The race to replace Charlie Kirk is being led by conservative women - Newsweek

On the first anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the American conservative movement has answered the question of who inherits his institutions. His widow, Erika Kirk, took over the leadership of Turning Point USA, the company he co-founded, after his passing.

The harder question is who inherits his microphone.

Kirk, 31, who was shot dead on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University while speaking to students, was the most influential media voice for young conservatives in America. His audience was young, online and, unlike prior generations, reached mainly through short-form video and podcasts rather than cable television. Any successor has to compete on those platforms.

A Newsweek analysis found that women are leading the race to fill the vacuum. Over the past 12 months, the candidates who have grown fastest are women working in the podcast and social media spaces that Kirk helped to define for the right.

Eviane Leidig, author of The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, told Newsweek: “It is very significant that the top-ranked figures in conservative digital media are women, when a decade ago it was male-dominated.

“It demonstrates that the conservative movement has effectively normalized its messaging on traditional family values which are embodied through these female figures."

She added that Erika Kirk’s position as the CEO of Turning Point USA ushered in a “new era of female-led conservatism.”

Newsweek scored various candidates out of 100 on five weighted measures: youth-platform reach, audience growth between September 2025 and September 2026, Gen Z platform penetration, conservative-media influence and access and mobilization infrastructure such as recurring shows, events and organizational backing.

Newsweek reached out to Turning Point USA and representatives from the five voices mentioned for comment.

Alex Clark is a breakout voice in the conservative media space and the host of the Turning Point USA podcast Culture Apothecary and POPlitics. On YouTube, she has more than 800,000 followers.

Culture Apothecary has regularly ranked in the top 10 of health and wellness podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify since launching in September 2024. Its Make America Healthy Again-adjacent wellness lane reaches a young female audience.

Brett Cooper commands a large raw audience, with her show The Brett Cooper Show on YouTube, where she has 1.7 million followers.

She gained national attention as a UCLA student criticizing COVID-19 lockdowns. She hosted The Comments Section with Brett Cooper, produced by The Daily Wire, from March 2022 to December 2024 before launching The Brett Cooper Show independently. In the summer of 2025, she became a Fox News contributor. Cooper was named to the TIME100 Creators list this year.

She lives on a farm near Nashville, Tennessee, and shares content about farm life on her social media. On her show, she discusses current affairs through a conservative lens.

Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer turned conservative political activist known for campaigning against the participation of trans women in women’s sports, hosts The Riley Gaines Show on Outkick.

Speaking to Newsweek via email, Gaines said that she takes her influence within the conservative movement seriously.

"But I don’t think about influence primarily in terms of followers or being a 'voice.' I think about whether what I’m saying is actually moving people toward truth and toward action," Gaines said. "There’s a responsibility that comes with having a platform, particularly when young women are listening. I don’t want to simply tell people what they want to hear. I want to challenge them to think more deeply.

"Becoming a wife and mother has also changed the way I think about influence. The question I ask now is: What am I building? What am I defending? And what will my daughter inherit from the work I’m doing today?"

Gaines has approximately 1.4 million followers on TikTok and she retains regular access to Fox News, Newsmax and the wider Trump-orbit media circuit.

Her single-issue brand is the most recognizable in the field. Gaines told Newsweek that her entry into the movement was "specific," but "that experience opened up a much larger understanding for me."

"I realized that the same cultural forces that were affecting women’s sports were also affecting education, medicine, family, faith and the way young women were being taught to understand themselves and their worth," she said.

Gaines does not think the conservative movement needs one singular movement.

"I think trying to manufacture one could actually weaken the movement," she said.

Looking at the prominence of women in the conservative media space, Gaines described it as significant.

"It challenges a very old stereotype about what a conservative looks like and who gets to be a conservative voice," she said. "The rise of conservative women in media ultimately signifies that the conservative movement is becoming less about preserving an old political coalition and more about building a new cultural coalition which is one that young people, and particularly young women, can actually see themselves in."

Isabel Brown, author and host of the Isabel Brown Show, has amassed 1.3 million followers on Instagram. She is affiliated with Turning Point USA and started her own chapter at Colorado State University.

Like Cooper, Brown’s show covers current affairs through a conservative lens. Speaking to Newsweek via email, Brown said that her platform “has very little to do with me” and is “designed intentionally as a community for young independent thinkers to gather and pursue truth.”

“I owe my entire career to my friend Charlie Kirk,” she said, adding that he had encouraged her as a young premed college student to “abandon my plans for medical school and pursue grassroots activism and media in his generational fight to save America.”

Brown told Newsweek that “no one will ever be “the next Charlie Kirk,” and said that with his loss, “we lost the leader of the conservative movement.”

Looking at the conservative movement more broadly, she said: "We as a generation of conservatives are tired of all-talk-no-action Republican politicians.”

Brown told Newsweek she was not surprised by how prevalent female voices were in the conservative media space. She said female voices are needed to “remind this next generation we are created as women on purpose and our culture is relying on us to fight for truth for our daughters.”

Amala Ekpunobi is a content creator who, similar to Brown and Cooper, discusses trending topics with a conservative lens on her self-titled YouTube, and on her Instagram and TikTok.

Ekpunobi began as a left-leaning content creator and then moved into the conservative space, a conversion arc that has featured in her content. She previously hosted Unapologetic from 2021 to 2023 while she was an in-house PragerU personality. She has also featured on conservative media platforms including Fox News and Dr. Phil.

Her growth in the last 12 months has been steady, and she rounds out the top five, according to Newsweek’s analysis.

That some of the fastest-growing and most influential voices in conservative media are women signifies a shift in the space and sets a possible agenda for its priorities.

“The rise of conservative women as prominent voices impacts the broader discourse about reproductive rights, gender and sexual orientation, motherhood and women's and men's roles in society,” Leidig told Newsweek.

Zooming out to look more broadly at the media space, she added: “Podcast hosts, creators and social media personalities, compared to traditional media figures, play an extremely influential role in shaping young Americans' political identities, regardless of ideological affiliation.”

But thinking about the gender politics at play here, Leidig cautioned against the idea that the reach of women in the conservative media space is progressive.

“The elevation of women in conservative media spaces should not be interpreted as a step forward, particularly since these figures promote traditionalist views of gender and sexuality,” she told Newsweek.

The index focuses only on their media presence and audience-building ability. Each candidate was scored across five categories: audience reach (30 percent), audience growth (25 percent), Gen Z relevance (20 percent), conservative media influence (15 percent) and mobilization or community-building capacity (10 percent).

Reach measured the size of a candidate's largest audience on major platforms, growth tracked follower gains over the previous year, media influence assessed appearances on major conservative outlets and access to prominent Republican figures, and mobilization considered recurring shows, events, tours, newsletters and other audience-building infrastructure.

All category scores were standardized on a 0 to 100 scale relative to the strongest performer in each category. The final score used a weighted formula combining the five categories. Followers were not added together across platforms because many users follow the same creator in multiple places.

Overall, the ranking reflects creators with large audiences who are growing quickly, maintain strong visibility in conservative media, and are particularly successful at connecting with younger conservatives online.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Alfred Joyner and Gray R. Thomas