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Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens Launch Turning Point UK to Fight Cultural Marxism Across British Universities
Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens announce the launch of Turning Point UK at a London gathering, bringing their proven campus activism model across the Atlantic. The duo, fresh from building America's largest student organization with presence on 1,400 campuses, reveal plans to target British universities in February with the same confrontational style that's generated billions of views. Kirk, who started Turning Point USA from his parents' garage at 18, and Owens, whose YouTube videos on feminism reached 26 million views, argue that Western civilization faces an ideological World War 3. They plan to challenge what they call the fascist left's monopoly on campus culture, positioning conservatism as the new punk rock rebellion for young people tired of being told what to think.
Bringing the Fight to British Campuses
Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens stood before a London audience, announcing their intention to launch Turning Point UK and bring their brand of campus activism across the Atlantic. Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA from his parents' garage in Chicago at age 18, explained how the organization has grown to America's largest student movement, present on 1,400 college and high school campuses with over 120 staff members and a $15 million annual operating budget.
The duo met a year ago and have since built what Kirk describes as an "only in America success story" - a kid from Chicago with no college education building a movement that's reshaping how young people think about freedom and Western values. Owens, who joined as communications director, brings her own compelling narrative from growing up in poverty to becoming one of the most watched conservative voices online.
The Cultural Marxism Threat
Kirk and Owens frame their mission as fighting what they call cultural Marxism, which they trace back to French post-modern philosophy and Italian Marxist thinkers from the 1920s and 30s. When economic Marxism failed to convince Western populations in the face of free-market success, Kirk explains, Marxists shifted to cultural warfare.
"Listen to Jeremy Corbyn for like 35 seconds and that's essentially cultural Marxism in a soundbite," Kirk said, describing it as an attack on Western society that portrays free enterprise as inherently exploitative and the United States as a great evil. This ideology, now dominant in universities, teaches that victimhood is a badge of righteousness, creating what they call the "oppression Olympics" where competing groups vie for the status of most oppressed.
Owens emphasized how this plays out in practice: "They say we're poor and you're rich and we have to take away your money," she explained, contrasting this with conservative arguments about economic efficiency that fail to connect emotionally with young people.
The Victimhood Trap
The pair reserves particular criticism for how victimhood culture has impacted minority communities, especially black Americans. Owens, who grew up in a family marked by poverty and children born out of wedlock, brings firsthand experience to this argument. She accumulated $150,000 in student loan debt before leaving college without a degree when loan companies collapsed.
"If you accept that you're a victim your entire life, you'll probably end up giving up a lot of your rights," Owens argued. She points to devastating statistics: the single motherhood rate in black communities has jumped from 23% in the 1960s to 74% today, while black Americans have become poorer over the same period despite expanding welfare programs.
Kirk reinforces this point by attacking the motivations of left-wing politicians directly: "Jeremy Corbyn says he cares for poor people but he himself cares only as long as he gets to maintain political power. If poor people became rich and self-reliant, maybe they won't be members of the Labour Party anymore and his power would diminish tremendously."
Culture War Strategy
The duo's success stems from understanding that politics is downstream from culture, a concept they credit to Andrew Breitbart. Rather than writing long-form essays, Owens started making four-minute YouTube videos that were funny and accessible. Her third video garnered 26 million views worldwide and was dubbed in Portuguese and French.
"This isn't a political war, it's cultural," Owens explained. "When you put 'big gov sucks' on a t-shirt, suddenly the movement becomes cooler and kids are more interested in it. There's a vibe going on that's very punk rock - you're not allowed to be conservative, which definitely makes kids want to be conservative."
Their campus events are designed for viral moments. They invite protesters, set up cameras, and encourage disagreement from the audience. "We might be in a room with 400 kids, but we repurpose that footage into one-minute clips that get millions of views," Owens said. "The generation beneath sees this and asks themselves: do I want to be the girl with purple, pink and yellow hair calling everybody a racist, or do I want to be the people who were poised on stage debunking arguments ideologically?"
The Kanye Effect
One of their biggest cultural breakthroughs came when Kanye West discovered Owens' YouTube videos and tweeted his admiration for her thinking. This broke what Owens calls the Hollywood bubble, where conservatives are forbidden from expressing their views.
"When Kanye tweeted this, it caused a mass firestorm," Owens recalled. "We spent a lot of time with him - he is a conservative, there's no question about that." However, she explains that Kanye learned you cannot do politics halfway. With a family and fashion brand at stake, he needed an exit strategy, which they provided.
Despite stepping back from public political engagement, Owens confirms Kanye remains conservative in his views. The impact of his brief public support helped fuel what has become a doubling of black support for Donald Trump over the past year.
Taking on the Universities
Kirk and Owens are clear about their target: the universities that serve as the left's primary recruiting ground alongside labor unions and government bureaucracies. "If anyone dares challenge their monopoly on university students, that's a political threat to the Labour Party instantaneously," Kirk explained.
They describe facing extreme opposition at campuses like UCLA, where they encountered Black Lives Matter protesters, Antifa members, groups chanting "no Nazi, no KKK, no fascist USA," and others playing Beyoncé music to drown them out. Yet by the end, students approached saying it wasn't what they expected - because media outlets like The Guardian had portrayed them as neo-Nazi sympathizers.
"The only way they can win the argument is to shut free speech down," Owens said. Their celebrity status now makes this harder - when universities try to quietly censor them, one tweet turns it into news and forces institutions to answer publicly for their actions.
