Since TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University last September, his widow Erika Kirk has taken over as the right-wing, youth-focused organization’s CEO and spiritual voice. Much of the time, she is on the road—moving from White House appearances, to book tours, to guest segments on right-wing media, to speaking engagements, to stops on her 25-city, national “Make Heaven Crowded” tour.
This evening, the tour will bring her just outside of Seattle, at the Kirkland campus of Pursuit NW, one of the fastest growing evangelical empires in the Pacific Northwest. As I reported in June, Pursuit hired pastors Ross Johnston and Jay Koopman, two prominent evangelical figures with histories of anti-LGBTQ activism, Christian nationalist organizing, and close ties to powerful dominionist networks and the Trump White House.
Tonight’s lineup includes TPUSA Faith senior director Lucas Miles, former actress and “Girls Gone Bible” podcast host Arielle Reitsma, Johnston, and Pursuit’s founder, Russell Johnson.
For locals, the question isn’t really about who’s coming—Charlie Kirk’s death made Erika Kirk into a household name. It’s why here, to the secular Pacific Northwest, and why now?
The “why here” is clear. The Seattle metro area’s secularity is actually part of the draw for TPUSA, which has a well-worn playbook for visiting deep-blue, non-Christian strongholds to generate friction. The local backlash, counter protests, and media coverage feeds a ready-made narrative of persecution that plays well to the base back home.
Few things unify the right faster than a visible left-wing protest. The splashier, the better for the right. The event follows a Patriot Front march through Kirkland on July 11, and comes a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller used a State Department conference to reframe “far-left political terrorism” as a top security priority—rhetoric that’s already translating into new visa restrictions. It builds on NSPM-7 (which lists “anti-Christian” views as an indicator of left-wing terrorism), a directive broadening the government’s definition of politically motivated extremism in ways critics say could sweep in ordinary protest activity.
Right-wingers have staged confrontational events in Seattle for some time now. Take right-wing Evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht, who performed music and proselytized at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in 2020. He planned to return to Cal Anderson Park last year, but the city moved him to Gas Works Park after the Mayday fallout. (In that case, the concert was a bust. Feucht didn’t get the charged reaction he wanted, he was mocked by, in some cases, literal clowns.) Johnson and Johnston were in attendance at these Christian nationalist pop-up worship events that plant their events in LGBTQ friendly, progressive cities. Claiming Christian dominion while casting queer people as the enemy, the Mayday tour stop led by Johnston and the multilevel marketer turned New Apostolic Reformation Apostle Jenny Donnelly at Cal Anderson Park in May of 2025 resulted in mass arrests of Seattle locals.
To that end, Pursuit NW is an obvious ally in this region for Erika. The church’s founder was friends with Charlie Kirk—he is due to speak at the TPUSA “Faith Forward Pastors’ Summit” in late August—and that they share influential friends in Washington DC. Paula White-Cain, who leads the White House Faith Office, spoke at Pursuit last year and called the church “the tip of the spear” in the spiritual warfare fight—language that places Pursuit inside the same political-religious network that shapes the administration’s approach to faith and culture. It’s a meaningful credential for Erika Kirk and TPUSA to align with.
But the “why now” is more puzzling. TPUSA is fundamentally a conservative youth organizing machine, and this tour runs through the high-stakes midterm elections in November. Generally speaking, Republicans are souring on Israel. Polls from Pew and Gallup show support is still high, but falling, especially among people under 50. The extreme right in particular is splitting over imperial questions about America’s involvement with Israel and antisemitic belief in an international Jewish conspiracy. And this tour does not appear to be designed to paper over that rift.
Leaders in the Charismatic movement such as Johnson, Johnston, and White-Cain are pro-Israel, and have run cover for the country’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. They believe the ongoing genocide is all part of God’s plan to usher in the end times and seem to have little interest in the death and destruction Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people. On a trip to Israel in October 2025, Johnston posed for a photo in front of a banner that read “Make Gaza Jewish Again.”
Opposite Christian Zionists are the antisemitic leaders in the nationalist wing like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes. They believe that Israel is evil and regularly lean into antisemitism and antisemetic conspiracy.
Both of these camps exist in today’s Republican party, and when Charlie Kirk was alive, he was a master at balancing them both. Kirk would bring together voices from (nearly) all camps under the TPUSA banner for their annual conference AmFest.
Matthew Taylor, visiting scholar in religious studies, theology, and American religion, with a specialization in American Islam, Christian nationalism, and Christian extremism at the Center for Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, says Kirk’s singular role is what has made the fight over his legacy so bitter.
But Erika has yet to thread that needle. In fact, her actions—speaking against antisemitism when asked, talking about her trips to Israel as “the Bible coming to life in technicolor,” and her open battle with nationalists like Candance Owens—suggest she isn’t mediating at all.
She appears to be most comfortable with Christian Zionists and Christian Zionist congregations. Johnson is not only the leader of a Christian Zionist congregation, he’s the Washington state director of Christians United for Israel. As Taylor put it “Erika is the kind of Catholic that hangs with evangelicals” and that her stance could be shaped by those around her, noting that “some of the other leaders in the TPUSA constellation have very strong ideological commitments to Israel.”
The youth vote in the last presidential election was heavily driven by the TPUSA engine through a “ballot chasers” turnout program, campus based organizing in swing states that coincided with a marked rightward shift among young voters, who backed Trump over Harris by a much narrower margin (47 percent to 51 percent) than they had backed Biden over Trump in 2020 (36 percent to 61 percent).
So, it’s unclear how TPUSA and Kirk will try to bridge this gap and turn the tide. As the event tonight and the rest of the tour is playing to people who already align with Christian Zionism, not the youth moving away from historic conservative support for Israel. But that brings us back to the “why here.” A divided movement, split over Israel, over Kirk’s legacy, over strategy has every incentive to rally around a shared enemy. A confrontation in Kirkland this week could do more to paper over TPUSA’s internal rifts than anything Erika Kirk says from the stage.
I reached out to Pursuit NW for a comment with no response. TPUSA initially responded however after I sent my questions, radio silence.
Local organizers are planning to protest tonight’s event, and Taylor warns they may be walking into exactly what TPUSA wants. The playbook is familiar: provoke a visible confrontation, film it, push it across social media, let Fox News amplify it, and use it as proof of left-wing hostility towards Christians. This playbook has been long tried and tested by the likes of Feucht.
“Left-wing protest organizations really need to be thoughtful about how they stage protests right now,” Taylor said. “They are using it to full effect as much as they can, trying to label anything that they can left-wing terrorism.”
For organizers weighing whether to show up in Kirkland today, the calculation isn’t just about making a point. It’s about whether making that point, right now, plays directly into a script written by people who are actively looking for a reason to escalate.
