Turning Point USA and the Looming Crisis of Young Conservatism
The kids are most definitely not all right.
It cannot be overstated just how thoroughly dysfunctional the American conservative movement is today, with one of its worst dysfunctions being the habits being inculcated in the next generation of young right-wingers.
I have long been alarmed by the abysmal caliber of conservative writers churned out by “respectable” training programs like those of the National Review Institute and Intercollegiate Studies Institute, but this past week gave us a reminder that things on the opposite end of the Right’s divide are, somehow, even worse.
Several individuals with campus conservative outfit Turning Point USA had... interesting... comments following the Hamas attack on Israel, including Lauren Chen (who also works for Blaze TV) touting the “balanced and rational” analysis and “advoca[cy] for peace and prayer between Jews and Muslims” of notorious Jew-hating troll Nick Fuentes; R.C. Maxwell framing Jews as enemies of Christianity who are no different than the jihadists murdering them; Morgan Ariel attacking Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro as “Israel 1st” and “Jesus hating” while floating a conspiracy theory that one of Hamas’s victims was really alive; and—most significantly—the organization’s founder Charlie Kirk insanely suggesting that maybe the Israelis let the attack happen to help Bibi Netanyahu politically (never mind that the attack has done the opposite).
Because accountability is apparently no longer a conservative value, Kirk has responded so far with indignation that anyone could possibly question his friendliness to Jews or support for Israel, first by pretending he did nothing more than call out “intel failures that let this happen,” then by complaining that The Spectator’s Ben Domenech told a “repugnant lie from the pit of hell” when he suggested TPUSA’s output indicated “the right has an anti-Semite problem” which could only be addressed by firing Kirk.
Across those two statements, Kirk offered abundant examples of his support for Jews and Israel. In neither did he confront the actual criticism of his own comments, nor make any mention of the TPUSA personnel who said infinitely worse.
For the record, no I do not believe that Kirk is anti-Semitic (ironically, just a few years ago Fuentes’s fans were the ones attacking TPUSA). It’s more likely he was trying to align himself with the negative sentiments TPUSA’s golden goose Donald Trump expressed the day before about Netanyahu (which weren’t anti-Semitic either, but rather driven by Trump’s childlike belief that the leaders of foreign countries fighting for survival should have prioritized Trump’s sense of victimhood in an American election over their own diplomatic needs). But that doesn’t make Kirk’s crackpottery and whatever animated it cease to be problems for his credibility.
More importantly, the comments by Chen, Maxwell, and Ariel are not nearly so easy to explain away. Whatever their motives might be—genuine Jew hatred, isolationist fanaticism invariably bringing people at least adjacent to anti-Semitism, or simply mining a historically-fruitful market—the ugliness of the content is undeniable.
Which should be all the more alarming in light of TPUSA’s theoretical purpose, which is to “educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government” as the “next generation of supporters, activists and leaders.” This is the example they’re setting? This is what we want the future of conservatism to look and sound and think and argue like? These are people to whom the task has been entrusted?
As should not be necessary to explain but apparently is, one of the most basic duties of teaching and training young people is to lead them away from bad habits and destructive trends. Conservatives tasked with helping impressionable and idealistic kids navigate all the dueling narratives pulling them in different directions are supposed to instill in them not just the first principles of conservative political theory, but also the reasoning skills and moral standards needed to recognize and avoid fringe elements and their fallacies that are anathema to conservatism, and which threaten to validate the Left’s lies about us.
To be clear, anti-Semitism is still a lunatic fringe. I do not think we are anywhere near realizing the Left’s fever dreams of a Right dominated by bigotry, in which haters of Jews have veto power over any of the Republican Party’s decisions. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to fear from all this. The danger of legitimizing the fringe and the freaks is not that they will gain sufficient power to impose their desires on the country, but that they will lead young people to destroy themselves, mire outside conservatives in obsessions and disputes that sap their potential to do any good in the fights that really matter, and repulse good people from whatever conservative causes they ostensibly associate with.
That may not be the future Turning Point USA’s leadership wants, but they certainly don’t seem interested in preventing it.