(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . 'Young Women's Leadership Summit' is bait-and-switch incel grooming [1] ['Daily Kos Staff'] Date: 2023-06-12 Media Matters' Madeline Peltz has a very good piece of reporting on the too-appalling-to-be-funny Young Women's Leadership Summit, a shindig put on by the pro-Trump fascist group Turning Point USA, and one which, like all such endeavors, features way more Charlie Kirk than anyone needs or asked for. Peltz focuses most on the actual messaging—the stuff TPUSA's gathered speakers thought it most important to say, once they had gathered a collection of the most ambitious conservative high school and college women in the country into a single room—and it's nasty, nasty stuff. "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," she reports. Clark railed against the young women in the audience for using birth control, blasted "day care," and take-your-pick. Clark 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. 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. It didn't get any better from there. Fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey opened day two of the conference. She, unsurprisingly, struck a notably more pointed Christian extremist tone than the other speakers, though religious rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the conference. “I can tell you what your highest calling is,” she said. It’s not to have a career, “it’s not even to be a wife and a mom, as wonderful as those things are. Your highest calling is to glorify God.” By the time you get to pro-Trump wackadoodle Benny Johnson it’s clear that the whole point of the conference was to gather up ambitious young Republican women and put them back in their place, with Johnson urging the "leadership"-aimed crowd to instead focus on becoming "a woman of value" who can "attract a great man," a "trad wife." And if that wasn't enough, head TPUSA fascist Kirk then went straight to scorn and belittlement when a college student asked Kirk for advice on how to "succeed." The audience member told Kirk that she is career-driven and has not thought much about marriage or starting a family. She asked if he had advice to give to “somebody who so badly wants to succeed in surgery,” but will be 30 years old before she has time to think about “settling down.” Kirk’s answer was straightforward and clear: “You’re going to have to choose which one matters more.” He then told her to spend a couple of days with infants and see how she feels afterward, and stressed that she may run out of time to find a husband if she focuses on her career throughout her 20s. Kirk told her that “there are a lot of successful, 35-year-old orthopedic surgeons that have cats, and not kids, and they’re very miserable." Help me, Charlie Kirk, I'm showing signs of having "leadership." Is there anything you can tell me, a would-be orthopedic surgeon, to squash these dreams I'm having so that I can meet your bullshit dreams about what the women around you should be? Who even goes to these things? What's most striking about the weekend's events is that when you put all these messages together (TPUSA also-celebrity Candace Owens was there too, rounding things out with a warning to the gathered women that they cannot be complete without children and making it quite clear that this was the intended message the fascist group meant to bring to the day), it begins to look perilously close to the indoctrination methods used by creepy religious cults. Turning Point USA collects college- and high school-aged women who want to succeed in leadership in the same convention hall and berates them for several days about how they should not want that, how they are wrong for wanting that, and how they will all end up hollow, with too many cats, and will hurt America itself if they do not instead resign themselves to letting conservative men be the leaders so that they can get married and have babies and absolutely not use day care or have a career of their own. This isn't a summit for promoting young women and leadership: It's a front for Big Incel. It's a whole summit premised on grooming new wives for conservative incels! And yes, it's more than a little strange that many of the people being most emphatic in discouraging young conservative women from becoming leaders are the current crop of conservative women in leadership. You'll note not one of them is stepping down to focus on being a trad wife, either. The whole yearly conference is a sham—a lure to find ambitious young conservative women and break their ambition before it gets out of hand. It's hard to feel sorry for this audience, though, because again: Charlie Kirk. If you're going to any event that's going to feature any amount of Charlie Kirk, much less the rest of his deranged posse, you already know what you're getting. You know you're putting your lot in with a sedition-defending, hoax-peddling, anti-democratic group that wants, more than anything else, for you to shut up and do as you're told. The difference between fascist movement and pseudo-religious cult isn't large to begin with. With this pink-hued monument to incel grooming, though, it's getting blurrier still. x Oh also they were selling these bedazzled gun and FJB purses pic.twitter.com/6piWsy1bJz — Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) June 11, 2023 x Candace Owens closed out day two. “Every ill that we are fighting right now in society has been brought forth by women.” She said hyper masculinity created Mussolini and Hitler. Now we're fighting an equal and opposite force: "hyper femininity" https://t.co/UcrLxPwCIa — Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) June 11, 2023 RELATED STORIES: 'Anti-groomer' Texas Republican groomed an intern, forced to resign Missouri Republican defends child marriage while attacking trans kids Things are getting ugly in the right-wing media ecosphere We talk about the field of Republicans willing to go up against the MAGA monster that is Trump. It’s a veritable who cares of the Republican Party, but it is also indicative of the rot inside of the conservative world. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/12/2174967/--Young-Women-s-Leadership-Summit-is-bait-and-switch-incel-grooming Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/