“I’ll tell you this ladies,” said Dana Loesch, former spokeswoman of the National Rifle Association, as she paced the stage of a Dallas ballroom. “You cannot have it all — at the same time. Something will suffer.”
The audience of roughly 3,000 young women listened, rapt. They wore pins that read “Dump your socialist boyfriend” and “My favorite season is the fall of feminism.” In ruffled sundresses and cowboy boots, they shimmied to the “Church Clap.” When Ms. Loesch stepped off the stage, and out came Trump World rock stars Charlie and Erika Kirk, the young women came up to the microphone one by one to ask for advice — on finding a husband, on raising Christian children, on what to tell friends who judged them for wanting to marry young.
“I must have missed it in Matthew — which is ‘Go forth and become C.E.O. of a shoe company,’” Mr. Kirk told the audience, voice inlaid with an eye roll.
It was the largest young conservative women’s event in the country, hosted by Turning Point USA, the organization Mr. Kirk leads that claimed a critical role in turning out young voters for President Trump. Most attendees had come to the Young Women’s Leadership Summit not so much for advice on how to lead, but how to live. Because sure, the personal is political — but it’s also practical, palatable. They got clear marching orders. “Less Prozac, more protein,” said Alex Clark, a wellness influencer and podcast host who headlined the weekend. “Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”
The conference was part sorority house (Saturday night was “Girls Night In”), part church and part suburban Tupperware party, with a heavy dose of “Unleash the Power Within.” Many attendees were raised in conservative homes. Others represented a new political constituency: Molded politically by Mr. Trump’s rise and rocked emotionally by the pandemic, they began listening to wellness influencers like Ms. Clark, whose voices became a gateway to the conservative political movement.
Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.
Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark’s show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.
“What dipped my toe into all of this was the MAHA movement,” Ms. Zito said, referring to the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, championed by influencers like Ms. Clark and now led in the Trump administration by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I find myself leaning more conservative than I ever have before.”
After the 2024 election, when young men swung markedly to Mr. Trump, pundits and political operatives began a frenzied and almost anthropological analysis of the “manosphere,” the ecosystem of podcasters, like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who nudged young men toward the Republican vote. Less in focus were the young women — a demographic that is still reliably left-leaning, but whose support for Mr. Trump also increased, according to post-election polling. Some were also swayed by what has been labeled a “womanosphere” of uber popular podcasters blending lifestyle advice and political polemics.
Many of the young women at the Turning Point conference were drawn to the event because conservative women influencers had helped them remake their lives: start dating seriously and stop eating ultra-processed foods, start taking supplements and stop using birth control. The Young Women’s Leadership Summit, which marked its tenth anniversary, drew its largest numbers yet this year: roughly 3,000 women, up from around 2,000 last year and under 500 in 2015, at its inception. The event, some attendees noted, was light on discussions about policy — immigration raids, trade wars — but heavy on dating, parenting and nutrition advice.
Ms. Clark, who helped organize the confab, offered her theory of the case for the many women flocking to her fold. “Based on MAHA, they’re getting redpilled and now they’re showing up at the largest conservative women’s event in the country,” Ms. Clark said. “I keep hearing them want to blame Joe Rogan and I just think that is so shortsighted. The problem was that they didn’t give MAHA the time of day.”
What women are finding in MAHA platforms like Ms. Clark’s isn’t just a vision of a healthy kitchen, but a new life, which Ms. Clark summed up onstage, to thunderous applause: “We’re done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop,” she told the crowd.
This political revolution, in other words, isn’t just starting at home, but staying at home.
“People say ‘Charlie what does success look like for the political MAGA movement?’” Mr. Kirk said. His answer, to this crowd at least: Success for MAGA would be if moms stayed at home. On Saturday, to raucous applause, he declared: “We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.”
‘Pray For Her!’
“How many of you, every single day, is your purpose for being finding a husband?”
Mr. Kirk sat onstage with his wife Friday night and drove home the weekend’s message. He looked out over the room, where to his dismay not everybody was raising their hands. “Every hand should then go up,” he said.
His wife, Erika Kirk, a former Miss Arizona winner, half softened the message. “For the women who are getting married after 30 — that’s OK,” she said, quickly adding: “It’s not ideal. It’s not probably the best statistical position for you — but God is good.”
“If you just want happy talk, that’s fine,” said Mr. Kirk. The crowd tittered, nervously.
One after another, members of the audience came forward to ask Mr. Kirk and his wife for advice. No questions on politics, he told them, only relationships, faith and parenting. “I don’t want to go to college and I don’t want to commit to a career that I know I’m going to abandon once I have kids,” one young woman said, to which Mr. Kirk replied: “You’re already thinking correctly.” Mrs. Kirk asked if anybody in the room had a liberal boyfriend. A hand near the front shot up. “Pray for her!” an audience member yelled.
Though the speaker lineup was a string of high-powered women — State Senator Angela Paxton of Texas, House Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina — the weekend was peppered with derisive comments about sad, lonely “boss babes.” There was a Burn Book, in the style of “Mean Girls,” placed on a Turning Point recruitment table with photos of Democratic politicians and captions like: “Make AOC bar tend again.”
