The young women mill excitedly around a table set with perfectly piped devilled eggs and an artful charcuterie board, but few reach out to load up their dainty pink plates. The waistlines are mostly slim and the women determined to keep them that way.
The gen Z-dominated crowd has gathered at a private Washington DC mansion to celebrate the launch of a podcast aimed at conservative women and many sport the hyper-feminine uniform of their tribe. The room is a glamorous cocktail of hot pink and puffy sleeves, high heels and even higher hemlines, plentiful makeup and plunging necklines.
But few could match the doll-like perfection of their host, Jayme Franklin, who boasted the highest heels, the tiniest waist and the longest, glossiest hair. The crowd whooped as she delivered her manifesto for her latest salvo in the battle for young women in the US.
“We are bringing a better culture to young women, we are bringing a love of country, we are bringing back faith, femininity!” she told the cheering crowd who had gathered to celebrate the launch of Franklin’s Sincerely American podcast.
Franklin is already a familiar figure in the rightwing media “womanosphere”, having co-founded a conservative magazine in 2020. Her podcast is part of a new wave of media aimed at like-minded women; a movement that has been supercharged by the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in September and the ascension of his wife, Erika, to lead his Turning Point USA organisation.
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For many women at the party, Erika Kirk is an icon: a former beauty queen, devout Christian and married mother of two who speaks of wives as “helpers” to their husbands. “She’s like the girl version of Charlie,” gushed Franklin. “She’s extremely well spoken. She’s such a faithful Christian, and she really believes in everything that she promotes.”
Despite her past public persona as the supportive wife to a successful husband, Kirk is an astute businesswoman and communicator in her own right. Now, with the multimillion-dollar funding machine of Turning Point behind her, she has the potential to replicate her late husband’s success – this time, with young American women.
“Charlie built just such an incredible thing, especially towards young men, but there are a lot of young women that like what he did as well, and I think Erika can continue that legacy with young women,” said Franklin.
And there is an army of female rightwing influencers – many of them given a platform and supported by Turning Point – ready and eager to spread her gospel of traditional family values and conservative culture steeped in Christianity.
Haley Lickstein, a progressive influencer, said the conservative female influencers she monitors gained a combined 8 million followers in the week after Charlie Kirk’s death.
“These women used the moment to talk about the importance of family, to talk about their own mission and values, and Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA elevated those conversations and made sure that they had a platform,” she said.
Erika Kirk with her late husband Charlie and two children
Given that Charlie Kirk helped deliver Donald Trump the White House by turning a generation of young men towards him, his wife’s influence could prove pivotal as the US heads into the midterm elections and edges closer to the 2028 presidential race.
Conservative donors will be pinning their hopes on her winning over a demographic – young women — that has stubbornly refused to shift in any great magnitude to the Republican party. If the manosphere helped propel Trump to the White House last time around, the womanosphere may be the rocket fuel that his successor relies upon.
The power of Erika Kirk’s rebooted organisation was on display last week, when Maga world decamped to Phoenix, Arizona, for AmericaFest, Turning Point’s annual conference. Every big Maga figure – from the vice-president, JD Vance, to former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, ex-Trump aide Steve Bannon to Donald Trump Jr – was speaking. But Kirk, who delivered the keynote address, was the star.
Kirk once described her marriage as being inspired by the Bible’s book of Ephesians, which instructs wives to submit to their husbands “as to the Lord”. Speaking at Turning Point’s Young Women’s Leadership summit in June, she called for “a revival of biblical womanhood” and urged women to reject the lure of a career and prioritise getting married and having babies.
A former beauty queen and college basketball player from Scottsdale, Arizona, Kirk studied political science and then obtained a master’s degree in legal studies. She met Charlie Kirk in 2018, when she applied for a job at Turning Point and they married in 2021.
While Charlie Kirk took controversial hard-right positions on issues including race, Islam, transgender rights and feminism, his wife was less overtly political, sticking to familiar topics of marriage, parenting and religion.
Yet at the same time as telling women to put their careers on the backburner, Erika Kirk was building her own businesses. These include a ministry programme, a Christian-themed clothing line and her own podcast on spiritual matters.
The 37-year-old was named chief executive of Turning Point a week after her husband was killed, and in public appearances since then has vowed to continue his mission: “I promise I’ll make Turning Point USA the biggest thing that this nation has ever seen,” she said on his podcast.
The organisation was already a multimillion-dollar enterprise, taking $85m in net revenue in 2024. In the weeks after Kirk’s death, new donations flooded in, many of them from Republican politicians and Maga influencers keen to align themselves with the Turning Point movement.
“In a very, very quick time, this organisation was very successful in raising a lot of money and looks to continue to be capitalising on the attention that it’s received,” said Michael Beckel, research director at Issue One, which monitors money in politics.
As well as donating money, conservative politicians have used their influence to expand Turning Point’s reach. At the time of Charlie Kirk’s death, Turning Point had 900 official college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters across the country. Since then, the organisation claims it has received more than 120,000 requests from high school and college students to start new chapters or join existing ones.
