Thread by @mattsheffield

1/x: Charlie Kirk and the Republican Jesus machine

You may not care about the awkward founder of Turning Point USA, but you should be aware of what he has planned for you.

This thread is a summary of @MatthewBoedy's excellent @DiscoverFlux article: flux.community/matthew-boedy/…

Kirk began his career on a lie, claiming to know that he had been rejected by West Point based on affirmative action. He started TPUSA by telling rich, elderly Republicans that he would stop the millennials from becoming socialists. (That didn't exactly work, did it?)

But Kirk did have one important difference in his message from past GOP youth outreach. He correctly understood that Americans, especially young ones, want secular arguments for ideas, not religious ones.

This idea + Kirk's open embrace of trolling, propelled him on campus.

Despite Kirk's claims to be in touch w/ young adults, his political conversion efforts haven't worked. 60% of voters between 18 & 35 voted for Joe Biden. Only 36% voted for Trump.

But in the course of his activism, Kirk came into contact w/a GOP subculture he had not seen yet.

This subculture, commonly referred to as Dominion Theology by scholars, holds that God has given Christians the right and duty to rule over everyone else. But that they must work to establish this supremacism, especially through elections.

One of the key figures in the Dominionist movement is Rob McCoy, a far-right pastor based in Thousand Oaks, California, who has turned his local congregation into a political machine. He used it to get elected to city council and to become the mayor.

McCoy has become the inspiration of a national political network called the American Renewal Project which holds free conferences for far-right pastors and encourages them to make their own political machines, too. It's funded by the owners of the Daily Wire, the Wilks brothers.

Dan and Farris Wilks have quietly used their fracking billions to steer Republican politics toward open Christian supremacism.

They've been helped by Dennis Prager & Ben Shapiro, both of whom hate atheists and LGBT ppl so much that they'd betray their Jewish heritages.

Under the influence of Rob McCoy, Kirk has turned from his previously semi-tolerant evangelical faith toward using all of his political resources to take over America in the name of Republican Jesus.

This conversation he had w/McCoy is highly disturbing:

In it, Kirk rails against America's teachers and professors. He tells his elderly audience that they shouldn't allow their children to attend college because doing so will turn them into "anti-American, godless, atheist, unhappy radicals."

Kirk also talks about how he believes liberals oppose his extremist ideas because they hate God.

It's a complete erasure of progressive Judaism and Christianity. But it also shows just how much he absolutely hates atheists. He is far from alone among GOP elites in this regard.

Kirk has gone whole-hog into outright Christian supremacism. He's launched a radio program distributed by the fundamentalist Salem Media Group, the most powerful GOP media operation other than Fox News.

And he's starting a massively funded offshoot called Turning Point Faith.

Turning Point Faith is designed to take Kirk's collegiate and high school brainwashing program directly into evangelical churches, to tell Christian fundamentalists that they are persecuted, and to focus their hatred into voting Republican.

While Kirk's goofy and awkward personality make it easy not to take him seriously, he is deathly serious about taking over America for Republican Jesus.

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