IDEOLOGY 101: THE CNP’S CAMPUS PARTNERS
The Council for National Policy’s demographics problem continued. The bedrock of its support, the older white Protestant population, was aging. Younger, more racially diverse voters skewed liberal, especially on social issues, and the causes that mobilized fundamentalist voters didn’t play as well with the new generations.1 Young women who had come of age with abortion rights weren’t ready to surrender them—especially to a movement that maintained that life began with conception. Millennials had grown up around openly gay friends and relatives, and the sky hadn’t fallen—even when they enlisted, married, or had children.
But these experiences never touched the CNP crowd. Its founders had been born old. In the 1960s, as his contemporaries were protesting the Vietnam War in sandals and blue jeans, young Paul Weyrich welcomed it in a suit and tie.2 Nevertheless, Weyrich understood the pressures of time. In the introduction to the 2001 manifesto, his protégé Eric Heubeck wrote, “We must, as Mr. Weyrich has suggested, develop a network of parallel cultural institutions existing side-by-side with the dominant leftist cultural institutions.” The roadmap specified: “There will be three main stages in the unfolding of this movement. The first stage will be devoted to the development of a highly motivated elite able to coordinate future activities. The second stage will be devoted to the development of institutions designed to make an impact on the wider elite and a relatively small minority of the masses. The third stage will involve changing the overall character of American popular culture.”3
The first stage—developing “a highly motivated elite”—had already been advanced by the Council for National Policy. The second stage, the development of institutions, was well underway through the groups clustered under the CNP umbrella. The third stage, changing American popular culture, had been set in motion through the fundamentalist broadcast media, but there was a long way to go.
The manifesto specified that none of these efforts would bear fruit if they didn’t address a vital demographic: “We will accomplish the goal of retaking our country only when large numbers of young people are educated outside of the indoctrinating environment of many public and private schools, universities, and of course, the popular culture. At this point in their lives, many of their ideas are still in the formative stage, the more so the younger they are … College students must be a key audience for our movement, since they are free of excessive time commitments and they find themselves in an environment that (theoretically) encourages activism and exposure to new ideas.”
The movement, it argued, needed to establish “alternative fraternities” as well as study groups and book clubs that could “build each other up in every possible way: in terms of public speaking skills, debating skills, physical skills, intellect, manners, aesthetic sense.”4
But the CNP’s most visible efforts were focused not on fraternities and book clubs but on cultivating entire colleges. It started in Hillsdale, Michigan, 130 miles southeast of the DeVos redoubt to the west.
At first glance, Hillsdale College appears to boast little more than some middling sports teams and larger-than-life statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gazing over a path called Liberty Walk. But what Hillsdale has in spades is money. As of 2017, the tiny Michigan college had an enrollment of some fourteen hundred students, but an outsize endowment of $574 million—much of it courtesy of CNP members and their donor networks.5 On a per capita basis this amounts to over $380,000 per student, outstripping many colleges, including Columbia, Brown, and Vanderbilt.6
Hillsdale was founded in 1844 by Baptist abolitionists. Its formal relationship with the radical right began with college president George C. Roche III, an early member of the CNP. In 1971 Roche founded a quasi-alumni journal called Imprimis, offered free of charge to Hillsdale graduates. It evolved into a platform for CNP members, such as the Family Research Council’s former director Gary Bauer and Judge Roy Moore of Alabama.7 Roche began to distribute Imprimis to a vastly expanded audience—still free of charge.
One of Hillsdale’s star recruits was Erik Prince, scion of the Prince-DeVos dynasty, who found his way to the class of 1992.8 He had previously served as one of the first interns at the Family Research Council (which his family supported with large infusions of cash).9 Family influence also helped him to a low-level internship at the Bush White House and a coveted spot at the U.S. Naval Academy. He lasted three semesters at Annapolis before he departed, going to Hillsdale to complete his studies.10
Like many other institutions with ties to the CNP, Hillsdale has been racked by scandal. Roche fell from grace in 1999, when he was accused of carrying on a nineteen-year-long affair with his daughter-in-law, the editor of Imprimis. She killed herself on campus with a handgun she took from his gun cabinet.11 Roche denied the allegation, but he was obliged to resign and went into seclusion until his death in 2006.
