November 12, 2022

By Bill Berkowitz

Conservative mega-donors and savvy organizing efforts harvesting rage and anger and building social cohesion are luring young Americans to the right. These youth initiatives, which gained momentum with the election of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, date to the 1960s when Morton Blackwell joined forces with Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie to form a powerful trinity of conservative activism.

While Weyrich eventually became known as the Godfather of modern conservatism, and Viguerie became the king of right-wing direct mail, Blackwell took on the arduous task of training right-wing politicians and activists, through the Leadership Institute, which he founded in 1979.  In recent years, the Leadership Institute has set its sites on young conservatives.

Conservative mega-donors and savvy organizing efforts harvesting rage and anger, are luring young Americans to the right. Kyle Spencer’s new book Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and its Plot for Power details how conservatives have built a growing youth movement.  Spencer is an award-winning journalist and frequent New York Times contributor, who has written for New York magazine, Slate, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, Politico, and many other publications.

According to Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron, Spencer’s “book traces the movement’s on-campus tabling events, highly structured training, raucous conferences and embrace of celebrity culture. It draws a portrait of a powerful, well-endowed movement that has grown increasingly brash, confrontational and, in many cases, incendiary. Spencer gives plenty of examples of communication strategies using ‘enraged mockery’ and gotcha games. There’s the ‘Affirmative Action Bake Sale’ (Asians: $1.50; Caucasians $1, African Americans and Hispanics $.50), the ‘Professor Watchlist’ and  doctored videos of liberals behaving badly.”

Two of the conservative youth movement’s best-known leaders are Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and talk show host Candace Owens. “In her book, Spencer describes their backgrounds, their knack for self promotion and their rapid ascent to the top echelons of Republican politics,” Shimron points out (https://religionnews.com/2022/10/31/how-americas-conservative-youth-movement-grew-a-powerhouse-on-the-cult-of-rage/). Kirk’s Turning Point USA is the largest, wealthiest student group in the country,

“Both Kirk and Owens became fixtures of former-President Trump’s inner orbit. Later they backed Trump’s Big Lie efforts, becoming the shock troops for the post-election misinformation campaign. Turning Point USA sent some 350 people to Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, where he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol as Congress was certifying the 2020 election results. (Kirk, who was not there and said he didn’t support the attack on the Capitol, nevertheless said the insurrectionists’ rage was understandable.)”

In an interview with RNS’ Shimron, Spencer said that her interest in the movement came about through her visits to several college campuses where she encountered numerous young people tabling for gun rights. When asked why they were doing the tabling, they said “they were doing this on their own.” With a little bit of research, Spencer found that “he NRA and Gun Owners of America were pumping millions of dollars on college campuses for pro-gun policies.”

According to Spencer, Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute “serves as a clearinghouse for all these groups.” Based in Arlington, Virginia, the Leadership Institute aims to win and it will to do anything in pursuit of its goals. It’s publication, called Campus Reform (https://www.campusreform.org/), “is a vehicle to push this idea that conservatives on college campuses have no free speech.”

In a story for Liberal Currents titled “How to Decipher Propaganda” (https://www.liberalcurrents.com/how-to-decipher-propaganda/), Caitlin Green discusses Campus Reform’s methodology. She writes: “Campus Reform’s mission statement says it is ‘a conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system.’ Its homepage is designed like a news site, with featured stories and videos arranged into sections such as ‘Trending,’ ‘Opinion and Analysis,’ and ‘Editor’s Picks.’”

The Florida-based media outlet SRQ reports that, “The [Leadership Institute] has trained conservative political candidates nationwide, and boasts providing support for some 250,000 activists, leaders and students since its founding in 1979.” According to The New Republic, graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.

Conservative organizers recognized that young people needed to have outlets for their … well… youthful needs. “When the conservative movement was building up, it understood people needed to convene.,” Spencer told Shimron. “The youth groups started having their own conferences, too. In the last 10 years they’ve become raucous parties. As the conservatives have become more celebrity conscious and have been working on building their own shadow Hollywood, they started to see these events as ways to push out celebrities and personalities and to turn them into these Lollapalooza festivals for the right.” 

According to SRQ, Sarasota County, School Board Member Bridget Ziegler took a job as director of School Board Programs for the Leadership Institute. SRQ reported that “Ziegler [has] established herself as a fixture on conservative cable news on political issues surrounding education, such as critical race theory. In Florida, she helped found the state chapter of Moms For Liberty, and was among a slate of candidates Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed in a statewide push to elect more conservatives and proponents of “parents’ rights” on school boards.”

Morton Blackwell, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie learned early that playing the long game would be essential to success. Steadfast organizing, building institutions, creating palatable messaging, and spending the money that was needed to effectuate change. The Leadership Institute has been a model for those lessons.