“There Ain’t Nothing Wrong With Being a Tradwife”

At Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, the leaders of today told the leaders of tomorrow to make more babies and demonize trans people.

This article appears in full at The New Republic

The doors open 15 minutes early. A river of rompers and go-go boots and diaphanous floral print flows up the stairs, past multiple ring-lit selfie stations and toward the darkened entrance. The bass is getting louder as we draw near, the melody becoming clearer until it abruptly resolves itself into Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and we plunge into the cotton-candy disco world of Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit.

Soft pink light half-illuminates thousands of chairs, while the largest disco ball I have ever seen bathes the ceiling in drops of mercury. The screen behind the enormous stage is neon sherbet, and strobe lights beckon us forward. The two girls directly in front of me exchange a look of giddy excitement before rushing to find seats. I take my cue to do the same. Next to me, a young woman from Arkansas holds an astonishingly well-behaved baby on her lap. As DJ Bad Ash—blonde, beautiful, and tremendously pregnant—monitors her laptop in a form-fitting purple cocktail dress, the sherbet screen turns into a countdown to the main event.

Say what you want about TPUSA: The conservative youth organization knows how to throw a party.

It is the evening of Friday, June 9, in Dallas. Mere hours before this event began, President Trump was indicted. But that bad juju can’t puncture this ballroom; only Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s founder and president, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene will be gauche enough to devote an entire sentence to these “salacious, wrongful, horrible charges” before moving on. And yet nearly every speaker has something to say about the successful Bud Light boycott and Target intimidation campaign. Somebody call DJ Khaled: All we do inside these walls is win.

Read the rest at The New Republic