Roche was succeeded by political scientist Larry Arnn, a native of Pocahontas, Arkansas, and the son of a Phillips Petroleum employee.12 Arnn also joined the CNP. Eager to expand the college’s footprint, he built on his predecessor’s initiatives to transform Hillsdale into a CNP platform. The college developed a distinctive curriculum based on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, parallel to fundamentalists’ literal reading of the Bible. Hillsdale worked in close partnership with the Federalist Society, whose leadership also joined the CNP, and argued that “the job of the judiciary is to say what the law is, not what it should be.” This position suggested that the Federalists and their hand-picked jurists should be in charge of defining “what the law is.”13
In their view, America had been corrupted by liberal lawyers and judges who sought to adapt the law to modern society, legalizing practices such as same-sex marriage and abortion. Constitutional originalists danced on the ledge of contradiction. The Founding Fathers had crafted a document that condoned slavery and denied voting rights to women. For much of the nineteenth century, the Constitution allowed states to deny the right to vote to slaves, free blacks and Native Americans, as well as to white males without property.14 Originalists allowed that history had moved on in some areas, but they tended to cherry-pick the principles that suited them.
Even as George Roche disappeared from view, his journal lived on. In 2010 Salon described Imprimis as “the most influential conservative publication you’ve never heard of.” By 2018 it claimed a circulation of 3.9 million, “read by as many people as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.” It still arrived free of charge and often unrequested. The publication made a special effort to blanket the legal profession. American attorneys found it unbidden in their mailbox, uncertain as to who paid for it and for what purpose. Many of its articles consisted of verbatim speeches by conservative visitors to the Hillsdale campus, closely tracking the prevailing winds at the CNP, and a reader would be hard pressed to find a voice that strayed from CNP orthodoxy. Imprimis was used to recruit participants for the Hillsdale National Leadership Seminars, held two to three times a year in different parts of the country. Hillsdale claimed that more than thirty thousand people have attended the program since it was founded in 1982.15
Besides CNP members such as Bauer, Moore, and Arnn, Imprimis published many friends of the organization, offering a preview of the policies they would enact in the future. In 2008 John Bolton, future national security advisor, explained why the United States should disregard the United Nations’ human rights policies.16 In 2016 Scott Pruitt, months away from his appointment to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained why the Supreme Court should dismantle environmental protections.17
Hillsdale’s mission statement declares, “As a non-sectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale College maintains ‘by precept and example’ the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.” It derides the “dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity.’ ”18 The college’s finances depend on conservative donors. Following a series of disputes with federal and state authorities over affirmative action requirements, Hillsdale decided to relieve itself of such obligations by refusing federal funding. Contributions from major donors, led by the DeVos family, allowed the college to offer extensive financial aid to its largely homogenous student body.19
But Hillsdale still stood apart from the fundamentalist colleges associated with the Council for National Policy, which maintained affiliations with specific religious leaders or denominations. The CNP designated Hillsdale to serve as its “constitutionalist” bulwark and groomed it to feed the coalition’s operations on Capitol Hill and in partner media.
In 2010 Hillsdale created an important resource in Washington. The Allan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship occupies three identical red brick town houses with crenellated towers on Massachusetts Avenue, a short walk from Union Station. Across the street looms the Heritage Foundation, eight stories of somber gray stone.
The Kirby Center serves as a (tax-exempt) home for Hillsdale’s Washington program, which overlaps neatly with CNP programs and partners. It has been fully integrated with the Hillsdale curriculum, and provides both a pipeline for student aides for conservative congressmen and a social center to attract like-minded young people to the movement. The center’s James Madison Fellows Program brings high-level congressional staff to annual retreats and networking luncheons.
