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Welcome back to False Flag! The conservative powerhouse organization Turning Point USA has suffered yet another setback. Just days after a widely ridiculed video showed Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Turning Point CEO Erika Kirk announcing a new effort to open more organizational chapters in Arkansas, the University of Arkansas’s TPUSA branch announced it would be ditching the mothership entirely.
Instead, chapter president Dino Fantegrossi announced on Instagram that the group would become a branch of “Young American Revival,” an upstart organization with a logo of an eagle carrying a crucifix.
While Fantegrossi didn’t explicitly cite Candace Owens’s attacks on Erika Kirk or Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s murder for his decision to leave TPUSA, he said in the Instagram post that his fellow students were “generally put off by how Charlie Kirk has been used by TPUSA since his assassination.” The group, he said, had been exploiting the memory of its dead founder.
As embarrassing as this is for TPUSA, I don’t expect a flood of other disaffiliations to follow. For one thing, TPUSA still has the right’s best parties.
Yet Fantegrossi’s move does raise a troubling question for TPUSA: Is the general controversy around the organization (stirred up cynically by Owens) making TPUSA a bit toxic, or maybe just uncool, for the next generation of conservative activists?
Ultimately, this is small potatoes compared to the problem that the established MAGA movement is currently facing—the one that’s the subject of today’s False Flag. The dramatic resignation of counterterror adviser Joe Kent from the Trump administration over the war in Iran has given the president’s MAGA critics a new cause to rally around.
This is a battle that is inflaming already white-hot wars in right-wing media—and I’m only able to cover its twists and turns thanks to our Bulwark+ members. Please consider signing up today, at 20 percent off the normal annual price!
–Will
Why Joe Kent’s Resignation Will Inflame the MAGA Civil War
The time for choosing sides has now officially arrived.
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THE FACTION OF MAGA PERSONALITIES angry about Donald Trump’s war with Iran now has a martyr, and he’s one of their own.
The resignation of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent this week—and the ensuing Trump administration attacks on him—have lent a new prestige to Iran-war critics like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Kent cited his disagreement with the war as the reason for his resignation (along with some wink-wink antisemitism about the war’s origins, too). In doing so, he gave likeminded allies a vessel onto which they could attach their own grievances.
He also did something those allies had been unable to do to this point: put real pressure on figures within the administration to make difficult calculations about their own political careers. If Kent could resign over the war—they might be asked in the not-too-distant future—why couldn’t they, too?
It’s fair to say, even at this early juncture, that Kent’s resignation is producing the biggest fissure on the right since Trump pushed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of Congress in November.
Kent is set to be interviewed by Owens Thursday night, at a banquet for MAGA group Catholics for Catholics. But first, he stopped by Carlson’s show on Wednesday, where Carlson sought to position Kent as an aggrieved patriot attempting to save the country from “certain disaster.”
“Is this the kind of person that makes me proud to be a fellow American?” Carlson asked his audience to consider.
The answer Carlson was looking for, of course, was “Yes!” Summing up the flurry of leaks aimed at Kent since his resignation—the latest being that, prior to his resignation, he was put under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information—Carlson said the Trump administration’s new ethos was “Joe Kent was right, therefore Joe Kent must be destroyed.”
Supporters of the Iran war outside the administration have also tried their hands at discrediting Kent. Mark Levin, perhaps the right’s most prominent war supporter, called Kent a “rogue staffer.” Glenn Beck and others pointed to an article critical of American aid to Ukraine that Kent’s wife coauthored for the Grayzone, a publication that has frequently run cover for Vladimir Putin. Beck, who erroneously called the site “the Graystone,” suggested that Kent, through his wife, has somehow fallen under the thrall of pro-Putin forces.
“The man may be the head, but the wife is the neck and she turns the head,” Beck said.
But Kent’s resignation is attracting some unusual supporters too, suggesting his criticisms of the war could get more support than those offered by more polarizing figures like Owens. While Breitbart has attacked him, the Daily Caller called his critics “neocon chicken hawks.”
Kent’s resignation is important not just because it’s forcing conservative publications to weigh in on the merits. It’s important because he isn’t a faceless bureaucrat. Kent is a known figure in right-wing media, with friendships with people like Carlson to draw on.
As a congressional candidate, he became a frenemy of antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, first talking to Fuentes on the phone in an apparent bid for his support, then infuriating the groypers when he disowned their leader. Kent even employed a Proud Boy. And he embraces some of the dissident right’s more outlandish beliefs, saying in his appearance on Carlson’s show that he was blocke