![]() ![]() Not only is Clark a highly successful political commentator with two podcasts and the face of a yearly conference, she is also, as she noted in her own speech, not a mother. ![]() You can have the career you want and you can raise your children in a positive, educational environment, aka day care.” She described it as “a lie to tell women that we can have it all.” Just because day care is “normal or common doesn’t mean it’s right,” according to Clark. Did you feel that shift?”Ĭlark claimed, “The feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce.” She went on: “The feminist movement gave way to the notion that a woman could have her cake and eat it too. And one of those solutions was day care.” After an awkward pause, she added, “It just got real uncomfy. She described it as her “spiciest take,” saying that “a lot of mothers in the ‘70s” (the decade was the conference’s theme) “who desired freedom and flexibility or who didn’t necessarily have a support system were oblivious to the fact that the solutions presented to them as safe, liberating or harmless were anything but. It was on this topic that her speech veered from sleepy to bizarre. Just a few minutes into her speech she lost the room, and it got worse from there.Īttacking abortion and fertility care are not unique to Clark’s brand, but her opposition to day care is both a new and relatively isolated stance, and it didn’t land with the YWLS crowd. “Wow,” she responded, following up by asking, “How many of you are considering ditching hormonal birth control?” Even fewer hands went up. She asked the audience, “Who in this room has decided to ditch hormonal birth control?” Very few hands went up. She has staked her brand in part on spreading misinformation about birth control - it’s a regular feature of her podcasts POPlitics and The Spillover, as well as her prolific Instagram presence. I know you were all thinking it, right? What is that all about? By the way, this hotel better do something or we’re going to find another hotel because I’m not going to come back, this is ridiculous.”įor the next 30 minutes, she launched into a winding, pseudo-academic diatribe about the four lies of modern feminism, which according to Clark are birth control, abortion, fertility care, and day care. In his opening speech, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk described his unsuccessful efforts to have the flag taken down: “I tried my best to take down the flag everybody,” he said. Much to my surprise, the first thing I saw when I pulled up to the venue was a massive pride flag. This tension drew me to attend the event in person in Grapevine, Texas, from June 9 to 11. The same goes for the vice president of events, Lauren Toncich.įorgoing a career in pursuit of marriage and motherhood is not something the women delivering this message can speak about from personal experience. Chief Marketing Officer Marina Minas’ biography says nothing of her achievements in the domestic realm. Behind the scenes, Turning Point USA’s events and marketing leadership are also populated by women. ![]() Speakers like TPUSA influencer Alex Clark, Fox host Laura Ingraham, and The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens both covertly and overtly discouraged the audience of young women from pursuing high-powered careers - but it takes a lot of work to build an audience as a woman in right-wing media. Yet this conference exists because of the labor of women on the right who clearly value their careers. These themes were nearly identical to last year’s YWLS. Speaker after speaker emphasized to the audience that they should become wives, mothers, and accessories to the astroturfed conservative movement rather than pursuing a demanding career. Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, which targets college and high-school age girls, grapples with these same contradictions in a much darker and more prescriptive way. This scenario totally boggles the normative masculinity of the contestants pursuing her. At the same time, her role is highly subversive to traditional norms of courtship - she’s “dating” 25 men at once. She is feminine, unattainable, a prize to be won, flirty, and non-threatening to masculinity - the ideal future wife. The woman crowned as the bachelorette each season represents a certain type of conformity. The dating show tries to awkwardly reconcile fundamentally opposed interpretations of gender roles in a woman’s pursuit of an opposite-sex partner. I’m fascinated by Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit for the same reasons I watch ABC’s The Bachelorette. ![]()
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