The tiny college has served as a feeder for higher positions as well. Soon after Donald Trump took office, the Hillsdale Collegian ran an article called “Hillsdale Alumni Take Over Trump’s Administration.” The lengthy list of appointments included chief of staff for Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education, associate counsel for President Trump, and speechwriters for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.20
Hillsdale’s CNP connections have brought rich economic rewards beyond the DeVos and Prince families and their foundations. The families have also contributed through their participation in the Donors Trust and the National Christian Foundation. Other leading donors included the Castle Rock Foundation, the family philanthropy of CNP founding father Joseph Coors, which has contributed over $5 million in multiple grants over the years. In 2002 the Foster Friess family foundation donated a handsome $100,000.21
In 2007 Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute contributed $1,000 to Hillsdale. This may have been more of a fee than a donation, explained by the Leadership Institute and the Kirby Center’s joint training activities. In 2012 the Leadership Institute held its Capitol Hill Staff Training School, intended to help aspiring activists, aides and interns “develop your networking strategy” and learn the basics of email campaigns and budgets, at the Kirby Center.22 The Kirby Center also hosted the Leadership Institute’s “Intro to Fundraising Workshop” to teach “the psychology of major gifts” and “one-on-one solicitation.”23 One hand washes the other: the Leadership Institute has trained Kirby Center interns, and the Kirby Center has provided the Leadership Institute with staff.
One of the Kirby Center’s major assets is the Boyle Radio Studio on the top floor, which enjoys a close relationship with Salem Media. The studio was launched in 2015, at the same time as WRFH (“Radio Free Hillsdale”), a new station on the Michigan campus. At the inauguration the Kirby Center’s director announced, “That station and these studios are part of a new and unique Hillsdale program to train students in broadcast journalism.”24 The “journalism training” in question differed from standard journalism curricula; one Hillsdale student intern reported, “We visited the National Rifle Association’s headquarters to learn how to cover gun-related issues and topics.”25 Hillsdale and the Kirby Center were set to groom future generations of fundamentalist and right-wing talk show hosts as well as traditional journalists.
Another inauguration speaker was Vince Benedetto, owner of a Pennsylvania radio network and the donor who launched the Washington and on-campus stations. Benedetto was an evangelist for the medium, whose influence was often overlooked. He cited a recent Nielsen survey that found that over 91 percent of Americans over the age of twelve listened to the radio each week—nearly 90 percent of every demographic age group.26 “It’s now surpassed television as the largest mass reach medium,” Benedetto said.27
Salem Media was prominently featured at the event. The keynote speaker was Salem’s syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who claims an audience of two million listeners every week in more than 120 cities. Hewitt hosts weekly broadcasts from the Kirby Center, which he describes as “the Hillsdale College lantern of reason, the lighthouse of sweet argument and persuasion in the shadow of the Capitol.”28
The CNP’s partner media platforms were as networked as its organizations. Hillsdale College enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Daily Caller, founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson and CNP member Neil Patel, and seeded with $3 million from former CNP president Foster Friess. Described as the radical right’s answer to the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller claims more than twenty million unique readers a month on its home page, and millions more on its partner sites and social media. (As of 2019 its Facebook page has more than five million followers.) The Daily Caller creates and distributes its content through the Daily Caller News Foundation, or DCNF—another tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. The foundation shares content with over 250 publishers, and its website states that its content “is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.”29
Hillsdale president Larry Arnn has been the subject of admiring coverage in the Daily Caller, disseminated by “eligible” news publishers ranging from the New Boston Post to American National Militia.30 In February 2019 the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Orange County featured Arnn and the Daily Caller News Foundation’s editor-in-chief as two of the five speakers.31 The Daily Caller also hosts Hillsdale interns, some supported by a two-year paid reporting fellowship.32 In December 2017 the Daily Caller hailed Arnn (as well as CNP elders Ed Meese and Richard Viguerie) as “Conservative Leaders Who Impacted American Culture.”33
Hillsdale College acquired another powerful tool for persuasion through its free online courses, with its ideology on full display. A course on the Supreme Court argued that “judicial decisions have done much to advance a Progressive agenda that poses a fundamental threat to liberty.” Constitution 201 chronicled the “rise of bureaucratic despotism” through FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs.34 In 2015 Hillsdale announced that its enrollment for online courses had surpassed a million; the college claims that eight hundred thousand people have taken its Constitution 101 course, to help so “America can begin to turn around and restore lost liberty.”35 Hillsdale has amplified its reach across social media. Imprimis, for example, has garnered almost 50,000 followers on Twitter and more than 660,000 on Facebook.36
Hillsdale wasn’t the CNP’s only foothold in academia. Other partners arrived by way of the revolt against the federal government’s integration requirements. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University illustrates both the deep roots of these relationships and the benefits they can yield. Falwell was one of Paul Weyrich’s earliest fundamentalist allies, serving on the founding board of governors of the CNP.
