February 8, 2019
NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:
Days After Its Disastrous British Launch, Turning Point Has Already Lost One Of Its Star Recruits (Alex Spence, Mark Di Stefano, 2/08/19, BuzzFeed News)
They were here to start a culture war, and Charlie Kirk was looking forward to the backlash."There will be retaliation, there will be protest," the 25-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing student organisation with close links to Donald Trump, said in London recently as he described plans for an assault on British university campuses. "You will see that it takes individuals to go straight into the fire to start a movement."But already some of the Tory activists Kirk recruited to launch Turning Point in the UK are having second thoughts about its war on "cultural marxism", according to several people familiar with their internal discussions. Within days of the launch, one of the "influencers" tapped to front the campaign has distanced himself from the group, BuzzFeed News has learned."There was a sense of people realising, 'Who are these cranks?'," one source said. [...]Turning Point USA claims to be the biggest student organisation in America, with a presence on 1,400 college and high school campuses, around 120 staff, and an annual budget of $15 million. In Kirk's telling, he started the group in his parents garage as a teenager in Chicago and grew it to be a powerful political force through sheer grit and hard work. As it rapidly expanded, Kirk himself was portrayed as a conservative "boy wonder"; he is a favourite of Fox News and is close to the Trump family.Owens joined Turning Point as head of communications in November 2017 and is now its joint public face with Kirk. The 29-year-old had previously run an anti-Trump website called Degree 180 but went through a profound political transformation and became a passionate advocate for the president, publishing stridently conservative videos on a YouTube channel called "Red Pill Black".Her fame went mainstream when Kanye West tweeted: "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." Owens argues that the left has done nothing to help ethnic minorities and launched a "Blexit" campaign aimed at convincing African-Americans to join the Republican party. [...]Asked by a member of the audience about nationalism in Western politics, Owens brought up Adolf Hitler. "I actually don't have any problems at all with the word 'nationalism'," Owens said. "I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want... Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.""He was a national socialist," she continued. "But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalise."
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2019 3:45 PM
