The first time I saw a photo of Erika Kirk it was on the site formerly known as Twitter: a portrait of a woman with pale blond hair and eyes the color of ice, glaring straight into the camera like she’s daring it, and you, to come even one step closer. The post didn’t identify the woman in the image, but it didn’t need to. Even if she hadn’t been standing at a podium emblazoned with a sign that read, “May Charlie be received into the merciful arms of Jesus,” the caption would have left no doubt as to who I was looking at.
It read, “She’s as hateful as her husband.”
That post has since been deleted—although not before it racked up over 140,000 likes and more than 12,000 retweets—but it’s representative of something bigger than itself: a progressive animus toward all things Charlie Kirk-related, so powerful that no one, not even a grieving widow addressing the public less than 48 hours after her husband’s death, will be spared its caustic attention.
The image of Erika Kirk was a still from her livestreamed statement, which she made from the same studio where her husband used to record a daily podcast; she was standing beside his empty chair. She spoke for nearly 20 minutes, offering words of grief, words of thanks, words of faith. These last were especially striking: a glimpse into a devoutly Christian world rarely depicted in mainstream culture except to ridicule it, one with its own vocabulary and rituals, and a frank familiarity with the divine.