Falwell was an eager entrepreneur. In 1971 he founded a small Baptist college in Virginia as a subsidiary of his multimillion-dollar televangelism business. But his revenues stumbled in the 1980s with the fallout from the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart sex scandals, and his college suffered too. Rebranded as Liberty University in 1985, the school made a partial recovery, but it still labored under heavy debt. Liberty started to explore the economic potential of an online curriculum, propelled by the vision of Falwell’s son, Jerry Jr., a bearded version of his father.37
There were limits to that vision. One was a series of scandals involving a number of for-profit schools with online curricula, which were issuing worthless diplomas while skimming vast amounts of federal scholarship funds. (Liberty is officially “non-profit.”) In 1992 Congress responded by passing the 50 percent rule, requiring colleges to hold at least half of their courses on a physical campus to qualify for federal support. But in 2006 the Republican Congress quietly passed legislation removing those consumer protections, stealthily inserting eight lines into a vast budget bill. This benefited a massive number of commercial educational institutions, including many fundamentalist colleges.
Liberty University’s fortune was made; it quickly expanded to become the second-largest online college in the United States. As of 2015, its on-campus student body numbered around 15,500, while its online enrollment approached 95,000. The school, like many similar institutions, makes a special effort to recruit military veterans, who have access to additional government funding. By 2016 the university was pulling in more than $1 billion a year, most of it courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, and clearing a net income of $215 million; Falwell Jr.’s salary was set at almost $1 million a year. The university has dismissed faculty concerns and student complaints about the quality of online instruction.38
Like Hillsdale College, Liberty University maintained close ties to the CNP. As of 2014, the dean of its school of public policy and the associate dean of its law school were members. Many other CNP members were graduates. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and then vice president of the CNP, graduated in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate in theology in 2006.39 CNP member Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, serves on Liberty’s board of trustees.
Liberty’s Jesse Helms School of Government, founded in 2004, furnishes another pipeline of staff for conservative congressmen.40 The university has also worked closely with Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, cosponsoring and hosting the Grassroots Campaign School to train students in strategic campaign planning, alliance building, and get-out-the-vote programs.41
Liberty University’s quarrels with federal government didn’t end with segregation. The school continues to ban transgender students, and its honor code states that “sexual relations outside of a biblically ordained marriage between a natural-born man and a natural-born woman are not permissible at Liberty University.”42 Obama-era federal guidelines banned sex discrimination on college campuses under Title IX, but Liberty University claims a religious exemption.43
The Council for National Policy has rich hunting grounds in America’s evangelical colleges, which number over a hundred. The CNP roster includes Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan until his retirement in 2019. Although the former college rebranded itself as a “university,” this tiny school enrolls only six hundred students on its main campus, with an additional online enrollment. The school has a dismal four-year graduation rate of 23 percent.44 Its name is confusing to traditional Methodists, who also name institutions after founder John Wesley; Oklahoma Wesleyan was established by the Wesleyan Church, a nineteenth-century splinter group from the Methodists.
