One of Americas most prominent conservative youth organisations has been engaged for months in a bitter internal fight over a university student wearing a babys diaper.
Turning Point USA, the non-profit founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk and funded by a roster of Republican mega-donors, is known for the performative stunts it uses to recruit new members on campus. Among other things, they have created a Professor Watch List for teachers who they claim discriminate against conservatives, and invited right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on college campuses.
However it was Free Speech Week at Kent State University last October, which featured one student dressed in a diaper, sucking on a pacifier in a playpen, that brought the group mass attention.
The stunt was meant to mock the idea of safe spaces protected areas on campus for members of marginalised groups by symbolising that only a baby would need one. Photos of the incident spread like wildfire online, where liberals and conservatives alike wondered why any adult would put themselves up for such a stunt.
What those poking fun online didnt know was just how much turmoil the incident caused inside Turning Point itself.
Just this month, the president and campus coordinator for Turning Point USA at Kent State University announced her resignation, claiming the national organisation had lied about the incident to the press and left her to clean up the fallout on her own.
As of right now, I am in disbelief at how I went from being so upbeat, enthusiastic, and passionate about this organisation to being disgusted, frustrated, and embarrassed to have invested my entire senior year into an organisation founded by a college dropout who hires some of the most incompetent, lazy, and downright dishonest people I have ever encountered, wrote former president Kaitlin Bennett in her scathing letter of resignation. ... That's why the Kent State chapter decided to ridicule the concept of safe spaces as part of the Free Speech Week they organised. During one planning session, Ms Bennett said, a member of a fellow conservative organisation suggested dressing up as a baby, to show that safe spaces were meant for children.
According to Ms Bennett, the event itself went swimmingly. Other students thought the person wearing the diaper was so funny, she said, that they even stopped to point and laugh. At a speaking engagement the next day, Mr Kirk even congratulated her personally on the chapters activism.
Keep up the triggering, good job, she says he told her.
Over the next several days, however, it became clear that many, many more people found the stunt funny for all the wrong reasons. Commentators on the left passed around photos from the event online, ridiculing the student who donned a diaper for the event.
Turning Points released a statement condemning the incident, which read, in part: While we support all our chapters to do innovative and creative activism events, this event clearly crossed the line and delved into the very obscure and inappropriate.
The statement also claimed that the event was not approved by their regional director or field staff despite the fact that, according to Ms Bennett, both the regional manager and field director knew about the free speech week. ... During their conversation, Ms Bennet says Mr Bowyer told her that the diaper incident was inappropriate because it gave the left a lot of ammo to take these pictures and make memes out of them.
Its not funny, Ms Bennet said the COO told her. Nothing about this is funny. Now every time Charlie [Kirk] tweets they tweet back pictures of him in a diaper.