In a recent appearance on MSNBC, Kyle Spencer cited a disconcerting fact: Four in ten of the young people who voted in the 2020 U.S. election voted for Donald Trump. “We think of these kids as being very lefty,” she said, but this ignores the tremendous inroads that conservatives have made in converting the young.
The secret to the right’s success, Spencer told MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, is its cultivation of superstars: “The Republican Party’s become like a celebrity-making machine, which can be kind of counterintuitive because we think of Hollywood being allied with the Democrats. But people like Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, and a lot of these other people that you and I have never heard of that our kids know about, these people are created.”
This is the subject of Spencer’s just-published book, Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, a work that combines analysis with on-the-ground reporting. Spencer, an excellent writer, spent years attending rightwing conventions and training sessions, tracking the rise of activists including Kirk and Owens as they became familiar figures on Fox News and other conservative media outlets.
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Kirk is the founder of the rightwing youth activist group Turning Point USA, and Owens is an acerbic Black ultraconservative who revels in the attention that saying outrageous things can bring. Spencer, in her introduction, relates how she realized, over time, that Kirk and Owens “weren’t just some swashbuckling anti-establishment renegades; they were key players in a heavily endowed, incredibly well-organized and inter-connected initiative to lure as many people into the ultraconservative cause as possible.”
Turning Point USA (TPUSA), assisted by a cash infusion from conservatives including the Koch Brothers, had, by the end of 2014, blossomed into a national organization with twenty-five full-time employees and “volunteer armies” on 750 high school and college campuses.
The group took a fundamentally different approach to recruiting members than other conservative organizations, such as Young Americans for Liberty. Instead of trying to convince young people of the wisdom of conservative political positions, it set out to show them that “owning the libs” can be a ton of fun.
The group launched a “Big Government Sucks” campaign and gave students the chance to line their dorm walls with posters that read “I’m Pro-Choice. Pick Your Gun” and “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.”
One TPUSA event, held in 2017 at the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque, was an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” in which the price of baked goods hinged on the race of the buyer: $1.50 for Asians, $1 for whites, and 50 cents for African Americans and Hispanics.
TPUSA also held campus Free Speech Ball Days, where giant beach balls, on which students could write whatever they wished, were tossed around. “The more offensive the comment,” Spencer notes, “the more powerful the point.”
“Cruelty, homophobia, and overt stereotyping were now tropes of everyday political discourse, as rightwing students performed ‘Coming Out Conservative’ celebrations, mocking members of their campus LGBTQ+ communities,” she adds. Indeed, “being offensive was no longer something you had to apologize for. It was cunning and cool. It was sticky. It drove engagement.”
Over time, members of this brash new right went what seemed to be too far. One example was when Owens in 2019 told an audience at the Royal Automobile Club in London: “If Hitler had just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well—OK, fine.” Alas, she added, “The problem is that he had dreams outside of Germany.”
Leave it to the right to find Hitler’s downside.
Owens, who has purportedly expressed a desire to be “the most famous Black conservative anyone has ever met,” told Spencer in an interview for the book that her remarks had been taken out of context. But they seem not to have done any damage to her career. Soon afterward, “The Candace Owens Show” launched on a rightwing network, where it ran for two years.
Yet despite Owens’s more than two million social media followers and personal friendship with Donald and Melania Trump, she still manages to complain about how she is overlooked. Spencer sees this as a reflex of the right: “Claiming victimhood, while denying it to those who history suggested might actually have legitimate complaints.”
Raising Them Right is not just about how the right has built the conservative youth movement up but also argues that the political left has largely failed to embrace the same proven strategies.
In 2017, journalist Jane Meyer reported in The New Yorker that Crystal Clanton, a prominent TPUSA field director, had sent a text message to a mentee that said: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all. … I hate blacks. End of story.” She later claimed to have been the victim of a former employee who had “created fake text messages.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, “were so sympathetic to Clanton’s plight,” Spencer writes, that they had her live with them for a year.
Raising Them Right is not just about how the right has built the conservative youth movement up but also argues that the political left has largely failed to embrace the same proven strategies.
“The left,” Spencer observes at one point, “simply did not have the well-coordinated educational infrastructure the right did. And large progressive activist organizations supported college students on a piecemeal basis, with ad hoc grants and leadership training. But they did not have the kind of robust budgets, common among groups on the right, earmarked just for campus outreach. These funding and networking disparities made it difficult for left-leaning college groups to launch comprehensive campus opposition campaigns and to offer clear alternatives to the messaging coming at students from the right.”
Indeed, she goes on to say: “For all the right’s complaints that the American left was filled with ‘collectivists,’ it was the modern-day conservatives who were actually embracing a pass-it-down groupthink that was facilitating knowledge-sharing, mentoring, and the kind of consistent online messaging that helps win elections.”
Spencer’s take-away is that the Democrats need to embrace the right’s tactics even as they reject its politics: “If Democrats want to grow their infrastructure and change the country—if they want to win—they must first find their ‘collectivist’ nature. They must unite, collaborate, cooperate, and take care of their greater network. This means giving real support to young activists on the ground . . . .”
Raising Them Right offers the left an opportunity to learn a thing from the people who would like to own them.