The United Methodist Church, with nearly seven million members in the United States, is affiliated with almost 120 U.S. colleges and universities and historically linked to many more, including Duke, Emory, Syracuse, the University of Southern California, Southern Methodist University, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The tiny Wesleyan Church, on the other hand, has approximately 141,000 members in the United States and five affiliated colleges scattered across North America. Oklahoma Wesleyan, like its fellows, long struggled in obscurity—until the 2002 arrival of Dr. Piper, who, as it happens, is a native of Hillsdale, Michigan. Piper is mediagenic, with a strong chin, crisp white hair, and a trim build. He grew up in a blue-collar family just down the road from the school George Roche was transforming into a CNP stronghold.
Piper joined the CNP at some point after he assumed the presidency of Oklahoma Wesleyan. There he developed an institutional relationship with Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council. Piper is a regular guest on Washington Watch, Perkins’s syndicated radio show, and often fills in as host for the program. In 2016 Oklahoma Wesleyan announced “a new partnership” with the Family Research Council “to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a Christian worldview.”45 Piper is another Daily Caller favorite, sometimes appearing with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, a Daily Caller correspondent (and CNP attendee).46 In one story, Piper recommended five books for college students—all put out by Regnery Publishing, a conservative house founded by CNP member Alfred Regnery and acquired by Salem Communications in 2014.47 Piper also appeared on the National Rifle Association’s NRATV and the Christian Broadcasting Network.48
The college board’s description of Oklahoma Wesleyan’s academic program stresses its commitment to the OKWU Pillars: “primacy of Jesus Christ, priority of Scripture, pursuit of Truth, and practice of Wisdom.”49 Like Liberty University, Oklahoma Wesleyan’s Christian worldview requires it to claim exemption from regulations governing sex discrimination, refusing to accommodate transgender students.50 In 2018 Piper came to national attention with an editorial in the Washington Times, stating that “in this brave new world of hyphens and acronyms, we paint ourselves into a corner of ‘tolerance’ where we must affirm the proclivities of anyone who ‘identifies’ as ISIS just as much as we do all who identify as LGBTQ. After all, in both cases it could be easily argued ‘that’s just who they are.’ ”51
Through the CNP’s energetic networking of media, money, and institutions, messages from minor-league schools like Hillsdale and Oklahoma Wesleyan could reach a national audience. A college president like Everett Piper could forgo the rigors of scholarship in favor of talk radio and blog posts on BullyPulpit.52
By 2014, the Council for National Policy counted a dozen college and university administrators among its 350 members, all of them at the level of president, vice president, or dean at their institutions. Most of their schools maintained a modicum of respectability, even if they generally fell short of academic excellence.
But the odor of corruption never disappeared. One striking case involved CNP member Oren Paris III. Paris’s father, Oren Paris II, founded Ecclesia College to train missionaries as an appendage of his fundamentalist country music empire. The younger Paris, a tall man with the hearty build and receding blond hairline of an aging quarterback, inherited the presidency from his father. The college, organized as a “church,” was located in a suburb of Fayetteville, Arkansas, about thirty miles from the Oklahoma border.53 It offers a limited curriculum—heavy on Bible studies—with 232 students and a 14 percent graduation rate.54 (Arkansans joked that Ecclesia’s commencement speeches better be long if there were only a dozen people graduating.)
