The kids are allright

Hoping there's a republic when the youth become adult

Trump Youth

[A] mostly white crowd of young people packed into a large ballroom for the chance to see the president. Many looked Fox News-ready, wearing slicked back hair and suits, or tight shift dresses, curled hair and strappy high heels.

Outside the ballroom, participants posed in front of a “FOX Nation” backdrop, and were able to pick up items like a sweatshirt with a collage of Trump’s face, “MAGA” purses, and $75 silk Trump scarves.

[...]

Trump rallied [the] crowd of young supporters with a colorful airing of grievances Saturday night, just days after becoming the third president in American history to be impeached.

“Crazy Nancy, she’s crazy,” the president said of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

[...]

Trump’s remarks came as he kicked off his two-week winter getaway with the keynote address to Turning Point USA’s annual student action summit here, not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort. It was a chance to bask in the love of some of his fiercest supporters, with scores of twenty-somethings donning “Make America Great Again” hats and rhinestone “TRUMP” hair clips.

[...]

“What kind of great support did we have from those great [Republican] congressmen and women this week? They were fantastic,” Trump said. “And I guess the vote was 196 to nothing, we had three Democrats coming to our side so we have to say it was a bipartisan vote.”

  Politico

Technically, he had only one. One of the the other two voted "present" and the third had already telegraphed his intention to switch parties right after the vote. But, in today's world, even one allows you to claim bipartisanship.

After being prompted from an audience member who yelled “Where’s Hunter?” the president launched into a discussion of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, in an echo of the speech his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani gave on the opening day of the summit.

Yeah, that was spontaneous.

Trump delivered a red meat speech that touched on everything from immigration and the border wall, to longtime enemies like “Never Trumpers” and windmills.

“Why is it okay for these windmills to kill the bird population?” Trump said in a long, colorful riff on wind turbines.

Unreal.

But the president seemed to get the biggest kick out of doing informal polls of the audience, first noting the standing ovation he got when he mentioned creating the Space Force, and then asking the audience to tell him which slogan they like better: “Make America Great Again” or “Keep America Great.” The audience overwhelmingly cheered for “KAG.”

“KAG is becoming cool,” Trump said.

[...]

The weekend’s list of speakers read like a who’s who of MAGA world: Giuliani, Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, commentators Dinesh D’Souza and Glenn Beck, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). The president was introduced by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

That is an incredible lineup. The nuttiest of the nuts.

Turning Point USA is the creation of 26-year old Charlie Kirk, who Trump calls “my great friend.” He’s a frequent guest at the White House and boasts of having the ear of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner.

Kirk has become a fixture on television as a voice for pro-Trump, conservative millenials and Generation Z.

Keepin' 'em ignorant.

UPDATE:

“I never understood wind,” Trump said [during a speech to the conservative student group Turning Point USA], according to Mediaite. “I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?”

“So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air,” the president added.

[...]

“A windmill will kill many bald eagles,” he said, according to Mediate. “After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true. By the way, they make you turn it off. And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail. That is OK. But why is it OK for windmills to destroy the bird population?”

  The Hill   

Youth reaction

Indeed, Ana.

Your child should not be allowed to ridicule a U.S. Senator, but your child should be allowed to buy an automatic weapon and shoot up a school.

I knew there would be people pushing back against the teens protesting lack of action on gun control, but I'm still surprised at the volume and the visciousness of it.  This one is pale, but no less problematic: respect is demanded, not earned.

A union.  They'll be getting the slings and arrows for sure.

The "solutions" of  "what we need is more people with guns" and "put armed forces (or drones, as I've seen recommended) in the schools" is beyond insane.  No wonder the kids are taking to the streets.  Their "respectable" elders have gone off the deep end.

In the end, I suspect they might get some mild concessions (although the Florida legislature wouldn't even allow a vote on the matter) meant to hush their voices rather than stop the mass killing.

“If the coach had a firearm in his locker when he ran at this guy — that coach was very brave, saved a lot of lives I suspect — but if he had a firearm, he wouldn’t have had to run, he would have shot and that would have been the end of it,” Trump said.

“Gun-free zone, to a maniac — because they’re all cowards — a gun-free zone is ‘Let’s go in and let’s attack, because bullets aren’t coming back at us,” Trump said, wondering aloud about arming “20 percent of your teaching force.”

“You can’t have 100 security guards in Stoneman Douglas, that’s a big school,” he said. “It’s a massive school with a lot of acreage to cover, a lot of floor area, so that would be certainly a situation that is being discussed a lot by a lot of people.”

“You’d have a lot of people that’d be armed, that’d be ready, they are professionals, they may be Marines that left the Marines, left the Army, left the Air Force, and they are very adept at doing that. You’d have a lot of them and they would be spread evenly through the school.”

The President said he believed “that if these cowards knew that the school was well-guarded from the standpoint of having pretty much professionals with great training, I think they wouldn’t go into the school to start off with.”

  TPM

Jesus, Joseph and Mary.

Our children are fed up

Students said Sunday they’re organizing an event called “March for Our Lives,” scheduled to be held March 24. There are also nationwide walkouts being organized on March 14 and April 20.

[...]

“My message for people in office is you’re either with us or against us. We are losing our lives while the adults are playing around,” Cameron Kasky, a student who survived the shooting, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“This isn’t about the GOP, this isn’t about the Democrats, this is about us creating a badge of shame for any politicians accepting money from the NRA and using us as collateral,” he added.

  The Hill

It can only be a good thing if our youth become politically active. We've had a very long run of disengaged citizenship. I just hope these kids don't get completely turned off by the corruption in politics or co-opted by a political party before they see any encouraging results of their activism.