Turning Point USA (TPUSA) is in the news again for being both fascist and racist. This time it’s a video that surfaced on the independent news site It’s Going Down. In it is the reported head of TPUSA’s University of Nevada, Las Vegas chapter, Riley Grisar, and an unidentified young woman throwing up the controversial white supremacist “OK” hand sign and saying “white power.” The young woman says “We are gonna rule the world,” to which Grisar adds, “White power,” and the young woman tops it off by saying “Fuck the ni**ers,” to which the person behind the camera says “Fuck them all.” Message received.
TPUSA announced that they were distancing themselves from that chapter leader of the young republicans organization:
A strong statement for sure. In fact, Founder and Executive Director Charlie Kirk has repeatedly denounced the white nationalist groups he says are trying to hijack the conservative movement. Of course, here’s a photo of Charlie Kirk shaking hands with Donald Trump.
But, hey, it’s the white supremacist president of the United States, what is a Charlie Kirk to do? How about not continuously hire fascists and racists and white supremacists into your national organization? TPUSA has had some real racist highlights over the past couple of years.
And of course there’s this:
The New Yorker did a story in December of 2017 about TPUSA’s former field director, Crystal Clanton, who once texted to another TPUSA employee “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”
The woman who replaced Clanton, a 22-year-old named Shialee Grooman, came under fire for having quite the racist and homophobic Twitter feed. She landed on her feet however, as a transition team worker for Arizona Republican chair Kelli Ward. Of course, Kelli Ward and her husband are all over the crazy racist conspiracy theory circuit—so it’s more of a lateral move than anything for Grooman. To put a finer point on TPUSA’s back-to-back hiring practices, Huffington Post has screenshots on some of Grooman’s old tweets, including lines like:
- “All I get is Nigger dick. RT”
- “I love making racist jokes.”
- “Okay. All of you are faggots.-_-”
One of TPUSA’s only black employees is Candace Owens, who you might remember spoke strangely about the positives of fascism and ethnic cleansing, by way of Adolf Hitler, to a group of likeminded Europeans back in February of this year. To be fair to TPUSA, they are just following in the footsteps of the previous iteration of young “superstar” conservatives like Tucker Carlson.