Women Lead Race to Replace Charlie Kirk Media Void as Alex Clark and Brett Cooper Take the Lead

One year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the fastest-growing voices competing to inherit his audience are, according to a new Newsweek analysis, women.

The magazine scored a field of candidates out of 100 across five weighted measures and placed podcaster Alex Clark at the top with 93.4, followed by Brett Cooper on 81.3, Riley Gaines on 80.2, Isabel Brown on 78.1, and Amala Ekpunobi on 68.6. Every name in the top five is a woman working in podcasting and social media, the platforms Kirk helped define for the American right.

Kirk was shot and killed on 10 September 2025 while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, the first stop on his American Comeback Tour. He was 31. His widow, Erika Kirk, was appointed CEO and chair of Turning Point USA, the organisation he co-founded, within days of his death. The analysis instead ranks the contenders for his standing as the right's leading online voice.

Why Alex Clark Tops the List

Alex Clark, 33, hosts the Turning Point USA podcast Culture Apothecary and previously fronted POPlitics, the group's first daily show when it launched in 2019. Culture Apothecary has ranked among the top 10 health and wellness podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify since September 2024, and she counts more than 800,000 YouTube followers, according to the analysis.

Her focus is wellness rather than electoral politics. Clark has become a leading voice in the Make America Healthy Again movement, and her wellness lane reaches a young, largely female audience.

The Rest of the Top Five

Brett Cooper, 24, has the largest single-platform following of the five, with 1.7M subscribers on YouTube. She first drew attention as a UCLA student criticising Covid lockdowns, then hosted 'The Comments Section' under The Daily Wire from 2022 to 2024 before launching the independently produced Brett Cooper Show. She joined Fox News as a contributor in 2025 and made this year's TIME100 Creators list.

Riley Gaines, the former University of Kentucky swimmer who campaigns against transgender women competing in female sport, hosts The Riley Gaines Show on Outkick and has roughly 1.4M TikTok followers. The ranking called her single-issue brand the most recognisable in the field, backed by regular access to Fox News, Newsmax, and the wider Trump-orbit media circuit.

Isabel Brown, an author and Turning Point USA affiliate who started a chapter at Colorado State University, has 1.3M Instagram followers. Amala Ekpunobi, who began as a left-leaning creator before switching to the right, previously hosted Unapologetic as an in-house PragerU personality and rounds out the top five.

A 'New Era of Female-Led Conservatism'

Eviane Leidig, author of the book The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, told the magazine it was 'very significant' that women now sit at the top of conservative digital media, when the space was male-dominated a decade ago.

Leidig tied the shift to Erika Kirk's own rise, calling it a 'new era of female-led conservatism' built around traditional family values. She cautioned against reading the trend as progress, however, noting that the figures involved promote traditionalist views of gender and sexuality.

Brown framed the moment in personal terms. 'I owe my entire career to my friend Charlie Kirk,' she told the magazine, adding that 'no one will ever be the next Charlie Kirk.'

The index measured audience reach, growth between September 2025 and September 2026, Gen Z relevance, conservative-media influence, and mobilisation infrastructure such as recurring shows and events. Follower totals were not combined across platforms, the analysis noted, because audiences often overlap.

The ranking arrived as Utah Valley University shut its campus for a memorial marking the first anniversary of the killing.