Like his academic counterparts in the CNP, Paris had an entrepreneurial streak, but he lacked their skills. In 2013 he struck up a deal with a young Arkansas Republican state senator named Jon Woods. Paris asked Woods to procure state development funds for the college, reinforcing his case with a text message stating, “Good selling point to conservative legislators is that [the college] … produces graduates that are conservative voters. All state and secular colleges produce vast majority of liberal voters.”55 Woods steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds to Ecclesia College over several years in return for a series of kickbacks. In 2017 Paris and Woods were indicted along with several coconspirators. In September 2018 Paris was sentenced to three years in federal prison, and Woods to more than eighteen.56
The CNP’s major donors understood that reaching a broader student population would require them to go beyond individual colleges. In 2012 an enthusiastic eighteen-year-old named Charlie Kirk approached Foster Friess at the Republican National Convention, pitching his idea for a new organization. Turning Point USA proposed to update the messages and the networking capacity of CNP partners to energize a new generation of conservative college students. Friess agreed to bankroll the new group and joined its advisory council (along with Ginni Thomas).57 The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation is reported to have made a contribution in 2015, and Betsy DeVos spoke alongside Kirk at a Turning Point USA summit in 2018.58
Kirk had a natural grasp of Paul Weyrich’s guerrilla tactics, updated for the digital age. Turning Point USA set out to use conservative media and social media platforms to advance its cause, with Kirk as public spokesman and student activists as ground troops. The organization uses memes posted by shadowy groups such as ConservativeMemes.com (“Registration Private” via “Domains by Proxy, LLC”). One example was as a photo with a caption reading “NRA HERO: THE HERO WHO SHOT THE TEXAS CHURCH SHOOTER WAS A CERTIFIED NRA INSTRUCTOR ARMED WITH AN AR-15.”59 The New York Times reported that the “pre-made, sharable graphics on sites like ConservativeMemes.com” match many posts on Being Patriotic, a Facebook page managed by Russian interests.60 (A further connection arose in a 2019 report requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found that Russian agents routinely shared content created by Turning Point USA.61) Kirk’s organization stands out as unusually combative in an already contentious field, exploiting the troubled boundary between free speech and hate speech on campus.
The organization’s goals included mobilizing college students for the movement, and challenging the trends of political correctness on campus. These efforts would undermine the authority of professors and administrators and disrupt the knowledge industry from a new direction, challenging American institutions that play a leading role in independent research and the advancement of science and social policy.
Kirk grew up in suburban Chicago and started his organization as soon as he graduated from high school. (His higher education consisted of some general education classes at a community college following his rejection from West Point.62) Kirk was a highly effective fund-raiser and self-promoter. By 2018 Turning Point USA claimed a budget of around $8 million, fed by a network of conservative donors (most of them undisclosed), as well as ongoing contributions from Foster Friess.63 By 2019 the TPUSA website listed chapters on more than a thousand high school and college campuses in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as “5000+ activism events” and “500k face-to-face conversations.”64
TPUSA maintains open ties to organizations run by members of the CNP. The NRA has cosponsored TPUSA events. TPUSA works hand in hand with Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, listing it as one of its three partner organizations.65 The Leadership Institute plays an essential role in TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist,” a site that publishes photos and denunciations of professors. The accused’s offenses range from joking about Republicans to documenting gender bias in economics textbooks. (Politico recorded 226 “watchlisted” professors at 156 schools in 2018.66)
The site encouraged students to inform on their professors through the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform project.67 Campus Reform works alongside TPUSA to equip and train conservative student activists across the country, through twelve regional field coordinators.68 Its “Balance in Media” grants fund conservative student publications whose staff members have been trained at the Leadership Institute.69