For many of the attendees, “feminism” was either cringe or a purely dirty word. Others talked about the waves of feminism, grateful for the right to vote but feeling that “later waves went overboard with man hating,” as Catalina Busse, a college student from Arkansas, put it. In more than two dozen interviews with attendees, young women said it was a relief to hear a message that they had privately embraced but felt uncomfortable sharing widely: that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life.
“I’m the product of the generation that said ‘Oh the future is female, go after your career, family can wait,’” said Callie Shaw, 26, an accountant who traveled to the conference from South Carolina and was part of her college Turning Point chapter. “Women like me are realizing climbing this corporate ladder doesn’t fulfill you. They realize ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been taking birth control, now I want to start a family but I’ve put it off.”
“I want to homestead with my kids,” said her sister, Josie Blanchard, 21. “I would have animals, a farm, a garden.”
“Maybe we can have a joint one,” said Ms. Shaw.
Ms. Clark — whose fans waited patiently for selfies at her meet and greet — insisted she would also readily trade away her work.
“I would have been married at 19 if I would’ve met the right person,” Ms. Clark said. “If somebody said ‘OK here’s your choice, you can keep all this or you can have marriage and kids, I would say I’m picking marriage and kids. Bye.”
But convening thousands of women for a “leadership summit” headlined by speakers telling them to forget about ambition did leave some of the attendees bewildered. Some noted that the Trump administration is filled with women they see as role models, like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (recently photographed cradling her baby at her desk) and Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the first woman to hold the role.
On Saturday afternoon, during another question and answer session with Mr. and Mrs. Kirk, a high school student, Nicole Hadar, came to the microphone at the front of the room and voiced her confusion.
“It’s the young women’s leadership summit, and all the women that spoke on that stage yesterday were there because they pursued a career,” said Ms. Hadar, 16, from Boston. “A key takeaway that I took from most of the speeches, especially Friday, was that I should quote ‘Get married and have babies.’”
“Interesting,” said Mr. Kirk. “I wouldn’t say all of them are there because they pursued a career.”
Mr. Kirk seemed uncharacteristically ruffled. “I could flip it on you,” he added. “The people that pursued careers are telling you to pursue kids. Maybe they know something you don’t know.”
“But don’t you think that they had children and got married to their wonderful husbands because of their career?” Ms. Hadar asked, gazing up at the stage.
“You know who the most miserable and depressed people in America are?” Mr. Kirk said. “Career-driven early 30-something women.”
The crowd roared with applause. But Ms. Hadar, who thinks she might want to one day run for office, noticed that when she sat down, a few girls seated nearby whispered that they had been wondering about the same question.
‘Down a Rabbit Hole’
Right before she flew to Dallas, Ms. Zito realized it was time to tell her close friends and family that she identified as conservative. After all, they might see her post photos from the Turning Point conference on Instagram.
Ms. Zito braced herself and called her grandmother, a liberal Methodist pastor in New Jersey. “I’m moderately conservative!” (She said her grandmother didn’t make a fuss, mostly wanting her to be happy.)
Ms. Zito still encounters political issues that prompt her to lean left. She finds some of the White House’s messaging about ICE raids to be “unchristian.” She believes in access to abortion under some circumstances. She wants a career. But she finds the MAHA of it all compelling. “It’s just like Alex Clark always says,” she explained. “We will not have political fights in 100 years if we’re all sick and don’t have babies.”
The pandemic, for many women at the conference, had been a moment of rupture, of questioning pre-existing beliefs. They were stuck at home, isolated, uncertain about their futures and in some cases distressed about the lockdowns and protests in their communities. They began to seek out new political perspectives.
Vina Pham, 23, who lives in Baton Rouge, is one of the young women who had a mid-pandemic political shift. Ms. Pham got the Covid vaccine on her campus, but was skeptical of the push to get boosters, asking: “Do we really need this?” She had offered to pay for someone she knew to have an abortion, and when that person decided instead to have the baby, Ms. Pham slowly changed her position, now opposing abortion in many cases. (She said she was also moved by the “Baby Olivia” video, made by an anti-abortion group, which some states are trying to make required school viewing.)
“I’m a secret conservative,” Ms. Pham said, though she consented to sharing her views in The Times, feeling it was time to be more outspoken. “My friends are like, ‘Why are you in Dallas?’ I’m like, ‘I’m at a women’s conference.’”
Milling around the conference crowds, she met other young women who had been encouraged by conservative influencers to remake their lives. Take Kate Salerno, 27, who lives in Denton, Texas, and said she learned about the conference through Ms. Clark. Ms. Salerno began watching video clips from Ms. Clark on Instagram during the pandemic. She declared to her husband that she was getting rid of their seed oils and food dyes. She ransacked the cabinets and tossed out Cheez-Its and candy. She decided not to get the Covid vaccine.
“All these doors opened when I found out about the food,” she said. “It only takes one voice to start going down a rabbit hole.”
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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