Juan Pablo Andrade, former Trump campaign advisor and current advisor to Trump-linked dark money group America First policies, spent some time influencing young people at a recent conference.
The conference was for Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk's hard-right answer to the College Republicans. Just yesterday Donald Trump had praise for TurningPoint USA, tweeting praise for the group as an "ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,”
Some of the "thinkers" in attendance at the conference, according to Mediaite:
...featured speeches from first-son Donald Trump Jr., Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Fox News personality Tomi Lahren, right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, ex-White House official Seb Gorka, and a slew of other personalities inhabiting the MAGA-sphere.
Here's what one of those "very smart thinkers" had to say about the Nazis. In the video above, obtained by Mediaite from a Snapchat video, Andrade is in mid-rant about Nazis. He shouts at anyone within earshot, unapologetically.
This stands out: “The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep f*cking going!”
According to Mediaite, Andrade was in a room with a group of white supremacists who were apparently in attendance at the TPUSA conference.
While it may seem odd that a political figure tied so closely to the Trump administration felt the freedom to endorse Nazi genocide on-camera, Andrade did so in distinctive company. Also in the hotel room was a close friend of Andrade’s, Cæsar Svbervi, an alt-right activist who participated in the Charlottesville white supremacist march and has been filmed with Richard Spencer.
The room where the meeting was held was paid for by TurningPoint USA, according to the report.
Neo-Nazi views are being adopted by young people across this country. What Andrade said is no different than the views espoused online and offline by young white American men.
This Atlanta Journal-Constitution report about the radicalization of America's young people highlights the alienation they feel and how neo-Nazi groups fill that void.
Finding young adulthood a big, empty place, they are readily radicalized by hate groups that offer a sense of identity and belonging. Many white supremacists share an ironic bond with American Islamists: They are not indoctrinated by radical far-right parents so much as they are seduced by the Internet.
Here is one young man's story of why he has chosen the path of hate and neo-Nazis, as reported by the Washington Post.
And then his mother was off to her job as a businessman’s personal assistant, and he was alone again, with so much time it felt suffocating, so he hit a button on his keyboard and woke his computer. It sat on a desk strewn with pamphlets bearing titles such as “The Truth Behind the Jewish Talmud,” a lighter emblazoned with a swastika, a business card that read, “It’s not illegal to be White . . . yet” and cited a website glorifying the Nazi regime, and a stack of books: “The American Militant Nationalist Manifesto,” “Trump: The Art of the Deal” and “Fatherland,” a novel set in a world where Germany had won World War II.
But in this case, we have another variable. Heavily funded right wing groups like Turning Point USA and America First Policies funded by billionaires with far too much money to spend and no care whatsoever for what that money spawns.
According to the 2016 IRS report, TPUSA more than doubled its donations in 2016 from just over $2 million to $4.3 million in 2016. It was seeded and funded by Foster Friess, the same billionaire who funded Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller.
Since its creation, TPUSA has received substantial donations from Friess, Home Depot's Bernie Marcus, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Dick and Betsy DeVos and the Ed Uihlein Foundation.
These fine billionaire patriots are perfectly happy to fund aspiring young Nazis if they'll help electing people to cut their taxes. That young man is being paid to stir the pot, keep young folks angry and hateful, and especially to elect more Republicans.
Perhaps this is the "influence" Donald Trump, Jr. was referring to?
