MAGA and the single girl

Washington Post

7 hours ago

GRAPEVINE, Tex. — 'We are witnessing a cultural revolution.'
Alex Clark stood center stage in a hotel ballroom on Friday evening, all business in her tweed minidress, pearls and beehive bun. The influencer and podcast host was addressing the hundreds of attendees who had gathered for the Young Women's Leadership Summit, an annual conference hosted by MAGA youth group Turning Point USA. Perched on a pair of periwinkle platform heels, Clark laid out the tenets of that cultural revolution, one alliterative prescription at a time.
'Less Prozac, more protein!' she said. 'Less burnout, more babies! Less feminism, more femininity!'
Clark, whose 'Culture Apothecary' podcast for Turning Point vaulted her to the forefront of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement, was articulating her vision for a new conservative womanhood — one that fused its traditional pillars of faith and family with wellness culture.
'This is Whole Foods meets The West Wing,' she said. 'It's collagen, calluses, and conviction. It's castor oil, Christ, and a well-stocked pantry.' The right has 'the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together,' Clark said. The left, meanwhile, has 'TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.' All this amounted, by her calculation, to the notion that conservatives are now 'the cool kids' and 'mainstream.'
'We're not running from culture anymore,' she continued. 'We're running it.'
Are they? President Donald Trump's most enthusiastic supporters like to imagine that his narrow victory in the 2024 popular vote signals a wholesale rejection of liberal cultural values and institutions. Turning Point leader Charlie Kirk has suggested that liberal ideas prevailed in the past because media and tech leaders had stacked the deck, and that was changing. 'We are the zeitgeist now,' Caroline Downey, the editor in chief of a conservative lifestyle magazine, recently told attendees of a party in Washington. Trump's gains among younger voters, including young women — Kamala Harris still won these groups, but by relatively small margins — have been particularly exciting to the soothsayers of the MAGA cultural revolution. Sure, maybe it was concerns about the economy and the job market, but hear them out: Maybe it was also a backlash against toxic feminism, trans people and the woke police.
And what, exactly, is the conservative culture in the age of Trump's second coming? What does it think conservative women should want?
These were the questions facing the roughly 3,000 young women, mostly ages 16 to 26, as they flitted around the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in a smear of pastels and florals — ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, like if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora. The conference's Pinterest board of fashion inspiration featured prairie skirts and Kate Middleton-esque silhouettes; its playlist claimed Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa.
There were booths selling toothpaste with 'zero ingredients discovered by NASA' and athletic gear from a company 'unapologetic' in its mission to keep transgender women out of women's sports. There were T-shirts instructing you to 'Call Her Crunchy' and tote bags declaring that 'Motherhood is my resistance.' There were the sounds of babies — crying, cooing, nursing — in the background, clutched to the breasts of young mothers who bounced and rocked them in the back of the ballroom.
Some of the women wore 'Make America Great Again' hats, but only a few. Trump didn't come up much. The focus was on culture, not politics.
After Clark delivered her manifesto on Friday evening, Charlie Kirk's wife, Erika, took the stage to warn against prioritizing work over family. 'You will always be able to create your own company, but children, family, your husband, marriages — that is not a renewable resource,' she said. Of course, many of them wanted careers, she added, acknowledging she herself had an online ministry and a line of biblical streetwear ('They said Noah was a conspiracy theorist...and then it rained,' reads an $88 hoodie). 'I don't want you to be chasing a paycheck and a title and a corner office,' Erika told the women, only to 'sacrifice such a short window that you have in this time period.'
Later, Charlie joined her onstage to take relationship questions from the audience. Erika advised the women to make themselves 'godly' and 'attract the man He made for you.' Specifically: dress modestly, save yourself for marriage, don't curse and gossip. Charlie — who, at an event later in the weekend, would tell the women that college is a 'scam' but a good place to pursue the proverbial 'Mrs.' degree — admonished that if they're not married with kids by age 30, the chances of either happening for them will drop precipitously.
'To the women who are getting married after 30, that's okay,' Erika added, softening the blow. 'I'm trying to bridge the gap here, because it is okay. It's not ideal — it's not probably the best statistical-odd position for you, but God is good, and — '
'There's nothing wrong with it — ' Kirk interjected.
'Right,' Erika said, cutting him off. The audience laughed.
"It's just, I find... ' Her husband shook his head and threw his hands up in spousal surrender. 'If you just want happy talk, then that's fine.'
The next day, the line to meet Erika was at least 300 women long, snaking past the booths with the 'Raw Milk Revival' posters and the 'Dump Your Socialist Boyfriend' stickers. For some, the Kirks' advice about how and when to think of marriage had been clarifying.
'If you have any confusion about the steps of womanhood, they are covering all of that, which has been super helpful and insightful,' Lauren Thacker, a 19-year-old from Fort Worth, told The Washington Post the morning after Erika and Charlie's Q&A.
For others, it was anxiety-provoking. 'I thought about that laying in bed last night!' said Wren Gordon, 32, a single woman from the Dallas area. 'I thought I would be done having children at this point in my life, not still waiting to get married,' she said. 'So, yeah, that really does freak me out. I have to rely on God and His timing. He's never late for anything.'
