Turning Point USA Colorado State University event erupts in violence

On Friday, February 1, 2018 at the campus of Colorado State University, Charlie Kirk, the golden Bannon and Breitbart boy who runs a billionaire funded, right-wing, astro-turf group, Turning Point USA, spoke on campus to students. The result was fascist violence.

Turning Point USA states on its website it is devoted to the promotion of the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government, but as we shall see, this is just a cover for their misogyny, white supremacy and fascist ideology. The group is joined at the hip with a subaltern group of rabid fascists, gamesters, misogynists and racists, including the fascist fight club, the Proud Boys (https://medium.com/@willsommer/the-fratty-proud-boys-are-the-alt-rights-weirdest-new-phenomenon-7572b31e50f2), started by former Vice News co-owner, Gavin McInnes.

Kirk and his group faced protests prior to and during his speech. The protests were conducted in an orderly fashion; but as Kirk spoke the protest that started peacefully, quickly turned violent when a group, calling themselves the Traditional Workers Party (TWP) arrived at the scene.

Carrying riot shields, oversized flashlights and face masks flashing with skulls, the TWP stormed a dissipating crowd, while repeatedly chanting a Nazi slogan (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/02/03/protestors-chanting-nazi-slogan-storm-crowd-outside-charlie-kirk-speech-colorado-state-university/303489002/).

At the close of his speech, scrambling to hit all the right buttons during and after the event question and answer session, Kirk dismissed the group as inherently racist because it foisted prejudice based on skin color.

"That BS they're trying to say out there, it's not who we are, it's not what we believe, it's not what Turning Point believes," Kirk said.

"It's very funny, they say, 'Oh Charlie, you must be an ethno-nationalist because these four people with no lives show up outside your event. First of all, that's a bunch a nonsense. Second of all, I don't remember anyone saying that when all the communists show up to the Democrat events" (ibid).

Kirk really took the cake when he even went so far as to cite Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, where King advocates for a society of people judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

"They're trying to discredit good ideas and good arguments, just because you're white," Kirk said. "And that's ridiculous" (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/violent-clash-erupts-outside-charlie-kirk-speech-at-colorado-state-university/article/2648026).

Despite the group’s use of white victimology, real facts tell a different story.

The fact is Turning Point USA (TPUSA) harbors and coddles fascist and misogynistic sympathies, and it is not being reported in the corporate press.

As Charlie Kirk, the slick, 24 year old, alt-right founder of the group tries to distance himself from the violence that erupted at Colorado State University, the dirty, hidden linen surrounding the group discloses a very cozy relationship with both outright fascists, Bannon, Breitbart, misogynists and pedophiliac toadies like Milo.

WHAT IS THE TRADITIONAL WORKERS PARTY?

Imagine being at the Trump inauguration and you are a black woman suddenly confronted by a large, bearded white man wearing a black shirt and a red baseball cap with the words “Make America Great Again.” He is yelling at you, “Get out! Leftist scum! Get out!” He shoves you once, then again, screaming at you to leave. The crowd around him is agitated and ginned up. Others surround you. Many are yelling. You are terrified. The police do nothing.

Congratulations you have just met Matthew Heim¬bach, a self-proclaimed fascist and leader of the Traditional Workers Party (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4f8Z2XefBDL421pnNEQH0Q)

Matthew Heim¬bach is a 25-year-old white nationalist who grew up in an affluent Maryland community and now lives in rural Indiana. He proudly acknowledged online that he was the one in the video pushing the woman. He is being sued in court by victims (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-white-nationalist-who-shoved-a-trump-protester-may-be-the-next-david-duke/2016/04/12/7e71f750-f2cf-11e5-89c3-a647fcce95e0_story.html?utm_term=.c2fc85a85a3c).

Like TPUSA the group says they want to make sure that elected officials are addressing the needs of poor and blue-collar whites. They say they want to run candidates in local elections. They say they want to siphon votes from mainstream Republicans. They say they want an end to illegal immigration; an end to outsourcing. They say they want an end to same-sex marriage; an end to abortion; and an end to foreign aid, except disaster relief; and an end to attacks on European American identity. That’s the short-term plan (ibid).

The long-term plan is far more grandiose. Heim¬bach foresees the United States being divided into autonomous racial states, with white Christians free to live apart and outside the control of any federal authority (ibid). It is like a frame from the film, Welcome to Leith (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/welcome-to-leith/).

