"T wo months before American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 13 while addressing an audience at Utah Valley University, twenty-eight-year-old Caroline Stout felt compelled to post a video to her social media accounts. In it, she reflected on her time with Turning Point USA, the non-profit conservative campus organization Kirk co-founded."
""I felt strongly that I needed to speak out against the current administration. And figuring out my own experience would be the best place to start," Stout tells me from her home in Amarillo, Texas. Stout began working for Turning Point in 2014, at age seventeen-two years after the organization was formed-and resigned in May 2017, just months after United States president Donald Trump first took office."
"Stout, who works as a lawyer and a writer, says she grew up in a very conservative bubble outside of Houston, Texas, and, as a privileged white woman, was never forced to confront her politics or think for herself about what she believed in. "I grew up in a strong-faith community and attended a megachurch where being conservative was the default," she says. "I believed you could not be a Christian and also a Democrat; it was ingrained in me that those two things were incompatible. My community of origin was a fusion between a conservative ideology and an evangelical faith ideology. I couldn't question one without also questioning the other.""
Two months before Charlie Kirk's assassination, Caroline Stout posted a video reflecting on her time with Turning Point USA and her political awakening. Stout began working for Turning Point in 2014 at age seventeen and resigned in May 2017, just months after Donald Trump took office. She grew up privileged inside a conservative evangelical bubble outside Houston where attending a megachurch made conservatism the default and being a Christian was framed as incompatible with being a Democrat. That fusion of faith and politics prevented her from questioning beliefs until she later felt compelled to speak out and reassess her political conditioning.
Read at The Walrus
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