The women who could make or break MAGA

The mainstreaming of brazen sexism in the conservative movement left the attendees at Turning Point’s women’s summit looking for a soft place to land.

Turning Point USA’s 2026 Women’s Leadership Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

(Amy Littlefield)

Two jets of pink smoke erupted on either side of the stage in a San Antonio hotel ballroom as the Christian wellness influencer Alex Clark strode to the podium in a filmy white dress. Behind her a screen displayed the words “faith over feminism” in cursive. The conservative organizing network Turning Point USA had kicked off its first annual women’s leadership summit since the group’s cofounder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot last year, and Clark was about to give some of Kirk’s offensive words about women a makeover.

Clark queued up video of a viral moment from last year’s conference. Sitting on stage with his wife, Erika, Charlie Kirk had lectured the 3,000 young women present to focus on finding a husband. “If you’re not married by the age of 30, you only have a 50 percent chance of getting married, and if you don’t have kids by the age of 30, you have a 50 percent chance of not having kids,” Charlie pronounced, and Erika interjected, sweetly, “To add on to that, to the women who are getting married after 30, that’s OK…. God is good.” This year, about 2,000 people, most of whom didn’t raise their hands when asked if they had attended last year, sat watching this video. The word “young” had been dropped from the conference’s title and many of the attendees were well over 30. Some of them laughed appreciatively at Erika and Charlie’s rapport, as if they were watching their mom gently chide their dad.

Then Clark got serious. She said Kirk’s words last year had hurt because she herself is in her early 30s and still unmarried. “I’ll be honest, I was sitting in the audience, and it stung a little bit,” she said, and the titters of laughter ceased. “But I also knew Charlie.” Because even though Kirk could be a little direct, he wasn’t wrong about the statistics on marriage, Clark went on to say. “They’re actually worse,” Clark breathed.

Clark went on to advise her fellow single ladies on how to have a “God-honoring single season,” a time when young women were free to have a career and buy as many throw pillows as they wanted while waiting for a husband.

For at least some of the women present, there was an edge of hurt to reliving this moment. Ann Dailey Moreno was in the audience last year, unmarried, and 28. She’d been so upset by Charlie’s words that she started to cry right there in her seat. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not welcome,’” Dailey Moreno told me, choking up again at the recollection. “That was disgusting. I’m sorry. I love Charlie Kirk but that was not the right thing to say.”

She wasn’t alone in feeling offended. “Literally not every woman has kids,” Roselle, 26, and president of the Turning Point chapter at her California state university, agreed. “Like, they either can’t have kids, or they might love kids, but their job takes them elsewhere.”

“I agreed with all the women that kind of criticized him,” she added.

There are moments when the misogyny that animates the conservative movement becomes so visible that even the women who help power that movement can’t stomach it. We are in such a moment now. The mainstreaming of brazenly sexist influencers like Nick Fuentes; the young men chanting, “Your body my choice,” the naked pro-natalism of the Trump administration’s Moms.gov website; and yes, attempts to revive a 1980s-style marriage panic have driven young conservative women to the left. The number of women ages 18–29 identifying as liberal has surged in recent years, creating a widely noted gender gap between these women and their male peers. Even Charlie Kirk, all but sanctified by his martyrdom, was being gently rebuked for sexism at his own organization’s summit. “Charlie and Erika were the perfect combination, because Charlie could come off a little blunt,” Clark said from the stage to a round of appreciative laughs, “and Erika was always this sweet, soft-spoken one, who could tie up everything in a really nice bow.”

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The solution? Those sweet, soft-spoken women were going to have to deliver the word. In Kirk’s absence, women at the conference were rebranding the same message—feminism is evil, marriage and God are good—in more relatable form, with sizable doses of MAHA, and just a hint of spice flaring between the Trump administration and the MAHA moms. Erika Kirk was the poised figurehead, the Christian mom under siege by the violent left as she defended the right of women to be feminine.

“At its core, feminism is a worldview that treats many of the things that make women uniquely women as obstacles to overcome rather than divine gifts to embrace,” Kirk declared, as she kicked off the conference. But while Kirk now leads Turning Point, she was scarcely present at the summit beyond her opening speech. Instead, the face was Clark, who…