What She’s Learned About Grift

Erika Kirk built a multimillion-dollar empire preaching submission to women she’ll never practice herself, and called it grief. She gets no sympathy from me.

Photo by Gage Skidmore on Wikipedia.

NEW YORK (The Daily Whatever Wire) — Anyone else been dreading this day for a year, the one-year anniversary of the murder of Charlie Kirk? I’ve felt bile in my gut just contemplating the speeches, the dedications, the balls-to-the-wall vigil energy for a man who unquestionably spent his rare and precious (and in the end, very short) life doing harm — to women, to minorities, to immigrants, to queer people, to anyone who wasn’t a white straight Christian dude with a gun fetish, like him. He road-showed his hate speech across college campuses and argued, among many other awful things, that, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

Was it worth it though, Charlie?

I suspect your widowed wife and your nonprofit, Turning Point USA, might say it was.

Erika Kirk and her kids watched as Charlie got shot and killed doing what he loved—championing guns, demeaning minorities—one year ago today. And this week, she published a New York Times essay called “What I Learned About Grief.” Boo fucking hoo, Erika. Call it “grief” or whatever you want — I’m calling it an opportunistic woman telling other women to submit while she herself assumes power to run an $85 million nonprofit in the wake of her husband’s death. I’m so fucking done pretending this is a grief essay and not a business plan with a calla lily taped over the logo.

Let’s start with the timeline she left out of her own essay. Four days, four days after her husband had his neck blown off in front of their children, Erika Kirk sent a fundraising email. Not a request for privacy. Not a moment of silence. An email, with a call to action: “I refuse to let the movement Charlie built die. It will only grow — stronger, bolder, louder. Join me.” She wasn’t waiting for a title. She was already running the place. But she did get that title — just eight days after Charlie’s death, on September 18, in a unanimous vote, after she’d already told staff she wanted to “10x the organization.”

Here are some numbers that might make your head explode (sorry, too soon??): within four days the shooting, Turning Point logged 37,000 inquiries from people wanting to start new campus chapters. Before the shooting, the organization had 900 official college chapters and roughly 1,200 high school chapters — 2,100 total. Against that base, 37,000 new requests is a 1,762% surge, 17 times over, and Turning Point’s own spokesman used those exact numbers to brag about it on X within days. Grief doesn’t come with a growth rate. A franchise rollout does.

Lynn Friess, widow of the donor who wrote Turning Point’s first check back in 2012 for $10,000, pledged $1 million — 100 times that original bet — before the funeral was even planned. Instagram handed Charlie’s account 3.5 million new followers postmortem, a bump you get from a true-crime docuseries, not from losing a husband. Turning Point closed out 2024 at $85 million in revenue, up 142% over five years, and I would bet every dollar I don’t have that the anniversary numbers blow that out of the water.

But what really makes my blood boil? It’s not the money, but the message the funds propagates. Erika Kirk and Turning Point spends every single day telling other women their highest calling is submission and domesticity, that a wife’s job is to stay home, defer, support, and disappear into the marriage so her husband can shine. Meanwhile Erika Kirk left her own small children — the same ones who watched their father bleed out onstage— to crisscross this country running a multibillion-dollar operation, giving speeches, closing donor deals, building her own personal brand on top of his corpse. She’s not staying home with the kids. She’s not deferring to anyone. She’s the boss, and she wants all other women, women without a security detail or a multimillion dollar entity behind them, to give up exactly the kind of power and autonomy she herself refuses to put down for one single day, even the day after her husband’s murder.

That’s the grift. Not the fundraising emails, though God, those are gross too.

The real grift is asking millions of women to hand over their agency in the name of a “sacred” domestic order that the woman selling it has never once lived inside herself.

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Reviewing Erika’s New York Times essay, I had to scoff at the attribution. The essay bio opens with “Mrs. Kirk is the widow of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.” But in the closing bio, it reads, “Erika Kirk is the chief executive of Turning Point USA.” Both statements are true, of course: same woman, same words, two job titles. But not one editor at that paper made her pick one. Grief gets the sympathy. CEO gets the revenue. She doesn’t have to choose, and apparently neither does the New York Times Opinions desk. And that’s exactly the sleight of hand this entire essay is about.

Erika writes that grief “doesn’t care whom you voted for,” in the same essay where she calls her husband’s murder his “assignment,” fulfilled, like God handed him a hate-speech worksheet that said “spew vitriol about how women, immigrants, minorities, and queer people are the problem, fight with some college kids, and then die for it on camera,” and he turned it in early for extra credit.

She writes that she’s not angry at God. Here we’re aligned; I believe her. I think she’s too busy closing the quarter with immense profits to be angry at anyone.

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Charlie Kirk didn’t deserve to get shot. Full stop, no asterisk, and every ounce of me wishes we had sensible gun laws that would have served as protection between that man and a rifle, even though I loathe everything he stood for. Even though he said — his words, not mine, and so many people got canceled online for quoting Kirk back to Kirk supporters after he died, but whatever — that some gun deaths were “a prudent deal” for keeping his beloved Second Amendment. I don’t think it’s prudent. I’d like to think he wouldn’t anymore, either. I watched the video of his murder many times that day, searching his face in those final seconds before the light went out. In my mind, he lived an eternity in those liminal seconds where he saw the harm done by his words, and fully grasped the irony of his undoing. I don’t have empathy for him. Just curiosity. I am sorry for how he passed, even as I see the cruel beauty in it. No one should die that way.

I can want him alive and still refuse to admire what his widow built out of his death. The New York Times op-ed desk ran a thousand words as if the second half of that sentence doesn’t exist.

Erika Kirk didn’t learn grief this year. She learned exactly how much a country will pay a woman to preach submission while she personally practices none of it, and she is never, ever going to stop cashing that check.

A prudent deal, you might say, if you were her husband.

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