,\u201d she added. Sorkin didn\u2019t respond to this suggestion that women should marry men out of economic need, but instead immediately asked if she would endorse JD Vance as a candidate for president in 2028.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kirk answered similar questions from Weiss about her past suggestions that women should marry and have children young. \u201cI didn\u2019t ask for this,\u201d Kirk said, saying she viewed taking over Turning Point as a \u201cduty and a blessing\u201d to her husband, but had been very happy staying home with their children. <\/p>\n \u201cThere was never any daylight between Charlie and I, and his mission was my mission. So stepping into this role is not so much a job title. This is not a nine to five,\u201d she told Weiss. \u201cThis is something that I\u2019m very passionate about, because it\u2019s still a remaining, breathing version of my husband, Turning Point USA. So this organization is not just a company to me. And the staff and employees are not staff and employees, they\u2019re family.\u201d She had, she added \u201cone heck of a village.\u201d<\/p>\n From there, Weiss and Kirk turned to answer a question from a woman who introduced herself as a 26-year-old Christian, who wondered how she could stay in New York longterm while also marrying a \u201clikeminded Christian conservative man.\u201d Kirk responded that, through the goodness of the Lord, she\u2019d met her husband when he interviewed her for a job at Turning Point. <\/p>\n After Kirk\u2019s death,<\/span> Turning Point shows signs of becoming even more powerful and omnipresent. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that he\u2019ll help create a TPUSA chapter in every high school in the state<\/a>, with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick saying he\u2019ll donate $1 million<\/a> out of his campaign coffers. Conservative megadonor Lynn Friess gave the organization<\/a> $1 million soon after Kirk was killed.<\/p>\n Yet neither Sorkin nor Weiss really asked about Erika Kirk\u2019s goals for the organization going forward. \u201cI knew his goals, I knew what his vision was for things,\u201d she said at one point to Sorkin. \u201cSo this is not out of my orbit, this is not uncomfortable for me. It\u2019s not, because I\u2019m picking up a mantle that I understand.\u201d But how she understands that mantle and what she\u2019ll do with it was less clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
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