TPUSA tells young women: shrink, submit, self-loathe

TPUSA Women’s – At Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas, speakers urged young women toward submission and criticized feminism and birth control, while Alex Clark—who said her experience of Charlie Kirk’s talk “stung”—returned with a message that

For most of the crowd at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas, last weekend wasn’t just another event on a campus schedule. It was a chance to hear what their future is supposed to look like.

Instead, one speaker after another delivered a message built around the same demand: women should put themselves last—socially, romantically, and sometimes spiritually—while calling it empowerment.

The tone was set by TPUSA’s opening remarks from Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk. She denounced feminism for teaching women to pursue “self-fulfillment. ” arguing that goal is trying to be “like men.” She also told attendees to “have more babies than you can afford. ” while leaving unmentioned that Republicans—Kirk’s preferred party—have been “chipping away at social services that make it possible to raise them.”.

The most personal moment came through Alex Clark. 33. a speaker at the summit who remembered how Kirk’s speech last year had made her feel. She stood before largely high school and college-aged attendees and confessed. “I was sitting in the audience and it stung a little bit.” Clark said she was “a woman in her 30s who very much wanted marriage. ” and she added that she knew others in the audience were “in the same boat.”.

Clark also pointed to the way Kirk had mocked women who aren’t married by 30—shaming them as “old maids” who “likely would never find a husband.” She described how she heard “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.”.

Yet even as she acknowledged the cruelty, Clark framed it as morally useful. She insisted she was grateful for what she called Kirk’s “fatherly tough love,” arguing, “Charlie was trying to wake America up,” though she never explained exactly how.

Her speech, she said, held a line that sounded like permission and punishment at the same time. She argued it’s okay to be single. but then told the audience. “I think we love ourselves a little too much.” She promised that being single isn’t “God’s punishment. ” and then criticized unmarried women as being too picky. adding. “Now ask yourself. would you want to marry you?” Near the end. she reassured the crowd that all of that self-loathing and frustration could pay off.

It paid off instantly onstage. Clark declared, “I’m engaged!” before bringing her fiancé—26-year-old right-wing writer Vance Voetberg—onto the stage. She wore a ruffled. all-white dress. and while the audience “freaked out with joy. ” she did not marry him on the spot. Instead. she waved her ring while the crowd screamed. hoping—she seemed to suggest—that internalized misogyny would lead to the happy ending that had been promised to them.

Clark’s path to that moment has been rough. Years earlier, she had spent time preaching that Christian chastity and female submission would result in blissful marriage. As she kept not getting married, the tone of her writing and podcasting reportedly turned increasingly “desperate.”

That desperation spilled into open bitterness a few weeks before the summit. Clark reacted to Alex Cooper. the 31-year-old host of the sex-positive “Call Her Daddy” podcast. after Cooper announced that she and her husband were having a baby. Clark wrote in a May newsletter. “Whores get married first.” Her language was “nasty. ” but the source material says her frustration was understandable under her doctrine—because it admits followers can become “socially isolated.” The reasoning offered was that women who avoid flirting. having fun with men. or sex outside of marriage will find it harder to get dates.

The timing also looked off. The source describes Clark as being in an exclusive relationship with the man she is going to marry when she wrote the newsletter. making her anger-fueled honesty “especially odd.” By the time the summit arrived a couple weeks later. she was back on the MAGA line: women can find their true purpose only through self-abnegation.

That pressure toward shrinking rather than leading wasn’t confined to Clark. The message of self-loathing for women was carried throughout the San Antonio summit, which drew over 2,000 women. The turnout was described as a “remarkable” one for TPUSA, which has been seeing “dwindling crowds in recent months.”.

Alongside Kirk, the program featured Kate Johnson, married to replacement-level MAGA influencer Benny Johnson. Johnson shamed more than 99% of sexually active women who have used birth control, saying the decision to get pregnant is “not yours to take control of.”

Noleen Sedra, wife of far-right preacher Andrew Sedra, went further in her condemnation of feminism. She declared that feminism has been a “demonic, satanic death cult” since its inception. In the U.S. the source connects that claim to the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848—when first-wave feminists demanded suffrage and the right to earn their own money. Sedra then defended burning women as witches.

Her sister-in-law, Millicent Sedra, mocked women who expect husbands to share housework. She asked, “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?” She then grabbed her Bible. pretended to flip through it. and said. “Let me just check. Yes!” She instructed women not to “despis[e]” being an unpaid servant for men. but instead to “start serving with gratitude!”.

Some speakers tried to reposition the rhetoric. They insisted they do not hate women; they argued it is the left that hates women. Right-wing commentator Isabel Brown said that by using birth control. women are “reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold.” But that framing. the source says. fails on its own terms by assuming women lack autonomy and could not possibly have reasons for wanting to avoid pregnancy or limit the number of children they have.

For a gathering billed as a “leadership summit,” it landed as something else: a parade of women being told not to lead—at least not in the way most people understand leadership—but to serve.

The source traces that tradition back to Phyllis Schlafly. describing how right-wing women have found that preaching self-abnegation can become a pathway to personal wealth and empowerment. Still. it’s striking. the reporting says. that TPUSA appeared to “double down” on extremist rhetoric at a moment when more young women than ever are rejecting traditional gender roles and embracing women’s equality.

Even with the large crowd. the event read as strained—described as desperate. like a bid to keep anti-feminism’s promises alive. The contradictions were hardest to overlook in Alex Clark’s speech: a woman who said Charlie Kirk’s message “stung. ” yet returned to insist the harshness was ultimately worth it—ending with the kind of certainty that was supposed to make everyone else’s doubt go quiet.

TPUSA Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit San Antonio Erika Kirk Charlie Kirk Alex Clark Vance Voetberg feminism birth control Seneca Falls Declaration Christian chastity female submission