Later that day, Nicole Hadar, a high-schooler from Massachusetts, approached the microphone in a smocked blue dress to press Charlie Kirk on what, exactly, he thought women should be aspiring to. 'I was wondering if you could clarify what the mission of this summit is, because it's a Young Women's Leadership Summit, and all of the women that spoke on that stage today and yesterday were there because they pursued a career.' As far as Hadar could tell, the takeaway from the conference 'was that I should, quote, get married and have babies.'
Murmurs and some giggles rippled across the room.
'That's interesting,' Kirk replied from the stage. His face scrunched into a thoughtful grimace. 'I wouldn't say all of them are there because they pursued a career — maybe I'd have to think about the entire career.' He stammered a bit before continuing. 'I could flip it on you,' he told the high-schooler. 'The people that pursued a career are telling you to pursue kids. Maybe they know something you don't know.'
Hadar asked for the microphone back.
'But don't you think that they, like, had children and got married to their wonderful husbands because of their career?' she said. 'Like, if they didn't pursue that career, that wouldn't have happened? I thought that one of the speakers today was really cool about this, and she talked a bit about how you can have a child and a family while also pursuing your career.'
An unscheduled panel discussion seemed to be taking shape.
'Again, that's for every one person to decide,' Kirk countered. The mission of the summit, he ultimately concluded, 'is whatever takeaway you want to have' — a renewed sense of patriotism, of 'traditional norms and roles,' of 'true femininity — not this toxic type.'
'But I'll also tell you this,' Kirk added. 'I hope that some of you ... walk away with a warning that a career-driven life is very empty.'
You notice how everyone's dressed and how I'm dressed? I'm dressed like a New Yorker.'
Arynne Wexler, in a black tube top and a long white skirt, stood out against the sea of nursery tones and florals. Not that she minds. 'Maybe a liberal would come here and be afraid of floral dresses, but I'm not afraid of the milkmaid dress,' she says. 'I just don't dress like that.'
She was hanging out in the convention center lobby on Saturday afternoon ahead of her Sunday morning panel on 'Next Gen Female Voices: Media, Culture & Impact.' Wexler grew up in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from Wharton. She runs a popular Instagram account where she mocks Gen Z college degrees as 'pescatarian arts with a concentration on hating white people' and calls the WNBA 'welfare for tall lesbians' — but she'd delete her account tomorrow if she could trade it in for a husband and kids.
She is Jewish, and religious. She eats healthy, but when it comes to the most recent iteration of the cultural right, Wexler has her limits. 'RFK can take that diet Dr Pepper out of my cold, dead, aspartame-filled fingers — he's not f---ing going near that,' she says. Also: 'I'm not gonna use your f---ing pronouns.' she says. (Wexler apparently missed Erika Kirk's advice to 'harness your tongue in a way that's biblical.')
She believes there are plenty of people like her out there — those with 'common sense, patriotic values' — who feel culturally out of place among conservatives. The 2024 election cycle had been an 'ascendant time' for the right, she said, but that was partly because people were sick of the excesses of the left — the people Wexler would describe at her panel as 'androgynous pixie haircut unbathed Marxist freaks in polycules.' But a backlash against liberal ways of life isn't the same as an endorsement of the opposite.
'I do not see the popular vote as supporting conservative culture,' Wexler said. 'We love being extreme and telling people they have to meet us where we are in culture. I don't agree with that.'
The last person to address the young women was conservative commentator Brett Cooper. Cooper is 26, recently married, and pregnant. Her YouTube channel has 1.57 million subscribers, a following she's built with a cheerful delivery and a penchant for pop culture. Onstage, Cooper told the story of her mother, whose career-oriented friends had mocked her when she left academia to raise Cooper and her siblings. Feminists and the left, Cooper said, had made a 'grave error' when they chose to champion the idea that 'a woman's value and happiness existed only in her work.' As a response to that error, the 'tradwife' aesthetic made sense. But perhaps, Cooper ventured, the pendulum had swung too far in some corners of conservatism — which had become as 'polarizing and puritanical as what the left was doing years ago,' she said.
'Some people might think that I'm crazy for getting up here on conservative women's conference and saying all of this,' Cooper said. 'But I think it's important to say this because I know that, personally, I fall somewhere between these two extreme binaries that we have been presented with. I'm sure that many of you do as well.'
'Tell 'em, Brett!' someone shouted from the audience.
'I'm not here to say that you need to chase being a wife and a mother and finding an amazing career and stay healthy and not eat seed oils and be engaged in politics and, and, and,' Cooper continued. 'That is really not reasonable. That's not the point.' (Later, over email, she explained her decision to address this in her speech. 'I believe young women want — and deserve — a nuanced approach to work and family,' she wrote. 'Life is more complicated than an X thread.')
Letting go of living up to others' expectations and building a life that works for you. It's a sensible bit of wisdom — and not an especially political one.
The young women shuffled out of the ballroom for a final time, still buzzing from Cooper's closer. To Leona Salinas, 20, she'd gotten permission to be whoever she wanted. 'Don't overwhelm yourself with thinking that you aren't good enough, career-wise, just because you want to have children,' she said. 'You can't have it all, literally. You don't have to be a career girl boss, you just have to be ambitious in what you do.'
'And as long as you have that — like, I'm literally getting chills.' Salinas paused and rubbed her forearms. 'As long as you have that, you really will be at your peak happiness. And that is what God wants from all of us.'