Another Turning Point USA initiative, the Campus Victory Project, consists of a plan to “commandeer the top office of Student Body President at each of the most recognizable and influential American Universities.” In 2017 the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published the content of a brochure from the project, which outlined the stages of its campaign. “Once in control of student governments,” Mayer wrote, “Turning Point expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda. Among its planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on campus, the implementation of ‘free speech’ policies eliminating barriers to hate speech, and the blocking of all campus ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ movements. Turning Point’s agenda also calls for the student leaders it empowers to use student resources to host speakers and forums promoting ‘American Exceptionalism and Free Market ideals on campus.’ ”70
There is evidence that Turning Point USA, like other groups linked to the CNP, vastly exaggerates its effectiveness. In 2018 Politico reporter Joseph Guinto found that TPUSA claimed to have helped fifty conservative students win elections for student body president, but when he called the student leaders in question, some of them disavowed the connection and others condemned TPUSA. Guinto noted that although the TPUSA staff had grown to 130, some of its four hundred registered chapters were dormant.71
Turning Point USA’s greatest utility may have been in its optics. Charlie Kirk has been a highly visible symbol of the coalition’s inroads with Weyrich’s longed-for student demographic. Donald Trump has tweeted his praises and granted Kirk numerous photo opportunities and an exclusive television interview at the White House.72 Kirk receives ample coverage on Fox News and Breitbart, and he publishes frequent editorials on the Daily Caller.73 It is not known whether Charlie Kirk is a member of the CNP, but the CNP’s Policy Council includes him as a featured speaker, and CNP Action prominently displays his endorsement on its website.74
TPUSA implements the coalition’s drive to enlist minorities as well as youth, but these efforts can backfire. In 2017 Kirk hired the controversial African American commentator Candace Owens, another Trump favorite, and promoted her to director of communications. The following year Owens told a British audience, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine.” She blamed “leftist journalists” for the resulting controversy.75 A few months later Juan Pablo Andrade, an advisor for a Trump surrogate organization, attended a Turning Point USA conference in West Palm Beach. Andrade released a Snapchat video from his hotel room (booked on the TPUSA tab) declaring, “The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep fucking going!” He too blamed the “leftist media” for the ensuing storm.76 Owens and Andrade recanted their statements. TPUSA’s 2018 summit featured a partnership with a new group called Young Jewish Conservatives, cofounded by Rabbi Ben Packer, a follower of the late ultranationalist rabbi Meir Kahane.77 In April 2019 the Young Jewish Conservatives hosted a Leadership Institute training session on lobbying in Hoboken, New Jersey.78
Turning Point USA chapters have racked up a series of petty gaffes, usually when their attempts to deride their opponents go wrong. In 2018 the Kent State chapter staged an event for Free Speech Week designed to disparage the idea of “safe spaces” on campus. A male student posed on campus dressed in diapers, awkwardly sucking a pacifier and distributing bubbles. He promptly became an object of ridicule; memes and countermemes went viral in a matter of hours.79 “Free speech” is a major theme of the initiative, often used to challenge administrators’ attempts to limit hate speech on campus. The Leadership Institute provides TPUSA chapters with giant “free speech” beach balls, which students are invited to inscribe. At the University of California San Diego, a student popped it with a pocket knife.80 At the University of Delaware students drew a penis on the ball, which prompted the campus police to remove it.81
There is concern about the organization’s involvement in electoral campaigns. Designated as another 501(c)(3) “charity,” Turning Point USA is required to be nonpartisan, but students told Jane Mayer that TPUSA staff asked them to engage in campaign activities on behalf of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential primaries.82 According to Politico, Kirk told a 2015 audience that TPUSA “members and those people associated with our organization were able to knock on over 58,000 doors and make over 107,000 phone calls” in the 2014 gubernatorial campaign of Illinois Republican Bruce Rauner—a major TPUSA donor.83 It’s unlikely that the IRS, given the incoherent policy governing the political activities of “nonpartisan” nonprofits, will address the question anytime soon.
