Mother Jones illustration; Gerald Herbert/AP; Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa USA/AP

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;........

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