Why the Trolls Booed at Don Jr.’s Event
Donald Trump is 73. Mitch McConnell is 77. Rush Limbaugh is 68. The median Fox News viewer is 65. For good reason, observers of the American right often focus on folks who already qualify for Medicare and Social Security. But anyone wanting to understand the right’s future would do well to study the public-speaking appearance that Donald Trump Jr. made Sunday at UCLA.
Don Jr. expected leftist protesters.
As it turned out, he and his girlfriend, the former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, were drowned out and forced off stage by chanting alt-right activists.
Understanding the unexpected turn requires a bit of background. But the effort is worth it. Few events better illustrate the complex interplay of ideologies, tactics, and hypocrisies that are influencing the right’s youngest activists, who’ll ultimately decide what to do with the Birchers of their generation.
Many of today’s college students didn’t start paying attention to presidential politics until Donald Trump was vying for the White House. They weren’t even teenagers yet in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the GOP standard-bearer and the populist right organized under the banner of the Tea Party.
That same year, Charlie Kirk, then 18, founded Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that aimed to “identify, educate, train, and organize” the campus right. He pitched the organization to wealthy donors, touting his ability to spread free-market ideology, limited-government policies, and movement conservatism. By 2015, no