The Environmental Question
When asked about environmental issues, which resonate strongly with young people, Kirk offers a three-pronged response. First, the number one polluter in the world is the U.S. federal government, so reducing government size would reduce pollution. Second, the Environmental Protection Agency itself caused the largest oil spill in America over the last fifteen years in the Colorado River, yet no one was held accountable.
Third, and most importantly, the war on fossil fuels hurts poor people most. "America is now energy independent for the first time in American history," Kirk said. "If you actually care about development of the third world, you should try to build as many coal-fired power plants as you possibly can. When you have a power plant, you have a hospital, you have a school, you have a mechanism to bring people out of absolute poverty."
He points to France's current unrest as proof that environmental concerns rank far below economic ones for most families. "When you start putting social issues first and say we need an answer on the environment, no - we need an answer on the economy," Owens added, noting that environmental issues have become a mechanism for government growth.
Nationalism Versus Globalism
Kirk and Owens embrace nationalism unapologetically, pushing back against media attempts to poison the term. "If nationalism is rooted on very good ideas and defense of common law and free enterprise, then yes, sign me up," Kirk declared. He argues that the idea of a nation-state is fundamental to a functioning society, while attempts to assimilate nations by force have led to more mass casualties than almost any other trend over the last century.
Owens goes further: "I don't have any problems at all with the word nationalism. Hitler's problem wasn't that he wanted to make Germany great - the problem was he had dreams outside of Germany, he wanted to globalize. That's not nationalism to me."
They view the European Union as the globalist project par excellence, working to erode national identity, unify currency, and destroy independent linguistic capacity. This makes Brexit fundamental to the defense of Western society, though they worry elites are doing everything possible to thwart the will of the British people.
The Psychology of Politics
Drawing on thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Kirk frames the fundamental disagreement with the left in terms of behavioral psychology. The left believes that with enough government force, they can eliminate hierarchies - the reality that some people will be better at some things than others.
"Cultural Marxism teaches there's no difference between men and women, which science tells you is fundamentally not true," Kirk explained. He points to Peterson's argument that hierarchies are embedded in animals going back to lobsters, which form colonies with clear leadership structures.
"If you admit that human beings are broken by nature, then you must fight for a system that requires the individual to act virtuously to be productive - and that's the free enterprise system," Kirk argued. "It's very hard to be massively successful while you lie, cheat and steal. You have to treat employees well, pay vendors on time. It breeds virtue, where socialism does the exact opposite."
The Social Media Battleground
Owens reveals that conservatives are preparing to migrate away from platforms like Twitter and Facebook to alternatives like Parler, which she discovered weeks before the event. After mentioning it in the Fox News green room, the platform crashed from overwhelming interest within 48 hours.
She identifies Alex Jones' simultaneous removal from YouTube, Facebook and Apple on the same day as the most alarming censorship event of the year, indicating collusion between tech giants. "Twitter is successful because of conservatives, because of Donald Trump tweeting, because of people like me and Charlie tweeting," Owens said. "If all of us migrate to another platform, that's how we defeat these companies."
The reason the left wants to censor these platforms, she argues, is because they allowed Donald Trump to get around mainstream media. "They want to return to a world where you pick up the New York Times and take it as Bible. They want to be the only source of information."
The February Offensive
Kirk and Owens plan to return to the UK in February to speak at three to four universities. "Put us at Cambridge," Kirk challenged. "We don't shy away from controversy. The most controversial, the most protests you can get - we will highlight, isolate and debunk the radicalism in 30 seconds or less and that will spread viral."
They're confident this will bring people out of the woodwork from across the UK wanting to start chapters, just as happened in America. "We don't go about anything unless we believe we can succeed," Kirk said. "We're here to fight a cultural war and we feel we can win."
Owens adds perspective on their courage: "So many people say we're so brave. We're not brave. Brave was our boys who landed on the beaches of Normandy with odds completely against them and won a war. That's what we're doing - fighting a cultural war."
The Blexit Movement
Separately from Turning Point, Owens leads Blexit - the black exit from the Democrat Party. She plans a tour of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and rallies in the neighborhoods of left-wing politicians. "The black community is extremely fatigued. They know something's not working. It's been 60 years of leftist policies, 60 years of telling us we should hate the rich, and somehow we're not getting richer by hating the rich."
She believes she can move the black vote 20 points by 2020, which would be catastrophic for Democrats who rely on winning more than 85% of the black vote to win elections. Hillary Clinton won 89% in 2016. Despite media outlets calling Trump racist millions of times, black support for him has doubled in the last year.
The Trump Phenomenon
When asked about the UK's lack of a Donald Trump figure, Kirk cautions that Trump was a movement 40 years in the making, from Goldwater to Reagan to Ross Perot to the Tea Party. While Trump deserves credit for the impossible feat of defeating the Bush machine, Clinton machine and media machine, it required infrastructure - pro-life groups, Second Amendment advocates, state Republican parties, and donor networks already in place.
Owens sees a domino effect: "Donald Trump created Candace Owens. Two years ago I was a liberal. Look how invested I got because of how much it mattered once the wool was pulled over my eyes. That energy will happen here too. Someone's going to rise up and say 'they said it first but I really believe in this.'"
Kirk invokes Winston Churchill, whom he calls "the greatest man to live in the twentieth century," quoting his famous line: "If you're not liberal when you're young you have no heart, and if you're not conservative when you're old you have no brain." He adds pointedly: "Boy does the UK need a Churchill right now, not a Neville Chamberlain."
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