Who needs a dog whistle?
Some of you may not be fully aware of who Charlie Kirk is and how influential he has become in the Republican Party. He originally started as a right wing youth organizer but in recent years has evolved into a major organizer of right wing activism across the board. Hit Turning Point USA conferences, which are held throughout the year, are major events that attract all the big names in the MAGA word as well as many “establishment” types. His organization is the heir to CPAC which has been losing steam for some time.
Here’s a recent dispatch from Dave Weigel at Kirk’s latest gathering:
LAS VEGAS – In a Planet Hollywood hotel ballroom, a few steps away from the Criss Angel Theater, around 200 Republican Party activists worked on their battle plans. The Republican National Committee would not save them. They would save themselves.
“No more culture of losing,” Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk told an audience of RNC members, GOP county chairs, and plugged-in activists. “Embrace Donald Trump. Don’t fight Donald Trump. Embrace what he’s brought to the party. It’s a populist, people-centered movement, and this is what the oligarchs fear the most.”
The two-day Restoring National Confidence summit was built to tweak Ronna McDaniel’s party committee, whose 168 members were about to meet in another hotel on the strip. Both meetings unfolded as the RNC released its weakest yearly fundraising numbers of McDaniel’s tenure.
TPUSA, with annual revenue not far off the RNC’s, had been building an alternative power base for years. It advocated non-stop “relational” organizing, developing an app that its allies could use to find votes. It had identified low-propensity voters — “disengaged voters,” as Arizona RNC member Tyler Bowyer called them — and put their information in binders for conference attendees. And it had built an influential media network, including Kirk’s show, which revels in the weekly churn of cultural battles that obsess the young, online right.
One host last week had expounded at length on the potential “psyop” of the Kansas City Chiefs making it to the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift endorsing Joe Biden — a topic that came up several times on stage in Las Vegas. Democrats, explained Bowyer and pundit Jack Posobiec, would use Swift’s fame to engage those lower-propensity, low-information voters.
The same week, Kirk had caused his own uproar by lashing out about diversity efforts at airlines — “I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like boy I hope he’s qualified,” he said on his show — and posting at length about the criminal records of the Central Park Five, after one of them, the recently elected New York City Council Member Youssef Salem, was pulled over by police. Earlier in the month, he’d commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day by remarking upon the civil rights leader’s “awful” personal life. The comments drove shocked media coverage — and, according to Kirk, getting no blowback “outside of one donor.”
Kirk then made this pivot …
That last is fellow fascist agitator Candace Owens getting on the bandwagon.
I wish this was fringe stuff but it isn’t. As you can see these people have a ton of money and they are very influential. They travel under the radar of the mainstream media so you may not be aware of just how dangerous they are. The fascist tone of their rhetoric has become very explicit. And millions of people absorb what they’re saying every single day.
Update —
Lol. There’s a little trouble in paradise: