It’s been a rough week online for the newest branch of Turning Point USA.
Last week, the pro-Trump non-profit unveiled its first overseas chapter in the U.K.. Almost immediately, parody accounts sprang up and multiplied on Twitter, including, but not limited to, Turning Point Glasgow, Turning Point Belfast, Turning Point Kurdistan and (this author’s personal favorite) Turning Point Albania.
The group’s posturing as a grassroots effort to combat the threat of dreaded socialist indoctrination among the young has also quickly fallen on its face. Media outlets, including ThinkProgress, were quick to point out that the father of the chapter’s leader, George Farmer, is also a multi-millionaire Conservative Party donor who paid for his son’s initiation into the notorious Bullingdon Club (somewhat akin to Yale’s Skull & Bones club, but with even more blue-blooded aristocratic “banter”).
— Turning Point Albania (@TPIllyria) February 6, 2019
Och, cry me a fuckin river ya spoilt dicks. https://t.co/hti4IioJJq
— Turning Point UK Glasgow (@TPGLA1) February 7, 2019
Farmer is also engaged to Candace Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA. During her remarks from the chapter’s introductory event in December, a video of which resurfaced online this week, Owens managed to add fuel to the dumpster fire already in progress.
“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the world ‘nationalism’,” Owens said, echoing similar comments made by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) last year which led to his own party stripping him of his committee appointments. “Whenever we say ‘nationalism,’ the first thing we think about — at least in America — is Hitler. He was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.”
“The problem is, he had dreams outside of Germany,” Owens continued. “He wanted to globalize, he wanted everyone to be German, everyone to be speaking German… to me that’s not nationalism. In thinking about how it can go bad down the line I don’t really have an issue with nationalism.”
Here is video of Candace Owens' full answer on nationalism and Hitler pic.twitter.com/NfBvoH8vQg
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) February 8, 2019
If one were to abide by Owens’ timeline of events, the persecution of Jews in Germany would be “OK, fine” by her, as they began as early as 1933, well before Hitler began “globalizing” beyond Germany’s borders. The Nuremberg Race Laws, which deprived German Jews of citizenship rights, were introduced in 1935. Kristallnacht, the horrific night of extreme and deliberate violence towards Jews, was in November 1938, nearly a year before the official declaration of World War 2 in September 1939. The first concentration camp in Dachau had been operational for more than five years before Hitler ran afoul of Candace Owen’s moral compass.
In the UK, meanwhile, nationalism also has a rich history. Take the case of Thomas Mair, a former member of the British Nationalist Party who attended English nationalist events and who, on June 2016, murdered Labour MP and mother-of-two Jo Cox by repeatedly stabbing and shooting her while yelling “Britain First.”
Or what about the British group National Action, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization which is described by the British Home Office as “virulently racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic,” which “implicitly endorses violence against ethnic minorities and perceived ‘race traitors’.”
In fairness, it would be unreasonable to suddenly hold Owens to even the most basic standards of fact-checking, since she has a well-established pattern of far-right grifting. She made a name for herself on Alex Jones’ Infowars — before the channel was repeatedly banned for hate speech — and famously bungled an attempt to use Kanye West to advance her failed “Blexit” campaign, an effort to persuade black voters to leave the Democratic Party. Last October, Kanye said that “he never wanted any association with Blexit. I have nothing to do with it.” Owens later publicly apologized to him.
But even for someone who has made a home for herself in the gutter of American politics, the outrage over her remarks was so swift and universal, Owens attempted to do some damage control via Twitter.
The Brexit campaigners who, as Buzzfeed News notes, helped front Turning Point UK are also doing a bang-up job of helping Britain stride towards a future free of the evil globalists in the European Union. Prime Minister Theresa May still doesn’t have a deal with the EU and has been repeatedly rebuffed in her negotiations, increasing the chance of a calamitous no-deal Brexit. But that’s OK for Turning Point U.K., since the people who would be most affected are poor, and thus, to them, don’t really matter anyway.