A Daily Reid: No, Erika ... You can't touch my hair

Charlie Kirk's widow is on a strange and seemingly endless media tour, and somehow I'm a part of it

Being a public person is strange in so many ways. You’ve constantly got to remind yourself that the person running up to you at the airport is not some person you knew at school or who you used to work with whose name you’ve somehow forgotten. You actually don’t know them at all. They just know you. Even stranger: people who don’t know you at all hate your guts, and publicly attack you on Fox or on the creepy Daily Wire or whine that you once blocked them on Twitter before it became X-Twitter. Looking at you, Piers. And then there’s Erika Kirk, the former Trump beauty pageant winning, right wing Christian* conservative, Tammy Faye Baker-like widow of conservative, racist theme-peddling college campus “debater” Charlie Kirk. Besides being one of the jolliest widows most people have ever seen, the 36-year-old is mainly famous these days for hugging on single woman-deriding, Hitler chat-excusing, take no sides in the right wing culture wars, but suddenly and very ostentatiously Hindu wife defending vice president John Donald Hamel JD Vance thusly at a Turning Point U.S.A. event honoring her late husband:

Now you’ve gotta admit, that hug was weird. It was a really intimate move for a woman, let alone a freshly grieving widow, to put on a married man. And I’m hardly the only one who noticed. Still, my commentary, for some reason I can’t explain, apparently hit MAGA harder. Particularly the thoughts I shared with Jennifer Welch and Pumps on I’ve Had It:

That prompted a full-on freakout on the right. Which perhaps trickled down to Erika, who this week issued her response:

Yeah ok, weird lady. I posted a rather viral response on social media but here’s my official response from The Joy Reid Show episode on Friday:

And hey Erika: just in case you’re more a reader than a watcher, allow me to reiterate: you cannot touch my hair. I don’t want a hug from you. Your creepy, condescending offer is hereby declined. First of all, I wouldn’t willingly let you near enough to touch me. No offense, but you kinda give me Tammy Faye Bakker vibes and also I haven’t forgotten the outcome of your pal the vice president snagging the last known public meeting with the previous pro-immigrant Pontifex…

Just kidding. :)

But seriously, I fully stand by my commentary about your preferred next president, who you also endorsed at the TPUSA confab for 2028 — which didn’t exactly shut down the mostly joking speculation that you’re essentially endorsing yourself for first lady. JD’s wife being a brown Hindu daughter of immigrants is a problem for MAGA, given that The Trump Faith is trending not just toward the far right, but toward open, gleeful, Hitler fandom. I hate to break it to you, Erika, but the “send Usha back” villainy is coming from inside the house. And your genuflection towards Israel, including saying stuff like this:

… and cuddling up to Bari Weiss for a ratings failure infomercial isn’t cooling down the hate talk. It’s torking it up. By the way speaking of Bari Weiss … what the actual hell…

But back to you, Erika:

You are vying to become a leader in a movement that is misogynist at its core — believing you yourself should be at home, taking care of your kids and whipping up homemade dinners for them; not working as TPUSA’s CEO. In fact that’s a message you yourself have embraced. And the natural implication of the ideology you yourself have been selling is that after a decent interval of far more restrained mourning than you’ve engaged in thus far, you should remarry; and give your new husband dominion over your late husband’s hugely profitable realm. The movement of which you are a part is also deeply fascist, racist, and contemptuous of the multiracial immigrant story that made this country what it is; which is why your very special friend the vice president gave a speech at your confab declaring that in Trump’s America, explicitly white identity politics are BACK, big time:

Now, it should be noted that no one has asked white Americans to apologize for being white. Diversity initiatives simply asked that nonwhite people be given the opportunity to participate in such things as academia, the military, and the economy — something the current regime is indeed rapidly ending, in favor of elevating clearly unqualified white men and a handful of heavily surgically enhanced white women to roles they are almost comically unqualified for, but which they are Senate-approved and hired for anyway because Trump likes the way they look or the way they talk on TV. Meanwhile, the new religion on the right is raising the level of majority entitlement and whining self-victimization to the point that white men — who already hold the vast majority of privileged positions in this country — if and when who don’t land whatever job they apply for … receive taxpayer funded reparations:

Reparations for disappointed white guys are of course the only form of reparations the right approves of. If your great grandparents, and great great grandparents built this country for free after being stolen from Africa and died enslaved or impoverished in the teeth of Jim Crow post-enslavement because of it, you’re out of luck.

Vance, surely to the delight of his mentor and patron, has made it clear that the party you and your young changelings support is a white man’s party, built to elevate white pride, white access, and white prosperity just like its 19th century Know Nothing and 20th century America First Committee predecessors did; with the traditional carve-out for conservative-leaning Asian-Americans — the convenient go-to for anti-Black and anti-Brown right wingers who still want to get invited to the good cocktail parties. Of course, any white American who dares to lean left, by supporting multiracialism or nonwhite immigration, is also out of luck — if not primed to be labeled a communist, dangerous, antifa terrorist by this regime. Ditto if they have the gall to be white but also poor, gay, trans, or disabled; because you know … the right is going for on-the-nose 1930s cosplay.

Indeed, right wing racism is no longer an unfortunate fact of life that people like me and Tiffany Cross and Michael Harriot and Wajahat Ali and researchers like Robby Jones at PRRI and columnists like Adam Serwer and Ta-Nehisi Coates feel obligated to point out. It’s something the party you prefer openly brags about in pro-Hitler group chats and Harvard Signal threads, and on stages at places like Turning Point USA. (And before you come at me with the “but Trump realigned the parties and brought home more Black voters than any modern president” talking points, please do read some actual data and walk quietly away.)

At some point, maybe you’ll confront these points, Erika — though given your proximity to our racist in chief, Donald Trump, I doubt it. Also: it’s almost 2026. Even ardent racists know at this point that you should not talk about touching a Black woman’s hair without her permission, let alone actually doing so. This isn’t the Antebellum South (as much as many in your ideological neighborhood would like it to be.) Touching our hair is not allowed. Well, for most of us, anyway. You could probably give Nicki a full head rub like some Republican did to “good boy” Byron Donalds during the Kevin McCarthy speaker fight and get away with it…

… especially if the head grab comes with the promise of let’s say … pardons for convicted child rapists and sex offenders who fail to register as such, but have a pro-Trump rapper in the family … or maybe a deportation reprieve for formerly undocumented Trinidadian Trumpers who couldn’t care less that the regime is murdering her countrymen on the high seas??? Just a thought, for no reason whatsoever…

I mean, no wonder Nicki loves Trump. He’s got exactly the kind of sex pest background she apparently admires; while she and Donalds — loud but subservient members of Black immigrant families (think Winsome Sears and Candace Owens too) — are precisely the kind of useful idiot minorities that MAGA craves; particularly in their fevered anti-diversity, nonwhite migrant mass incarceration and deportation phase.

Candace Owens and Kanye West. Never forget.

Meanwhile, now that the suspense is over and Erika has vowed to commit the full billionaire-provided resources of TPUSA to ensuring a Vance presidency and perpetual MAGA dominance of the federal legislature and judiciary, we can all stop pretending that Turning Point USA has some higher purpose than getting young, white Christians to vote Republican, so the Pedo Protection Party can further pursue The Project: reducing the taxes of the super rich to as close to zero as possible and ending government regulation on their businesses — recreating the pre-20th century condition we all know as The Gilded Age, and locking that condition in, permanently. Everything else they claim to be pitching to young America; from the supposed Christianity* to family values? Well, I’ll just let Erika explain in her own words:

Exactly.

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