Another CNP youth affiliate is Students for Life of America. This antiabortion organization was founded by student volunteers in 1977 and relaunched in 2006. President Kristan Hawkins is a member of the CNP. Students for Life claims more than eleven hundred chapters in all fifty states, with a budget of over $6 million and a staff of forty, including nineteen regional coordinators.84 Its Facebook page peddles T-shirts reading “Equally Human, Born and Preborn” and promotes Hawkins’s lecture “Lies Feminists Tell.” Students for Life starts recruiting students as early as in middle school for antiabortion activism and continues through high school and college, with additional chapters in medical and law schools.85 It holds dozens of training workshops and summits across the country every year, together with the Susan B. Anthony List, the Family Research Council, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, all run by prominent CNP members.86 A page on its website states that Students for Life “frequently partners” with these groups.87 The Students for Life’s Planned Parenthood Project accuses the organization of supplying “faulty birth control” and “deceptive counseling” in order to carry out abortions for profit, and lobbies to defund it.88
Students for Life encourages followers to create their own “Cemetery of the Innocents” as a school activity, offering detailed instructions for assembling it on school grounds: “Your Regional Coordinator may be able to provide your group with little pink crosses from SFLA,” the group advises. “One idea is to use paint stirring sticks and wire them together. You can get these for free at local paint stores.” There’s a cafeteria option for high schools: “You can also stick your crosses into large sheets of Styrofoam and display them during lunch periods!”89
The Council for National Policy cultivates upcoming members through the William F. Buckley Jr. Council, a group of sixty. (This may have been its response to the Council on Foreign Relations’ term membership for promising candidates under thirty-five.) The CNP’s youth council is heavy on senior members’ offspring; one founding member of the Buckley council was Paul Pressler IV, the son of the Houston judge and founding member of the CNP.90 Another member is the daughter of CNP member Charmaine Yoest, the antiabortion activist who directed public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2017 to 2018. Other spots are occupied by staff of the leadership and their organizations. Judge Pressler’s personal assistant is a member, and so is the assistant to Jenny Beth Martin, head of the Tea Party Patriots. The youth council has also included the executive director and director of field operations of Students for Life.
The William F. Buckley Jr. Council has experienced its own whiffs of scandal. Reality television star Josh Duggar (19 Kids and Counting) was listed as a member in 2014, when he was serving as executive director of the homophobic Family Research Council Action, the FRC’s lobbying arm. In 2015 Duggar was caught up in a series of scandals. Duggar confessed to various transgressions, including pornography addiction and adultery. “The last few years, while publicly stating I was fighting against immorality in our country I was hiding my own personal failings.”91 He resigned from the Family Research Council; Tony Perkins responded, “We are praying for the family.”92
Perkins had his hands full. For years conservative Republicans had been grooming a young Ohioan named Wesley Goodman, who worked under CNP member Paul Teller on the House Republican Study Committee. Goodman had built his political career lobbying against LGBT rights, as a relentless foe of same-sex marriage. In 2015 the thirty-one-year-old Goodman had been elected to the Ohio state legislature with the benefit of funds raised by the CNP from various members, including Paul Pressler, Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell, and Ed Meese.93 Goodman was also the director of the CNP’s Conservative Action Project, created to oppose the Affordable Care Act and other Obama initiatives.
But earlier that year Goodman, another rising star on the CNP youth council, was accused of molesting the eighteen-year-old stepson of a CNP member in his hotel room at the annual meeting of the CNP at the Washington Ritz-Carlton. The stepfather complained to Tony Perkins.94 Perkins sent Goodman a private letter saying he could no longer support his bid for office, but chose to remain silent as Goodman pursued his winning campaign. Eight weeks later he suspended Goodman from the CNP.95 Perkins managed to keep the CNP incident under wraps for over two years, until it finally broke in the Washington Post in November 2017. Rod Dreher, a columnist for the American Conservative, fumed, “This is how it works! Play the game, and you’ll get ahead. If you won’t play the game, then at least keep your mouth shut about the players … Tony Perkins of the Council for National Policy showed how to do it.”96
A few days after the story broke, Caleb Hull, an investigative journalist for the conservative Independent Journal Review, reported that he had also been approached by Goodman, and cited testimonies by an additional thirty men and boys who had been stalked by Goodman, some after he had spoken at a 2017 Turning Point USA conference.97 Goodman had reached some of them online through Craigslist, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger, often with promises of mentorship and political connections. Goodman resigned from public office following the revelations and went into a career in public relations.
The Council for National Policy took these speed bumps with aplomb, wrangling college presidents with feeble academic credentials, media moguls with no commitment to journalism, and self-righteous crusaders who committed criminal abuses. The CNP’s uncompromising vision required a surprising amount of compromise.