The truth about Turning Point

Earlier this week I made the usual mistake of looking at Twitter and saw that ‘Turning Point’ was trending. This is unusual in Britain. Turning Point is a very successful organisation set up in the US to counter the dominance of left-wing views on campus. It turned out to be trending because of the launch of Turning Point UK this week. In essence the response to the launch of Turning Point demonstrated the need to launch Turning Point in the UK.

After all, what we are talking about here is a student-oriented organisation which wants to extol the virtues of free markets over socialism and individual liberty over identity politics. There is nothing in the group’s statements so far that should cause a flutter even among the precious mobs on social media. But the launch of Turning Point UK was covered in exactly the way you might expect. Varsity described the group as ‘far right linked’, Wired celebrated various self-described ‘anti fascists’ who had apparently ‘ruined Turning Point UK’s big day’ by setting up mocking parody accounts on social media. If there are any actual fascists around anywhere they must be trembling in their boots that this generation of ‘anti-fascists’ is so willing to die for its principles that it will even set up parody Twitter accounts to bring about their downfall. Take that, Nazi scum.

The Guardian meanwhile went with ‘Tory MPs back youth group with apparent links to US far right’. I would assume that the Guardian’s legal team must be thanked for that ‘apparent’. And very important it is too. After all we might all say anything we like about anybody so long as we caveat serious accusations with such legal weasel get-out words. We might all say anything we like about the hacks at the Guardian for instance.