“Thin, fertile, and conservative”: Inside Turning Point USA’s conference for conservative young women

The push and pull of modern anti-feminism

About halfway through the Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas, I got a talking to from Turning Point USA comms.

Andrew Kolvet, the organization’s chief spokesman, peeled me away from the line of young women I was speaking to warn me that he had gotten complaints about me, though he couldn’t name what they were beyond “weird questions”, and if I kept interviewing attendees under 18, I’d be removed from the conference. “I’m very familiar with your work,” Kolvet said. He reminded me these girls are “innocent,” and to lay off.

I’m not sure how I got on Kolvet’s radar, though I have an idea. But of course, I was offended by the implication I didn’t have the best interests of my subjects in mind. I spend 75% of my waking hours thinking about young people’s role in the current right-wing movement, the subject of my forthcoming book, so I went to Texas this year to give them a chance to speak for themselves.

If we’re really worried about who is preying on young conservative women, let’s listen in to what was being said on stage.

This year marked the 10^th Young Women’s Leadership Summit, the largest annual conference for young women and girls in the conservative movement. The event is designed to pop on Instagram — the halls of the Grapevine, Texas conference hotel lined with cutesy photo opportunities everywhere you turn. The theme this year was “Home Sweet Home,” centered around a stage stylized as a Rococo-era sitting room complete with gold accented window frames and pleasant cream-colored couches, a small chandelier glittering above. The setup was framed by LCD screens, including the ceiling, which displayed whirling background graphics to hype up the crowd as speakers took the stage. It was my second time attending YWLS, a long-held point of fascination in my career, for the bizarre way the event artificially sutures glamorous, well-paid career women in right-wing media like Alex Clark, Dana Loesch, and Brett Cooper with the insistence on settling down and having babies before the audience graduates high school.

YWLS sights

During a question-and-answer session on the second day of the conference, Charlie Kirk was speaking to a 14-year-old in braces named Addy. She identified herself as a freshman in high school, said she was interested in pursuing political journalism, and asked about the pros and cons of attending college.

“I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree.” The crowd chuckled. “No seriously. Just be clear that’s why you’re going to college.” Addy nods along. “Don’t lie to yourself, like oh, I’m going, I’m studying sociology, no you’re not. You know why you’re here and that’s OK, actually. That’s a really good reason to go to college actually.”

“You have a bunch of people that are single,” he went on, “they’re at the prime of their, let’s just say attractiveness, the dating pool is as robust as you’ll ever find and they all live together over a four-year period. You don’t get much better than that.”

It’s painful to watch this little girl listen to Kirk’s response. Her body language and facial expressions suggest she’s confused and uncomfortable. Needless to say, this is an inappropriate way to speak to a child. Any parent who hears their daughter asking a 31-year-old man for career advice and getting this response should intervene.

This year’s YWLS did a fantastic job bringing together the last year and a half of the Make America Healthy Again movement with rising currents of anti-feminism. No one better exemplifies this intersection than Alex Clark, host of Turning Point’s Culture Apothecary podcast, which offers luminary takes on why sunscreen is bad and raw milk is good. She is, according to Vanity Fair, in “close contact” with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and since she spoke at a viral roundtable of right-wing health and wellness personalities hosted on Capitol Hill last September her social media following has exploded.

“If you don’t know me, my name is Alex Clark and the Guardian recently accused me of running a PSYOP to turn American women thin, fertile, and conservative. I’m here to publicly say the accusations are true!” A tinkering of cheers from the crowd.¹ She was standing on stage in a tweed mini skirt, matching blazer, bouffant updo, and layered pearl accessories, reminding me more of Sarah Palin than the cottagecore aesthetic around her.

realalexclark

A post shared by @realalexclark

I looked around at the young women and girls sitting near me, fluttery floral summer dresses draping bodies of all sizes and shapes, oversized bows crowning loosely curled hair parted in the middle, listening attentively. “Thin, fertile, and conservative” is of course the exact message I’d been hearing for years from Clark and other conservatives targeting young women. The rise of MAHA has made this set especially body conscious, and to hear it stated so plainly jives with the “masks off” ethos we’re all suffering through under Trump 2. MAHA really just is 00s style disordered eating and fatphobia repackaged for the right-wing Instagram era.

