Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, will visit San Antonio in June to host a women’s leadership conference.
The event, scheduled for June 5-7 at the Marriott River Center, is hosted by Turning Point USA, the far-right group Charlie Kirk founded in 2012 and led until he was shot on a Utah college campus last fall. After his death, Erika Kirk assumed the role of CEO.
The list speakers includes an array of conservative media personalities including Allie Beth Stuckey, a prominent Christian conservative podcaster who frequently speaks out against transgender women and gender-affirming care on her podcast Relatable. She is joined on the roster by Alex Clark, host of Turning Point USA’s Culture Apothecary podcast and a major figure of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
The roster also includes Savannah Crisley, a former guest host on The View whose family rose to reality TV fame before a headline-grabbing series of scandals. Those included a $30 million fraud and tax evasion conviction for her parents, which landed them in prison until they received a pardon from President Donald Trump.
Tickets for the upcoming Women’s Leadership Summit are priced according to age. Women and girls 13 to 26 can buy general admission tickets for $50, while women between 27 and 35 can get in for $100 and those over 36 must pay $200. VIP passes range from $300 to $450, depending on age.
Despite its conservative pedigree, the conference’s website is full of words normally used in leftist feminist spaces, such as “empowerment,” “confidence,” “leadership” and “self-care.”
“This is for women who are ready to rise fully into the life they were created to lead and who value courage, conviction, and clarity in every season,” the homepage states.
The event also seems to capitalize on the wellness movement’s pipeline into far-right spaces — often by way of rhetoric shunning vaccines and modern medicine while championing “miracle cures” such as raw milk and beef tallow.
As another component of the same internet echo chamber, several of the event’s “holistic health speakers” also specialize in topics related to homeschooling. Those speakers, such as Culture Apothecary podcaster Clark, are marketed on the event’s website as proponents of whole foods and “hormonal, mental and spiritual health” who draw from natural remedies and “ancestral wisdom.”
But whose ancestors?
‘Pink razor’ feminism
To Sarah E. Erickson, co-director of Trinity University’s Women’s and Gender Studies program, Kirk’s summit represents a “commoditized version of feminism that’s about individuals and about whiteness.”
Notably, all speakers at the event are either white or white-passing, according to an analysis of its website.
Commodity feminism is the appropriation of feminist ideas, icons and language for commercial purposes. The upcoming summit particularly reminds Erickson of the kind of “femvertising” that brought us the pink razor.
“They’re really using the language of commodity feminism,” Erickson told the Current. “Feminism that’s sort of based in capitalism, that is sort of counter to what the actual goals of the feminist movement were.”
Further, Erickson takes issue with the concept of lifting up certain women — such as Kirk and other wealthy whites — to leadership roles while upholding the system that keeps other women down.
“When we think about the structures and systems that feminism pushes back against, it’s not about putting an individual woman in a powerful situation. It’s about thinking about how do we dismantle these unfair and inequitable structures,” the professor said. “It does seem like the values that they’re espousing are more aligned with traditional patriarchal views and neoliberal individualism that feminism fights against.”
Follow the leader
One could argue Kirk wouldn’t be CEO of her late husband’s company without the advances of feminism. She is also allowed to live in her own home and own her own credit card thanks to the advocacy of feminists who fought for women’s equality in this country.
Yet, Kirk has repeatedly denounced feminism wholesale in favor of traditional gender roles.
During an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, she said the couple’s relationship was modeled after the fifth chapter in the Bible’s Book of Ephesians, which requires the wife to submit to the husband.
“It’s so hard to articulate the beauty of an Ephesians 5 marriage when you actually have a man that’s worth following, to have a true example of a leader to look up to. And I had that in Charlie,” Erika Kirk told the New York Times.
Erickson said Kirk is part of an entire ecosystem of women who simultaneously reject feminism while benefitting from it.
“I mean, we see this with the tradwife trend too, right?” Erickson said. “These women who are espousing these ‘traditional values’ and the return to the family and the return to the home, but really, they’re doing it to make money and become the primary breadwinner in their families.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
