On September 10th, Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. In the days that followed, the United States flew flags at half-mast. His body was flown home on Air Force Two. The news networks spoke in hushed tones, replaying tributes as if the nation itself had been wounded.

It was a grotesque spectacle of state mourning.

This was not a head of state. This was not a public servant murdered for defending democracy. Kirk was a man who built a career on cruelty, who stoked hatred and division, who declared at a Turning Point USA event that “it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” He treated loss of life as a rational trade-off in his quest to fortify white patriarchal order.

And yet, when his life was taken, the nation draped him in reverence.

Meanwhile, when politicians in Minnesota were murdered in their beds, no flags were lowered. No military plane carried their coffins. No national audience was invited into mourning. Their deaths were quietly absorbed as local tragedies. The message is unmistakable: some figures are elevated as symbols of the nation, while others are discarded as collateral.

Into this theater stepped the Widow Kirk. In her first speech after his death, she promised to carry on his mission. The crowd cheered, the media framed it as resilience, devotion, continuity.

But within the framework of Kirk’s own philosophies, Kirk’s widow’s vow is hollow. His ideology was built on hierarchies that keep women in supporting roles. She cannot inherit his mantle as an equal. She can only echo his mission in his name, never in her own. Her words were not a declaration of agency but of subservience: a confession that even in widowhood, her life’s purpose is service to a patriarch who is no longer here.

That paradox is the core of white women’s complicity. They align themselves with patriarchal men to secure safety and status, but the system they defend never grants them real power. Their loyalty props up the order, yet their reward is always proximity, never sovereignty.

We often soften this reality by calling women like Kirk’s widow naïve or brainwashed. We say they are weak, that they simply want protection, that they can’t imagine themselves outside male authority. There is some truth to that. But weakness doesn’t tell the whole story.

If you want proof, look at Phyllis Schlafly. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale gave us Serena Joy, but Schlafly embodied her in flesh. She toured the country arguing against the Equal Rights Amendment while reaping the benefits of education, public speaking, and political visibility, things many women were denied. She was not weak. She was strategic. And her strategy kept generations of women trapped in a domestic bargain she herself had transcended.

There is also attraction. Evil recognizes evil. A man like Kirk, who trafficked in contempt, who sold hatred as politics, does not accidentally marry someone pure of heart. He marries a woman who sees in him her own pathway to safety, relevance, and borrowed authority. She may not rant on stage, but she holds up the house he built.

This is not just survival. It is appetite.

We see this same pattern in our politics today. Groups like Moms for Liberty present themselves as “just moms,” defenders of children. Yet their work is unmistakable: book bans, anti-LGBTQ policies, whitewashed curriculums. They cloak themselves in maternal rhetoric while enforcing the very systems of repression that keep patriarchy alive.

The camouflage works. A woman shouting at a school board about a library book looks less dangerous than a man in body armor. But the outcome is the same: exclusion, discipline, narrowing of what counts as family, knowledge, or belonging.

That’s why focusing only on Kirk’s assassination misses the point. The explosion makes headlines, but the quieter, daily complicity is what sustains the machinery of hate.

When we turn our gaze to white women in moments like this, it can feel trivial compared to the spectacle of political violence. But that’s exactly why it matters. The assassination is the fever. The disease is the everyday loyalty that makes a man like Kirk look respectable.

It is the marriage vows that sanitize his politics. The family portrait that renders him palatable. The widow’s pledge that casts him as a fallen patriarch instead of a peddler of hate.

Evil marries evil. That is the pattern. That is the pledge. Until we name it, until we refuse to let innocence disguise it, we will keep mistaking the symptom for the disease.

Author’s Note:

Readers may notice that in this essay I refer to white women as they rather than we. In much of my writing, I use we because I am a white woman myself, and I believe in claiming complicity directly. It matters to say we when describing how white women benefit from and reproduce systemic power. That pronoun signals ownership and accountability.

But in this piece, the choice of they is deliberate. A Widow’s Pledge addresses a particular type of white woman; those who do more than comply with patriarchal systems, who actively marry into their violence, defend it, sanctify it, and vow to carry it forward. Here, I am not writing from inside the “we.” I am writing at a distance, naming a pattern I refuse to embody.

This distinction is not about innocence. I do not believe I am outside complicity. It is about accuracy: there are forms of white womanhood so welded to domination that to write we would misrepresent the boundary I, and many like me, insist upon. To write “they” here is to mark the boundary between shared responsibility and chosen alignment with evil.