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Robert Mendick meets the US freespeech campaigners heading to British campuses to take on the no-platforming ‘safe space’ culture
Candace Owens, a US conservative activist and a favourite of Donald Trump, doesn’t have a lot of time for the “snowflake” generation. “Melt them all,” she declares, straight-faced and with certainty. Ms Owens, 29, is the communications director of Turning Point USA, a controversial but increasingly influential campaigning group that seeks to challenge political correctness and the “safe space” culture it says is gripping US university campuses.
In six years, the group – founded in 2012 by another Trump acolyte, Charlie Kirk – has grown to become “the biggest and most far-reaching youth organisation in America”, operating, according to its own publicity, in 1,300 US schools and colleges. With a $15million budget, it runs student activist conferences, publishes leaflets and manifestos and promotes the most unfashionable student causes: the principles of freedom, free markets and limited government. It also runs a website – called Professor Watchlist – that “exposes and documents college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance Leftist propaganda in the classroom”.
But if that’s not enough, British lecturers and students alike should brace themselves: Turning Point USA is now heading this way.
Mr Kirk, 25, and Ms Owens flew to London this week to meet Right-wing activists – although they don’t like the term – on British campuses who are fed up with “safe spaces” and “snowflakes”, and want a conservative (with a small “c”) network all their own.
Plans are now in place to launch Turning Point in the UK, with chapters expected to open in leading universities up by spring. On Tuesday night, Mr Kirk and Ms Owens met students from Oxford, St Andrews, Warwick, King’s College London and University College London. Students from Cambridge University have also been in contact, they say.
“We have had an inordinate amount of success in the States over the last six years, and now we are going to launch Turning Point in the UK. We are going to have a very big impact,” says Mr Kirk, a clean-cut, all-american and evangelical Christian who hails from just outside Chicago. He speaks rapidly and with passion and energy. Leftwing activists seemingly detest him – certainly enough that in August this year, as he and Ms Owens sat in the Green Eggs Cafe in Philadelphia, they found themselves being mobbed by local members of Antifa (short for “anti-fascist”), who hurled eggs at them (they missed) and poured water over Mr Kirk (he was soaked).
The duo are not deterred, and the UK project is the first step in their global expansion. “We want to be a spark plug, but this will be a UK grassroots movement,” says Mr Kirk. “We will share best practice advice and techniques, but this UK movement will have a life of its own.”
The arrival of Turning Point on British campuses certainly coincides with growing concern that UK universities have put up barriers to free speech, using so-called safe spaces to shut down events that might cause offence. A parliamentary committee earlier this year warned of the “real problems for students to put on challenging events”. Earlier this week, it emerged that comedians performing at SOAS, the University of London college specialising in the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, were asked to sign in advance a “behavioural agreement” forbidding them from tackling any topic in a way that is not “respectful and kind”.
Other tales abound. This summer, students at the University of Manchester painted over a mural of Rudyard Kipling’s muchloved 1895 poem If
– regularly voted among the nation’s favourite verses – arguing that the writer “dehumanised people of colour”; it was replaced with Still I Rise,a 1978 work by the Africanamerican poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. In March, Bristol University student union became the first in the country to “no-platform” speakers who question the transgender status of women; three years earlier, Cardiff University students attempted to stop prominent feminist Germaine Greer giving a lecture. Linda Bellos, the black, Jewish, lesbian feminist, was dropped from Cambridge University last year over the same issue. In February, Jacob Rees-mogg, the arch-brexiteer and Conservative MP, was manhandled while protesters disrupted his speech at the University of West England.
It is against this backdrop that Turning Point has turned to the UK. What’s more, they detect what they see as the malign influence of Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left politics in cranking up antagonism towards anyone with Right-wing views.
Mr Kirk is scathing. He doesn’t – like Mr Trump, whom he says he met at least 10 times last year – pull his punches. (Incidentally, Mr Kirk is in “almost daily contact” with Mr Trump’s influential daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.)
“Jeremy Corbyn is a Jew-hater. Jeremy Corbyn is a committed Marxist who wants to destroy Western civilisation,” he says. For the record, Mr Corbyn denies being anti-semitic, although members of his own parliamentary party have also levelled the criticism at him. For two years, Labour has been embroiled in a series of damaging rows about anti-semitism that Corbyn has been accused of being slow to put a stop to.
Ms Owens chimes in, fearful that “a dangerous socialist ideology” is now gripping British campuses.
“We don’t want political hacks like Jeremy Corbyn taking advantage and exploiting the youth because he realises that they have no real-world understanding. British students are naive. Corbyn wants to lower the voting age to 16,” she claims. “He understands there is a naivety of youth that attracts them to utopian ideas.”
Ms Owens doesn’t stop there. “Students have gone soft. They are mollycoddled. The idea that you can shut down speech because it makes you slightly uncomfortable is ridiculous,” she says. The demand that stand-up comics on campuses sign “behavioural agreements” is evidence of a world gone mad. “The Left has killed comedy,” she says, deadpan. “Political correctness has killed forms of enjoyment for people.”
“Monty Python would not be allowed in this politically correct culture,” Mr Kirk adds. “That’s true.”
I ask him if, as a committed Christian, he would – as an advocate of free speech – still allow the screening of Monty Python’s Life of Brian? Made in 1979, the religious satire was hugely controversial, banned in some cinemas and accused of blasphemy. But Mr Kirk has never heard of it.
On reflection, he says: “I am an evangelical Christian, but I don’t want Life of Brian banned.”
Mr Kirk is in favour of free speech, whether he likes the views espoused or not. He’s not so sure when it comes to Islamists, however. “I would ban Iranian-funded groups from British campuses,” he says after a long pause.
Mr Kirk and Ms Owens will return to Britain in the spring for Turning Point’s official launch. Backing will come from British donors – from grassroots activists, but also from business leaders.
John Mappin, a hotelier and businessman, said: “There has not been a political arrival like this in Europe since the arrival of Jefferson in Paris in 1784, and the export of his ideas of freedom.”
Mr Kirk is more modest. “We are a cultural movement. What we hope to achieve is what we have done in the States – that is to significantly change the conversation.”
British snowflakes, you have been warned.
‘The Left has killed comedy. Political correctness has killed enjoyment’