The 4th annual Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, saw more than four thousand high school college students, from all 50 states and from Canada to Australia, turn out to hear speeches from the conservative firebrands and learned skills to help advance conservative causes on their campuses.
The four-day event featured fiery speeches from the likes of Donald Trump Jr., Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Nigel Farage. The event kicked off with rousing speeches from veteran radio host Dennis Prager, talk show host Dave Rubin, and Turning Point leader and conservative activist Candace Owens.
“Everything the left touches, it ruins,” Prager told the room full of young activists. “It is a force for destruction.”
Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, shared a video Wednesday slamming the elite media for ignoring a capacity crowd event of conservative students from around the world.
Attendees were treated to a panel honoring the legacy of Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, featuring Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, Kirk, and Farage. The tribute panel saw Farage acknowledge that “Brexit could not have happened without Breitbart,” while Kirk told the crowd that Breitbart was the first outlet to give him the platform to expose left-wing lies he found in his high school textbooks.
There were training sessions to teach students “How to Change Your Campus, Grow your Group, and Get Media Attention, and “How to Grow Your Group On Campus: Membership, Tabling, and Recruitment,” and another for “Protecting Free Speech On Campus.”
The Silicon Valley crackdown on conservative voices and media platforms was also tackled by various speakers from Kirk, to Dennis Prager, whose PragerU organization sued YouTube and its parent company Google, and Donald Trump Jr.
Prager said it’s “crap” for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to blame censorship on algorithms, as he did before Congressional committee.
“They will lie, because they can get away with it. Who’s going to catch them? The New York Times? The Washington Post? The LA Times? CBS? ABC? NBC? Who’s going to catch them?,” Prager told Breitbart News.
Trump Jr., who has slammed Facebook’s photo-sharing platform Instagram for restricting his reach, called Google “pretty disgusting” after Pichai couldn’t explain to lawmakers why searching the word ‘idiot’ produced photos of President Trump.
There were dozens of Turning Point campus leaders eager to talk to Breitbart News and explained how the organization has helped them advance the cause of conservatism on their respective campuses across the country.
“We had no organization before Tuning Point,” one student campus leader said. “Now, we’re bringing in local speakers and we’re drawing pretty good crowds. I really thank Turning Point for providing the resources for us to be able to do that.”
“It definitely inspires me about the conservative movement. It reminds me that there are others like me out there,” he said. “Sometimes its tough on a campus where there’s a bunch of liberals.”
One student said being exposed to speakers like Dr. Jordan Peterson helped give him tools he could use and take back to his campus to “help other people.”
“I’ve been able to reach young people on campus that don’t really know they are conservatives … and think that’s for old people,” another campus leader said.
“Normally you feel so alone on campus, like no one shares your beliefs. A lot of conservatives are afraid so speaks up because of the backlash they get from their peers even their teachers,” another leader said. “So Turning Point has given student conservatives courage, a sense of community, and they’ve given them the sense that they are not in this alone. You’re in this together and you can make a difference in the movement.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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