Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by
Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023
Kali Holloway, “Candace Owens Is a Willing Tool of Republican Racists,” The Daily Beast, October 11, 2020, sec. politics, https://www.thedailybeast.com/candace-owens-is-a-willing-tool-of-republican-racists. 20. Rilyn Eischens, “Right-Wing Celeb Charlie Kirk Thinks George Floyd Is a ‘Scumbag,’” Minnesota Reformer, October 6, 2021, https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/hagedorn-munson-attend-charlie-kirk-speech-in-mankato/. 21. Stephen Moore, “Private Enterprise,” WSJ, May 6, 2006, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114687252956545543. 22. Jonathan Martin and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Roy Moore Is Accused of Sexual Misconduct by a Fifth Woman,” New York Times, November 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/us/politics/roy-moore-alabama-senate.html. 23.
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That includes people like Candace Owens, a conservative Black activist whose platform has been amplified by rich white men who deny that anti-Black racism exists. These rich white men relish Owens’s claims that Black culture is “broken,” Black people are “pretending to be oppressed,” and Black Lives Matter activists are “domestic terrorists.”19 Owens is a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization led by Charlie Kirk, a wealthy white man who has called George Floyd a “scumbag” and characterized Democratic immigration policies as “diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”20 Turning Point’s board of directors is composed exclusively of rich white men. Its major backers include members of the Koch Network—which has hosted semiannual meetings for wealthy right-wing donors since at least 200621—like Richard Uihlein, a billionaire who backed Roy Moore’s candidacy for one of Alabama’s US Senate seats even after he was accused of sexual misconduct with underage girls.22 Rich white men like Uihlein stay out of the public eye while funding people like Owens and Kirk to do their dirty work.
Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by
Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020
Their agenda had three major points: advocating for anti-Semitism; advancing the theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants, including legal ones; and asserting the necessity of explicit homophobia.6 Their greater goal is a calculated shattering of the Overton window, drawing the GOP closer and closer to the white-nationalist movement until their goals and public rhetoric are fundamentally indistinguishable. Throughout his tour of various colleges all over the United States, Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA’s twenty-six-year-old spokesman, struggled to answer questions from smirking young men in MAGA hats, like “Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?” Success and press coverage emboldened the insurgent faction: In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr. faced a humiliatingly abbreviated book launch, scampering offstage a mere twenty minutes after his event began as he was beset by demands for a Q&A.
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In other words, it seems as if he would like to embrace ethnonationalism and prop up anti-Semitic ideologies without having embarrassingly open ethnonationalist anti-Semites show up and ruin his good time. Trump’s own statements, coupled with his policies, form the strongest argument white nationalists can make that their militancy most authentically represents his vision. One wonders what, precisely, someone like Charlie Kirk could have said had an audience member taken up one of Fuentes’s suggestions: asking Kirk “to defend the President’s preference for immigrants from Norway versus Haiti.” While the litany of Trump’s acts cozening and encouraging a once-fringe, white-nationalist element of the American polity would happily fill another book or a dozen, it’s worth considering the architect of the immigration policies that establishment Republicans like Dan Crenshaw champion.
Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul
by
Kurt Wagner
Published 20 Feb 2024
had been with Kanye West when he made comments to TMZ about slavery being a “choice”: Sean Rossman, “Candace Owens’ Rapid Rise Defending Two of America’s Most Complicated Men: Trump and Kanye,” USA Today, October 19, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2018/10/19/candace-owens-found-her-place-conservative-politics-age-donald-trump-alongside-kanye/1521771002/. had even met with the president in the Oval Office just a few weeks before meeting with Dorsey: Jonathan Swan, “Trump Huddles with Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens,” Axios, May 25, 2018, https://www.axios.com/2018/05/25/trump-huddles-with-charlie-kirk-and-candace-owens. His father was a Republican, his mother was a Democrat, and Dorsey identified “somewhere in the middle”: Joe Rogan, interview with Jack Dorsey, The Joe Rogan Experience, #1236, podcast audio, February 2, 2019, https://www.jrepodcast.com/episode/joe-rogan-experience-1236-jack-dorsey/.
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Building in midtown Manhattan with Sean Hannity, the well-known Fox News host and radio personality. He also exchanged private messages with Ali Alexander, a far-right political activist. (Alexander would later go on to help orchestrate the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, 2021, after Trump’s election loss.) In some cases, Dorsey convinced Twitter’s critics to come to him. Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, both from Turning Point USA, a group that promoted conservative ideas to high school and college students, visited Twitter’s headquarters in June for a meeting with Dorsey and Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland. Owens was a regular critic of Planned Parenthood and the U.S. welfare system, and had been with Kanye West when he made comments to TMZ about slavery being a “choice.”
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by
Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023
unvaccinated people were not full citizens: Jon Henley, “Macron Declares His Covid Strategy Is to ‘Piss Off’ the Unvaccinated,” The Guardian, January 4, 2022. “transhumanism” correspondent: Steve Bannon, host, “The Transhumanist Revolution,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,394, November 6, 2021; Charlie Kirk, host, “Transgenderism to Transhumanism with ‘Detransitioner’ Ritchie Herron and Tech Writer Joe Allen,” Charlie Kirk Show (podcast), September 15, 2022. “I am a woman, I am a mother”: Benjamin Dodman, “‘Mother, Italian, Christian’: Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Far-Right Leader on the Cusp of Power,” France24, September 24, 2022. “perfect consumer slaves”: Ian Schwartz, “Italy’s Giorgia Meloni: We Are the Enemy to Those Who Would Like Us to Have No Identity, Be the Perfect Consumer Slaves,” RealClearPolitics, September 26, 2022.
Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by
Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023
Benny marveled as he walked through the grand marble Entrance Hall, where he was greeted by a giant Game of Thrones meme printed on poster board and, between two marble columns, an enlarged printout of one of the president’s tweets: “Many are saying I’m the best 140 character writer in the world.” The guests milled around in wonder. Along with Benny and his boss, the Trump youth movement leader Charlie Kirk, they included pretty much anyone with a big social media following and an unquestioned loyalty to the president. Gateway Pundit, a leading purveyor of false news, was there, as was a guy who wrote under the Twitter pseudonym @carpedonktum and was famous for making an edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which generated Democratic outrage and a presidential retweet.