Powerful people are sending young people out to do political battle against LGBTQ+ people, abortion and progressive causes.
Around White flew the flags of right-wing extremist groups, including the American Nationalist Initiative and the New Columbia Movement, carried by men who looked to be in their 20s, strapped with rosaries or assault rifles or both. On a cloudless January day in Dallas, they faced off against a group of nearly 100 community members who showed up to support the drag show performance that White and his peers were protesting.
Since he was 16, White has been following young white-supremacist agitator Nick Fuentes and groups like Protect Texas Kids, which has been targeting drag shows in North Texas, including the one that day in Dallas. The organization was founded and is directed by recent college graduate Kelly Neidert, who achieved notoriety by calling for transgender people to be criminalized and Pride event participants to be “rounded up” while she was the chapter chair of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) at the University of North Texas in Denton. Now she is using the activism skills she learned from YCT to lead other young conservatives like White, a freshman political science major who hopes to become a lawyer one day.
It’s all part of a nationwide effort by multiple well-funded groups, many of which originated or are based in Texas, to mobilize young people, mainly Christian youth, to engage in right-wing politics. These groups and their leaders are part of a roll-call of Christian nationalist power players who defend the January 6 riots, promote hate speech, and aim to build their economic and political power by instilling Christian and constitutional “originalism” in the public sphere. To achieve their goals, they are increasingly defending the use of violence, particularly anti-LGBTQ+ violence, which has shot up in frequency since the start of 2022.
What’s more, the leaders of the movement are set on convincing young people, starting even before high school, that they are the underdogs in this fight—the under-funded rebels fighting a rich, powerful leftist establishment–and that what they’re engaged in is a holy war for America’s soul.