The name, Traditional Workers Party, sounds as if they might be a Socialist grouping. They use the name to promote and to stir up confusion in an effort to lead people to believe that Socialists are behind this group’s formation and ideology, when in fact the opposite is true. The group is fascist. And Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk know it.

Turning Point USA and Proud Boys

The Liberty Observer is “an online magazine devoted to sharing the ideals of personal liberty and limited government” ( https://thelibertyobserver.com/category/news/). Sound familiar? It should: it is the mantra of the neo-fascists and of course, Turning Point USA.

Joe Enders II not only writes for the Liberty Observer, he was the King's College Chapter President of Turning Point USA, located in Glen Ellyn, Illinois from August 2016 to May 2017. And not surprisingly he is a proud member of Proud Boys and is a current contributor to Proud Boy magazine, since December of 2016.

In a January 11, 2018 article in Proud Boy Magazine, Elders asks: “Where in the world is my white male privilege?” (http://officialproudboys.com/columns/world-white-male-privilege/). Elders recounts the sorry state of his early life and it is not unlike so many white males who have been left out of the American Dream, ravaged by de-industrialism and failed capitalism:

“Poverty is yet another hurdle in my life. After my mother left my father, she took me and my little sister (who is special needs). She had no place to go, no job, and no family to run to. She wound up making up a story about being physically abused by my father in order for us to seek refuge in a battered women’s shelter in the west suburbs of Chicago. We were homeless there for about 6 months until Section-8 housing kicked in and we got a small townhouse in the area. Later on, we had no money left to pay our bills and we had to ration our meals—sometimes to one a day—just to scrape by. My skin color was the last thing on my mind” (ibid).

Like many disenfranchised youth who fail to see how capitalism oppresses all workers while benefiting only the rich, Elders became a White Nationalist and fascist.

Joel Valdez is another Turning Point USA member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

As Kristina Kahn reported recently in Truthout:

“Like his fellow TPUSA members, Valdez claims to simply be a "conservative" who believes in capitalism and the free market, yet he proudly shares on social media accounts the now infamous "alt-right" symbol Pepe the Frog, work by rape-apologist Mike Cernovich, and graciously thanks extremist "Infowars" conspiracy peddler Alex Jones for any retweets. Nelson has argued genocide is merely a leftist construct, an opinion that he disagrees with.

These patterns of racism make their way to the top of Turning Point's leadership. As The New Yorker reported, Crystal Clayton, one of TPUSA's most prominent members for five years, said, "I hate Black people. Like fuck them all.... I hate Blacks. End of story." TPUSA also posted and then hastily removed a blatantly anti-Semitic tweet last November” ( http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43419-young-fascists-on-campus-turning-point-usa-and-its-far-right-connections).

At the University of Connecticut students and community members confronted Alt-Lite troll and conspiracy theorist Lucian Wintrich and his friend and associate, Sal Cipolla, a member of the Proud Boys who attended the neo-Nazi ‘Unite the Right’ rally with white supremacist organizers. This is what they wrote:

"On November 28th,2017 members of University of Connecticut’s administration decided to provide a platform for Lucian B. Wintrich, a self-described Alt-Lite or ‘New Right’ provocateur, misogynist, anti-trans, conspiracy theory peddling, hate-mongering troll, and in doing so cosigned his message of hatred and violence towards minorities. [Editor’s Note: Lucian Wintrich, who has White House press credentials, gave a speech entitled, “It’s Okay To Be White,” a reference to a neo-Nazi meme popularized on 4chan’s /pol/, an imageboard associated with the Alt-Right and where Wintrich often finds conspiracy theories to signal boost for the Alt-Lite publication he writes for, The Gateway Pundit.]

The organizers booked the event under false pretenses and on short notice in a craven attempt to catch the community off guard. Leading up to the time of the “lecture,” members of the community contacted officials within UConn’s administrative offices, urging them to cancel it. Alas, the school’s official twitter released this all too predictable deflection:

“UConn does not bar speakers on the basis of content. Free speech, like academic freedom, is one of the university’s bedrock principles. That being said, a particular speaker’s or group’s presence on campus doesn’t indicate UConn’s endorsement of the presenter or their message"(https://itsgoingdown.org/uconn-shuts-down-alt-lite-troll-lucian-wintrich-and-unite-the-right-proud-boy/).

