October 27, 2022
Republicans Have Spent Millions on Youth Outreach. And It’s Working.
By Lisa Herforth-Hebbert
Kyle Spencer’s new book Raising Them Right shows how the conservative establishment has recruited and trained new generations of activists over the last 60 years.
By Julian Epp
For conservatives, the most frightening place in the country has always been a college campus. By 1964, Students for a Democratic Society had formed chapters at hundreds of universities with tens of thousands of supporters, protesting racism, inequality, and the Vietnam War. After Barry Goldwater’s loss in the presidential election that same year, his young crusaders were worried—and inspired. They began building out conservative political infrastructure independent of the Republican Party to compete for America’s youth.
Paul Weyrich helped found the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation, and the Council for National Policy. The youngest Goldwater delegate, Morton Blackwell, would eventually become the youth director for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. But it wasn’t enough to get young people already interested in right-wing causes to vote—they had to be trained. In 1979, Blackwell created the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that offered workshops, seminars, and employment placement services for over four decades, funneling right-wing students from campus groups into the conservative machine.
Today, alumni of the Leadership Institute include Mike Pence, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Dan Crenshaw, and Mitch McConnell. The Institute claims that Blackwell has likely “trained more political activists than any other conservative”—more than 200,000—with over 1,700 conservative clubs and newspapers on campuses nationwide. But Blackwell is not alone. Turning Point USA, founded in 2012 by millennial Charlie Kirk, aims to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom” with donations from the Bradley Foundation and various Koch-affiliated groups. According to The Guardian, TPUSA’s revenue increased from around $4 million in 2016 to almost $40 million in 2020. Meanwhile, beginning in 2005, the libertarian Koch brothers Charles and David spent almost half a billion dollars on university and higher education nonprofit grants in an effort to push free-market ideas and integrate more students into their network.
