Oh, cripes! Turning Point USA’s new venture in the United Kingdom has gone a bit pear-shaped, BuzzFeed News reported on Friday:
But already some of the Tory activists Kirk recruited to launch Turning Point in the UK are having second thoughts about its war on “cultural marxism”, according to several people familiar with their internal discussions. Within days of the launch, one of the “influencers” tapped to front the campaign has distanced himself from the group, BuzzFeed News has learned.
“There was a sense of people realising, ‘Who are these cranks?’,” one source said.
I mean. Didn’t you Google them? Where you would have found out about the diaper protest, or the racism, or... anything about their entire thing?
But let’s put hindsight aside and enjoy the spectacle of TPUK falling off Big Ben with its knickers around its ankles, or something. According to BuzzFeed, Tom Harwood, one of TPUK’s high-profile backers—well, sort of high-profile: He was a writer at a thing called Guido Fawkes, a gossipy conservative blog run by the British version of Steve Bannon—has already pulled out.
The group is also reportedly not receiving much of a welcome from the Conservative Party, with fears that “Turning Point’s wholehearted embrace of Trump and its campaigning style will be unpopular in Britain.” Only 19 percent of Brits think Trump is a good president, which is honestly actually a little higher than I would have guessed. Do better, Britain.
Other founding members of TPUK include a Trump-loving Scientologist who buys into the QAnon conspiracy theory, the son of a prominent Conservative donor, and Candace Owens’ fiancé, who BuzzFeed describes as a “29-year-old son of a multimillionaire hedge fund trader and Tory peer.” Speaking of Owens, she had her own public misstep at a TPUK event when she somehow wandered into saying Hitler wasn’t that bad:
Whoops!
The group’s launch on Twitter was also predictably messy, with an inspiring number of parody accounts springing up immediately:
Anyway, best of luck to this exciting new transatlantic partnership. But please, whatever you do, don’t let Benny Johnson near my treasured homeland.