Students for a Conservatarian Society

The TurningPointUSA High School Leadership Summit - four full days for 500 mainly students, who by a show of hands are almost all between 14 and 18 - could have been dubbed "Students for a Conservatarian Society," after Charles C.W. Cooke's 2015 book, "The Conservatarian Manifesto."

It's sort of amazing that no one - the kids at one point told a Leadership Institute speaker coaching them on how to campaign effectively with social media, that "only old people use FaceBook, we are all on Instagram" - has yet produced a meme portraying the core national HQ Turning Point staffers, Charlie Kirk, communications director Candace Owens, and youth outreach director Kyle Kashuv, as Star Trek's Captain Kirk, Uhuru, and Chekov.

Held in Washington, D.C. at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, with an amazing roster of speakers, the non-partisan, but very pro-Trump, group helmed by new media stars Candace Owens (29) and Charlie Kirk (24), the summit avoided talking about foreign policy and most social issues, and stuck mainly to discussions of free speech, on and off campus, and free markets and limited government generally.  A banner on the stage read "I(Heart)Capitalism" and one outside the building announced that "BigGovernmentSucks" (a slogan also available on the group's T-shirts).  Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke Tuesday not on civil asset forfeiture as a crime fighting tool or the need to recriminalize pot, but on collegiate Bias Response Teams as a threat to free speech on campus.  Senator Rick Santorum spoke Wednesday but didn't expound on traditional marriage or the sanctity of life, even during the Q&A.  Instead moderators and emcees made libertarian overtures, with Kirk denouncing Saudi Arabia and other countries that execute or imprison gays, and FOX News contributor Guy Benson urging students to be open minded and engage their future college dorm mates in debate, to which he attributed his shift while an undergraduate at Northwestern from being a down-the-line conservative on all issues to being more of a libertarian.  Partly because Parkland, Florida survivor Kashuv is on staff, defending the 2nd Amendment was a recurring theme of the conference, along with free speech on campus and chants of "Lock her up!"

Most such center-right conferences now feature a few speakers who are politically engaged billionaires.  Earlier this month FreedomFest in Las Vegas featured Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Whole Foods founder John Mackey (and in 2015 they had a pre-electoral Donald Trump.) This week TurningPoint gave the teens Mark Cuban on Tuesday, who had a contentious debate with Kirk on climate change, but told one student in a Q&A that he would have invested in TurningPoint when it was founded in 2012 if Kirk had appeared on Shark Tank, because "sometimes you bet on the jockey, if not on the horse."  (Because he'd listed the possibility of real life Terminators - artificial intelligence with weapons produced by either the U.S. or Chinese military - as one of the two biggest problems humanity faces, along with climate change, Cuban got one question one would have expected to hear at the annual Students for Liberty conference: "Would you privatize the military?")
The TurningPoint teens got another billionaire speaker, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, discussing how immigration and international trade have not worked out in practice as they are supposed to in theory.  (The speakers are livestreamed here.)

The list of speakers addressing these students is truly impressive:  besides Cuban and Thiel, Sessions and Santorum, the young people heard from United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos, Senator Orrin Hatch, Nigel Farage, Sebastian Gorka, Sean Spicer, Corey Lewandowski, Tom Fitton, Anthony Scaramucci, Ken Bone, Dennis Prager, Eric Bolling, FOX News Jesse Watters, Breitbart editor Alex Marlowe, GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and Congressmen Thomas Massie, Louie Gohmert, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, Steve Scalise, Lee Zeldin, and Kevin McCarthy.

But the break out star of the event, the speaker most loved by the audience, is one of their own, Parkland, Florida shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv, now the Director of High School Outreach for TurningPoint and a major 2nd Amendment defender.  Kashuv, a high school junior, shared emceeing and moderating duties with Kirk, Benson, and the Daily Caller's Benny Johnson.  Kirk is a remarkably confident public speaker at 24, debating Cuban or interviewing Secretary DeVos.  But at 16, Kashuv, steady, if less polished, is even more so.