Turning Point USA was co-founded by Charlie Kirk and its fundraising apparatus since his death has centered around fading MAGA fantasies that he will be a movement-reviving martyr. So it was a little surprising that one of the speakers at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas, Alex Clark, spoke about how Kirk made her feel bad about herself. Speaking last weekend to a crowd of largely high school and college-aged attendees, the host TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” remembered the cruelty of Kirk’s talk at last year’s summit, in which he shamed women who aren’t married by 30, suggesting they are old maids who likely would never find a husband.
“I was sitting in the audience and it stung a little bit,” Clark, 33, confessed. “I was sitting there as a woman in her 30s who very much wanted marriage. And I know that there’s a lot of other ladies in this audience who are in the same boat.” She even complained about “right-wing men” who “act like we’re supposed to just I guess live under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.”
But even while tacitly admitting Kirk’s scolding was unfair, she still insisted she was grateful for the “fatherly tough love.” (Kirk was younger than Clark, by about 8 months.) “Charlie was trying to wake America up,” she argued, though never quite articulated how.
Clark’s entire speech was a bundle of contradictions. She argued that it’s okay to be single, but then also chastised the audience, “I think we love ourselves a little too much.” She promised that being single isn’t God’s punishment, but then criticized unmarried women for being too picky, adding, “Now ask yourself, would you want to marry you?” At the end of this confusing speech, however, she reassured the audience that all this self-loathing and frustration was worth it.
“I’m engaged!” Clark triumphantly declared. While the audience freaked out with joy, she brought her fiancé, 26-year-old right-wing writer Vance Voetberg, on stage. Although she was dressed in a ruffled, all-white dress, they thankfully did not get married on the spot. Still, Clark waved her ring around while the young audience screamed in their collective hope that all the internalized misogyny would lead to the happy ending they were promised.
Clark is an especially tough case. She’s spent years preaching that Christian chastity and female submission would result in blissful marriage, but as she kept not getting married, her writing and podcasting took on an increasingly desperate tone. The situation got especially ugly a few weeks ago, when Clark had an unhinged, bitter reaction to Alex Cooper, the 31-year-old host of the sex-positive “Call Her Daddy” podcast, announced that she and her husband were having a baby.
“Whores get married first,” Clark griped in a May newsletter. Her language was nasty, but her frustration was somewhat understandable. Her own doctrine, she momentarily admitted, leaves its followers “socially isolated.” Turns out women who shun flirting, having fun with men, or (heaven forbid!) having sex outside of marriage, will find it’s just a lot harder to get dates. Note that when Clark was writing this, she was supposedly in an exclusive relationship with the man she’s going to marry, making this anger-fueled burst of honesty especially odd. By the time the summit came around a couple weeks later, Clark was back on board with the MAGA line: only through self-abnegation can women find their true purpose.
The message of self-loathing for women was carried throughout the San Antonio summit, which drew over 2,000 women, a remarkable turnout for TPUSA, which has been seeing dwindling crowds in recent months. Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, kicked things off with a speech denouncing feminism for teaching women to pursue “self-fulfillment,” which, she argued, is trying to be “like men.” She also coached them to “have more babies than you can afford,” without mentioning that her preferred party, Republican, keeps chipping away at social services that make it possible to raise them.
Erika Kirk’s hypocrisy has been well-documented. Even before her husband’s death and her takeover as CEO of TPUSA, she was a highly-educated career woman only playing at being the demure housewife for his audiences. But her message of submission was one of the milder speeches at this year’s summit.
Kate Johnson, married to replacement-level MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, shamed the over 99% of sexually active women who have used birth control, saying the choice to get pregnant is “not yours to take control of.”
Noleen Sedra, wife of far-right preacher Andrew Sedra, declared that feminism has been a “demonic, satanic death cult,” since its inception — which, in the U.S., means the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, when first-wave feminists demanded suffrage and the right to earn their own money. She then went on to defend burning women as witches.
Her sister-in-law, Millicent Sedra, also spoke and scolded women who expect husbands to share housework. First she mocked women with, “What am I, my husband’s servant? Picking up after him all the time, picking his undies off the floor, ironing his clothes? What am I, his servant?” Then she grabbed her Bible, pretended to flip through it and said, “Let me just check. Yes!” Instead of “despising” being an unpaid servant for men, she instructed women to “start serving with gratitude!”
Speakers did try to insist that they don’t hate women, and that it’s the left that hates women. Right-wing commentator Isabel Brown insisted that, by using birth control, women are “reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold.” Even this effort to turn the rhetoric around fails by its own measure, assuming women don’t have autonomy and could not possibly have a good reason for wanting to avoid pregnancy or limit the number of children they have.
It’s all very strange for anything called a “leadership summit” to feature one speaker after another casting women not as leaders at all, but as servants. Of course, there’s nothing new about this paradox. Dating back to Phyllis Schlafly, right-wing women have found that preaching a doctrine of self-abnegation to women is a pathway to personal wealth and empowerment.
Still, it’s striking that TPUSA is doubling down on the extremist rhetoric, right at the time when more young women than ever before are rejecting traditional gender roles and embracing women’s equality. Despite the turnout, there was something strained and desperate about the whole enterprise, like they are the few still holding onto hope that anti-feminism can make good on its promises. The contradictions are getting harder to paper over, as evidenced by Alex Clark’s mess of a speech.