After Clark’s opener, we got a Tammy Fae and Jim Bakker impression from Charlie and his wife Erika Kirk. Erika is a former Miss Arizona, who according to Kyle Spencer’s book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and its Plot for Power, first met Charlie while seeking a job at Turning Point USA. “I’m not going to hire you,” he told her when he was done with the interview. “I’m going to date you.” Again, Charlie Kirk’s behavior is something to warn your daughter about.

“How many of you every single day it’s -- your purpose for being is finding a husband?” Kirk asked the crowd. Virtually no one raised their hand. “Every hand should go up.” Erika appeared to cringe. “If you’re not married by the age of 30,” he claimed, “you only have a 50 percent chance of getting married,” and cited the same percentage about having children. The diminishing chance of matrimony with age is a long-standing myth of the anti-feminist media.² It’s a classic fear tactic meant to shame young women for pursuing an independent life, scaring them with this false perception that there is a scarcity of marriageable men as they fight against their “biological clock” pulling them ever closer to miserable spinsterhood.

Unfortunately, Charlie is speaking about many of his employees when he denigrates single, childless women over the age of 30, including Alex Clark, who herself has not yet gotten married or had children despite her insistence that doing so is crucial to making America great again.

genuinely one of the most bizarre moments of the weekend

The message did not land well with the audience. Erika, dressed like the love child of Kate Middleton and a cotton candy machine, tried to clean up. “For the women who are getting married after 30, that’s OK. I’m trying to bridge the gap here because it is – OK, it’s not ideal, it’s not probably the best statistically odd position for you but God is good.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, right?” Charlie quipped, drawing laughter.

“It’s good, this is good,” Erika responded uncomfortably.

Charlie flipped off the amiable switch. “If you just want happy talk, that’s fine.” Erika smiled politely to the crowd.

The “push-pull” effect

I interviewed more than a dozen conservative girls and women this past weekend. Almost none of them were as dogmatic as Charlie Kirk or Alex Clark. Overwhelmingly, they were polite, religious, and family-oriented. Many of them expressed a desire to pursue the full spectrum of what life has to offer them– an education, a career, and a family. Though some placed a premium on marriage and children, a higher incidence than the girls I grew up with on the liberal and affluent north side of Chicago, no one talked shit about single women in their 30s the way the speakers did. So where is the demand for this coming from? There’s a “push-pull” dynamic at play here. Yes, the audience is overwhelmingly from religiously conservative backgrounds, and the church primes them to accept the idea they are incomplete without a man. There’s your pull.

But the push is so much more powerful – a top-down message so extreme that it only survives because it is backed by right-wing billionaires. Turning Point has made an active choice to craft this message and sell it as hard as possible, rather than getting carried away by some overwhelming demand from the audience. It’s a piece of a wider war on young people, women in particular: stripping away reproductive rights, including access to birth control, gutting what remains of the social safety net that overwhelmingly benefits women and children, and persecuting, culturally and legally, anyone who strays from the traditional framework of heterosexual marriage.

Before I walked away from Andrew Kolvet’s light threats to throw me out of YWLS, I asked him if Charlie Kirk would be interested in sitting down with me for an interview.

“Probably not,” he replied.

Anyywayyyy, here’s what I’m into:

• I spoke to the Sunday Times about how the Young Women’s Leadership Summit fits into the right’s relentless backlash against the Me Too movement. Check it out.

• I also robbed the place of stickers and buttons. My favorite is the “Crunchy Cuteservative” sticker. I’m sending these out to fellow appreciators of right-wing conference swag, so if you’re a friend reading this and want something hit me up.

  

  Thanks for reading, and please share. Stay safe – and for fucks sake, keep your kids away from Charlie Kirk.

1. Here’s the Guardian article she’s talking about.

2. See: Susan Faludi’s classic Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women for a full debunk.