Charlie Kirk, right-wing radio host and founder of Turning Point USA, maintains extensive links with far-right extremists, including election deniers, white supremacists, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. I spent years establishing myself and my organization as pillars of the conservative movement.
Kirk now appears to be involved in a widespread right-wing media uprising against Fox News. Fox News remains a dominant media property among conservatives even after the station faced its crisis. string Recent frustration. Fox News didn’t broadcast any of last weekend’s Turning Point Action Conference (ActCon), unlike in previous years when the network covered the TPUSA event extensively. Fox Nation, the network’s upstart streaming platform, posted only two speeches from Actcon. Speeches by former President Donald Trump and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, both Republican presidential candidates. While Fox’s on-air talent has been a frequent headliner at previous TPUSA conferences, the network’s star has been absent from ActCon’s 2023 speaker roster.
The rupture will see Kirk and TPUSA affiliate Turning Point Action set to spend as much as $108 million on an early voting effort that the group called a “vote tracking operation” in promotional materials. happened in according to to the Washington Post. “The organization is raising money to hire 500 full-time organizers in Arizona, 800 in Georgia, and 350 in Wisconsin, according to fundraising documents, at a cost of $99 million, We are compensating each staff member’s salary of $60,000,” the Post reported.
Under Kirk’s leadership, TPUSA has a long history of hiring racists, and there’s no reason to believe that this new surge in hiring will change that dynamic. Jane Mayer for The New Yorker, 2017 clearly TPUSA National Field Director Crystal Clanton reportedly texted a colleague: “I hate black people. Like all shit… I hate black people. End of story.”・It seems that Mr. Gruman and Mr. Troy Meeker have been appointed.as huffpost report Immediately following the announcement, Gruman posted a number of anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black tweets, as did Meeker at least one. just last year leaked text A TPUSA Towson University chapter report showed members minimized slavery and embraced anti-LGBTQ slurs. According to researcher Ben Lorber, documented of many point of overlap while The TPUSA and Nick Fuentes’ white supremacist “Groiper” movement, despite the conflict between the two groups, history clash with each other.
Not only is Kirk associated with extremists, but he himself frequently supports far-right views. He regularly and inaccurately claims that not only the 2020 election but also some of the 2022 midterm elections were stolen, including Kari Lake’s Arizona gubernatorial failure. He also uses explicitly racist, anti-LGBTQ, and sexist rhetoric: charlie kirk show, a product of the Salem Media Group, and at his conference. Naturally, this prejudice has been carried over to TPUSA, which is increasingly oriented toward Christian nationalism.
Kirk and TPUSA take a broad trajectory of the increasingly radical conservative activist class over the past decade, from the Tea Party movement to the Trump campaign and administration, the rise of QAnon, and now Trump’s second presidential election. embodies.
In that spirit, here are some of the extreme figures and organizations that Kirk has been around.