Some educational institutions will not even get a choice: in Oklahoma, the schools superintendent mandated all high schools in the state to open Turning Point chapters.
In recent weeks, Erika Kirk has undertaken a string of events and media interviews, cementing her status as one of the leading mainstream figures within the Maga movement. Last weekend, she appeared in a primetime, one-hour televised “town hall” style event with Bari Weiss, the new CBS News editor-in-chief.
Erika Kirk with US vice-president JD Vance
In Phoenix last week, it became clear what the new aim of Kirk’s turbo-powered Turning Point will be: electing JD Vance president in 2028.To huge cheers, Kirk announced that Turning Point is “going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected… in the most resounding way possible”.
The endorsement is a huge moment for Vance, cementing his position as the Maga frontrunner. It was not a surprise; last month, Kirk had told the conservative chatshow host Megyn Kelly that one of the last conversations she had with her husband was about his intentions for “supporting JD in 2028”, while at another Turning Point event in November she had said: “No one will ever replace my husband, but I do see some similarities of my husband in JD.”
The relationship between Kirk and Vance has been subject to online rumours after a touchy-feely hug between the pair at the memorial for Charlie. Erika Kirk later attempted to explain the warm embrace, telling Kelly that she always touches the back of people’s heads when she hugs.
Kirk’s blending of lifestyle advice with undertones of politics is emerging as the stealth weapon of choice on the right. Many of the new generation of conservative content producers are open about using fashion and beauty to try to appeal to a broad church of potential voters.
Raquel Debono, an influencer and founder of the Make America Hot Again movement, organises parties for conservative-leaning women in New York, where she hopes to win over the undecided: “My ultimate goal is to use my parties as a vehicle to register as many Republicans as possible and also shine a spotlight on candidates I really admire.”
Franklin believes the content focusing on femininity, faith and family in her new podcast will resonate with a generation of women who she said were sold a false promise of fulfilment through “casual sex culture”.
“You see women in record rates are in therapy, they’re on antidepressants, they’re miserable, because this is just such a terrible culture to promote to them,” she said.
She is already a veteran of the movement, having co-founded The Conservateur – an online magazine styled as Vogue for conservatives – in 2020. Her goal is political: to use lifestyle content to spread her values.
“We really want to transcend the conservative bubble and get into the mainstream world because there’s a lot of women in this country who are not necessarily super-political people but might feel icky about what’s out there and what they’re promoting to women right now.”
While Debono and Franklin are not affiliated with Turning Point, the organisation has supported and given a platform to similar female influencers, including Alex Clark, who focuses on conservative-aligned health, and Isabel Brown, whose promotion of family values mirrors Kirk’s.
Turning Point is not the only organisation with an aggressive strategy to spread its message on new media. Leonard Leo, the ultra-conservative activist credited with engineering the supreme court’s shift to the right, has plunged donors’ money into projects including the networking organisation Teneo, which he has said aims to “crush liberal dominance” in areas including the media. Some female bloggers are members of the network.
“One of the things that we’ve seen in recent years are increasingly opaque and dark vehicles influencing not just political campaigns and advocacy campaigns, but the constellation of media organisations that are out there as well,” said Issue One’s Beckel.
“The public isn’t getting any insight into who is actually putting their thumb on the scale with this contribution, who’s trying to curry favour, who’s trying to invest in a certain policy agenda or advancement of certain principles through these very large investments.”
Liberal influencer Lickstein points to PayPay co-founder Peter Thiel’s business relationship with the co-founders of Evie, the conservative answer to Cosmopolitan, but with sex tips reserved for women and their husbands.
“Men with ideologies are backing and supporting and putting forward women as the imagery of the society they hope that we have one day,” said Lickstein.
The question is: how many people are buying what Kirk and the conservative female influencers are selling and how successful they will be in shifting the political dial?
While Trump narrowly beat Harris 49%-48% in November among men aged 18-29, a shift of 12 percentage points, the gains were much less convincing for women.
Biden’s 35-point lead with young women fell to a 24-point lead for Kamala Harris. But recent YouGov polling shows Trump’s popularity plummeting among young people and women, with 75% of 18- to 29-year-olds disapproving of his performance. Just 32% of women across all age groups had a positive perception of his presidency.
“I think she [Kirk] is going to come up against some headwinds there,” said Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at University at Buffalo. “At the same time that young men have moved in a somewhat more conservative direction, young women have really moved to a more liberal direction.”
Aware that many young women are put off by Trump’s politics, conservative influencers are cloaking rightwing messaging in discussions about beauty, fitness, fashion and lifestyle.
“Yes, we love President Trump, but we don’t actually talk about President Trump at all,” said Franklin.
However, she feels that once women come round to the culturally conservative worldview, then politics is the natural next step: “Culture is so tied to our politics, so that is a natural bridge that would happen if women do start embracing more of this traditional pro-America, pro-western civilisation, pro-family, way of life.”
That may be Erika Kirk’s gamble too; hoping that sticking to her established brand of aspirational Christianity and family values will win over more women than the confrontational politics of her husband before her.
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty. Other pictures by Jonathan Ernst, Pool, AFP, Getty, MrsErikaKirk, Instagram