The story would be incomplete without adding the name of Aiden Mattis, another Turning Point USA rising star. Mattis said Turning Point USA is attempting to reverse the idea that conservatives are ignorant or bad people (http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_b1b1349a-b841-11e6-8565-3f442bc54ada.html).

http://www.collegian.psu.ed...

Mattis is clone of Charlie and it seems Mattis himself has a soft spot for fascists.

https://voat.co/v/Identitarian/1692846

One shouldn’t be surprised. Fascist Richard Spencer has a large presence at the rust-belt state campus.

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_27a91588-b79b-11e7-8187-4ff0e2da19ee.html

https://www.turningpoint.news/florida-ban-free-speech-zones/

PAY-TO-PLAY FASCISM

The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation (The Foundation) was established in 1984 by the family of Professor Vernon K. Krieble, a scientist and educator (https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vernon_K._Krieble_Foundation). The foundation works closely with the Koch brothers and has formed a Koch conduit for donations to transform education -- to the far, far right. The Foundation is also connected to American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

In June of last year, The Foundation partnered with Turning Point USA to recognize six (6) students with what they call, the Unsung Hero Award. The non-profit foundation pays Turning Point USA, also a supposed non-profit, to pay students to engage in dirty tricks on campuses, like outting professors, intimidating students, holding race-based bake sales and the like.

Take a look at the video announcing the sponsorship (https://youtu.be/vzO9Q8bsWh4).

Paying students to do dirty tricks with seed money from fascists and right wingers reeks of Roger Stone, the Trump advisor and dirty tricks man for Richard Nixon’s campaign for president in 1968. Not surprising that Stone is a big donor to Turning Point.

SUMMARY

Charlie Kirk was pushed into the spotlight by rancid right wingers like David Horowitz and the billionaires who support his group. Kirk is now the author of, ‘Time for a Turning Point: Setting the Course Towards Free Markets and Limited Government’ and the book has made Kirk a millionaire.

The book’s title seems to reflect the thinking of Steve Bannon, former Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to President Trump. Bannon is a prominent proponent of the theory postulated in William Strauss, Neil Howe’s book, ‘The Fourth Turning What Cyccles of History tell Us About America’[s Next Rendezvous with History. In the book, the authors claim that every 80 years American history has been marked by a crisis, or 'fourth turning', that destroyed an old order and created a new one. They and Bannon claim we are at the ‘Fourth Turning’ (http://www.fourthturning.com/).

As a documentary filmmaker, Bannon discussed the details of Strauss-Howe generational theory in Generation Zero. According to historian David Kaiser, who was consulted for the film, Generation Zero “focused on the key aspect of their theory, the idea that Kaiser said Bannon is "very familiar with Strauss and Howe’s theory of crisis, and has been thinking about how to use it to achieve particular goals for quite a while.”

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory).

Seems with Charlie and Turning Point USA, he found a way.

Again, as Kristina Kahn noted so succinctly in a recent Truthout article:

“While the extent to which TPUSA works with self-identified white nationalists and neo-fascists is not wholly clear, it is obvious that their conservative branding centered on "free-speech and free-markets" is misleading. Their roots are planted in racist ideologies and handed to enthusiastic young people unrestrained by a fear of consequences. At UIUC's campus, for example, rather than seeing TPUSA members holding "civil discussions" on fiscal conservatism, one is more likely to see TPUSA members on the quad trying to convince passersby to sign a petition calling on the administration to reinstate "Chief Illiniwek," a racist sports mascot that the National Collegiate Athletic Association forced UIUC to retire years ago” (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43419-young-fascists-on-campus-turning-point-usa-and-its-far-right-connections).

And if this was not enough, Turning Point USA is busy with state legislators working in 21 states to pass "The Campus Free Speech Act", a gross inversion of free speech under the canopy of protecting free speech (https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/02/02/18806453.php).

With Trump signaling his support for Charlie and Turning Point USA, it is likely that we will see more street level fascist protests (http://thehill.com/people/donald-trump).

BuzzFeed has a long piece based on a cache of leaked emails that describe behind-the-scenes efforts at Breitbart, Bannon and Gorka to mainstream the “Alt Right” neo-Nazis. The story firms up analysis of Breitbart as a white nationalist publication run by neo-Nazis for the purpose of mainstreaming neo-Nazi ideals (https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.thVeWYd1K#.vfBGlr2Mn).

Now we know that Turning Point USA is part of the tapestry. Of this, there can be no doubt.