There are sensitive 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.
Erika Kirk began making public appearances soon after her husband’s September death; a former beauty pageant winner, she’s 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’s appropriately being given compassionate and careful treatment as a recent widow and victim of a shocking act of violence.
Turning Point shows signs of becoming even more powerful and remains dedicated to a sweeping policy agenda.
But Kirk has also been allowed to use those recent appearances to whitewash her husband’s often inflammatory public statements with little pushback and to avoid real questions about Turning Point’s radically regressive policy agenda. To date, her interviewers—including, in a Saturday evening “town hall” event, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss—haven’t tried to get Kirk to clearly lay out what Turning Point’s goals are under her leadership, even as the organization experiences a fundraising boom and a notable expansion following her husband’s death.
Kirk used her CBS appearance with Weiss (who, fittingly enough, got her start as a campus activist protesting what she saw as anti-Israel bias before becoming a right-wing media mogul) to challenge conspiracy theories about her husband’s death, many of which have been promoted by former TPUSA contributor Candace Owens. As she did in another recent conversation 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’s focus has been to defend her late husband’s public legacy. She has held him up as a model of how to productively and respectfully disagree with political and ideological opponents, a “peacemaker,” as she’s put it.
“My husband did something very simple,” she told Weiss. “He talked to people.”
It’s true that Charlie Kirk often modeled a version of that in his on-campus debates, where he’d argue amicably with a line of college students. But TPUSA wasn’t and isn’t 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, 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 Islam “Not compatible with Western civilization,” posting many tweets insisting that Black people disproportionately commit acts of violence targeting white people, or are unfairly given jobs they don’t deserve due to affirmative action.
During Saturday’s 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’s role was to ask Kirk about a FIRE survey which found, he said, that “90 percent of undergraduates believe to some extent that words can be violence.”
“For the people who say that my husband might have incited violence,” Kirk responded, “I’m going to put a squash on it before anyone else can attach to that. My husband never incited violence. He never once said, ‘Go after them because they’re saying XYZ and they deserve to die.’ My husband never once said that and he never would.”
It’s true that Charlie Kirk didn’t incite direct violence with his commentary, nor would he have “deserved” to die, even if he had. But someone who attacked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (calling him, among other things “an alleged rapist” and a “race Marxist”), who platformed white nationalists on his podcast, and who in so many other ways helped deepen 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.
Kirk’s new role running Turning Point seem to clash with the organization’s longstanding aspirations for women. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported, at a TPUSA conference for young women this past summer, before Charlie’s death, he and Erika both stressed the importance of young women choosing to have families and leave the workforce. “I don’t want you to be chasing a paycheck and a title and a corner office and sacrifice such a short window” to have children, Erika told the audience, while Charlie told young women to “be clear” that the reason to go to college is to obtain an “MRS degree”—that is, to find a husband.
Kirk was invited to explore that contradiction at the New York Times’ DealBook conference earlier this month, where she was interviewed by finance columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Sorkin disclosed that he’d asked Erika Kirk to appear because he’d befriended her husband before his death and had invited him to the conference. “He was supposed to be part of a task force that we’d been talking about for quite some time,” Sorkin said, sounding near tears; he didn’t disclose what the supposed task force was meant to address.
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.
“There really is no such thing as balance,” Kirk responded. “There is really no blueprint of what I’m going through. It’s really a one-of-one type of situation.” 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.
As Vanity Fair pointed out, the Times 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’s legacy. For instance, he didn’t follow up after Erika failed to respond coherently to a question about one of Charlie Kirk’s most inflammatory past statements: that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed.
How Kirk understands her mantle running the organization—and what she’ll do with it—has been left unclear.
“My husband, just because he would make certain statements, did not mean that he was trying to rile up a certain part of people,” Kirk responded. “He was trying to, again, go after ideas, not people. He was trying to get people to think a little bit differently.” (The Civil Rights Act outlawed major forms of discrimination; it would follow, then, that the idea Charlie Kirk was “going after” was the existence of anti-discrimination laws.)
Kirk also had a strangely reductive response to a question about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race, suggesting that Mamdani’s “career-driven” female voters “almost look to the government as a replacement for certain things.”
“What I don’t 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’re relying on the government to support you instead of being united with a husband,” she added. Sorkin didn’t 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.
Kirk answered similar questions from Weiss about her past suggestions that women should marry and have children young. “I didn’t ask for this,” Kirk said, saying she viewed taking over Turning Point as a “duty and a blessing” to her husband, but had been very happy staying home with their children.
“There 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,” she told Weiss. “This is something that I’m very passionate about, because it’s 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’re family.” She had, she added “one heck of a village.”
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 “likeminded Christian conservative man.” Kirk responded that, through the goodness of the Lord, she’d met her husband when he interviewed her for a job at Turning Point.
After Kirk’s death, Turning Point shows signs of becoming even more powerful and omnipresent. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that he’ll help create a TPUSA chapter in every high school in the state, with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick saying he’ll donate $1 million out of his campaign coffers. Conservative megadonor Lynn Friess gave the organization $1 million soon after Kirk was killed.
Yet neither Sorkin nor Weiss really asked about Erika Kirk’s goals for the organization going forward. “I knew his goals, I knew what his vision was for things,” she said at one point to Sorkin. “So this is not out of my orbit, this is not uncomfortable for me. It’s not, because I’m picking up a mantle that I understand.” But how she understands that mantle and what she’ll do with it was less clear.
TPUSA’s next major event is AmericaFest 2025, where several Trump administration officials are scheduled to appear later this month. Vice President JD Vance is set to be a featured speaker, alongside Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump Jr., former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, as well as several members of Congress. The organization, under both Kirks, remains dedicated to a sweeping legal and social policy agenda, one with the full backing and support of the Trump administration. The least any competent journalist can do is ask about it.
