Chapter 1: What happened at Turning Point USA after Charlie Kirk's assassination?
Turning Point USA's last big event, AmericaFest, was held in December without founder Charlie Kirk. Had Kirk been alive, it might have gone differently, but it was a mess. Ben Shapiro went ham on Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens.
So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TPUSA. or to mirror her bullshit lines of questioning because you love Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly.
Kelly and Tucker hit back at Shapiro. To hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I'm like, what? This is hilarious. I don't... I think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben. Nobody knew who the heck Ben Shapiro was when I started putting him on my shows on the Fox News channel. Erica Kirk tried to keep it light.
The enemy has thrown a lot of curveballs at us today. My iPad won't even turn on. Nicki Minaj was there. Why not? And those people are adult professionals. Charlie Kirk started Turning Point USA to reach college students. It was a campus organization first. So what are the students thinking? That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Indeed.
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I'm Noelle King with Simon Van Zylenwood. He's a features writer for New York Magazine. All right, so Simon, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah in September, the question was, what would happen to Turning Point USA? You went looking for answers. What did you find?
Yeah, I think the question was not only what is going to happen to TPUSA, his campus and sort of electoral apparatus. It's such a multi-pronged organization that's grown over the last decade, but also what was going to happen to youth conservatism. As everybody probably remembers from the post-Charlie Kirk assassination moment, there was a swelling of energy on the young right.
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Chapter 2: How did the young right respond to Charlie Kirk's death?
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Chapter 3: What insights were gained from the memorial for Charlie Kirk?
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Simon Van Zylenwood of New York Magazine is back. All right, so there is Turning Point USA. That's Charlie Kirk's group. And then there is conservatism on college campuses. And you discovered that these two things are not one and the same. What does the conservative ecosystem on campuses look like now?
There's a bunch of different groups. TPSA being the sort of top dog right now, but there's Young Americans for Liberty, which is kind of the Ron Paul style libertarian group, Young Americans for Freedom, outgrowth of an old William Buckley group.
Then there's the classic college Republicans groups, which are themselves divided into all these various, they're sort of like situated in all these umbrella groups.
What's really important, and I found out, is that TPUSA, I kind of assumed that because of Charlie Kirk's identity and the way that he would debate liberal students as, you know, this is his calling card, basically, was going to be the group on these campuses engaging in kind of bare-knuckle culture war, especially after the radicalization that followed Charlie Kirk's death.
It turns out it doesn't really work that way. The group was very loyal to Trump, and it actually kind of serves as a sort of a pep squad for Team MAGA. That might sound really right-wing to a lot of listeners, but they end up looking like the moderates in this arch-right conservative ecosystem. The radicalization of Gen Z is sort of the through line of my piece.
And what happens is that a young woman like Leslie Lachman, who's running TPUSA, she's got impeccable conservative bona fides. But actually, there are many, many students, even to her right, who feel like Trump is too moderate. J.D. Vance is suspect. Charlie Kirk was barely acceptable as a moderate.
And they loved him anyways because of what he stood for and the power that he had and also that devout persona I talked about. But he was barely acceptable to them on any number of issues, from immigration to Israel especially, which is a major flashpoint for Gen Z conservatives right now.
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Chapter 4: How are college students engaging with Turning Point USA now?
This is like a really interesting trope that seems to exist on the right in a way that it doesn't on the left. And Kirk had a lot to do with it. You know, Charlie Kirk used to go to colleges and initially he'd do these, they're called tabling or tenting events where he would basically sit at a table under a tent and just have anyone come up to him for one, two, three hours.
We know deep down it's wrong to murder a baby.
You're not murdering a baby.
Yeah, yeah. All right, so without looking at the phone, look at me. What should the penalty be for breaking into America? I think there should be a system where it's more merit-based.
Do you feel proud of yourself for debating college kids who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself?
Are you a voter?
I am a voter.
Oh, so I vote and you vote. So I'm talking to voters of this country that will determine the future of Western civilization.
What's happened is that there's a whole microculture where kind of Kirk-type imitators will do the same thing. And so they'll show up on campus. You know, these are 19, 20-year-old students. And they'll just organize their own tours. They'll bring their videographers. They'll connect with TPUSA or College Republicans Group. And then they'll get grilled.
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