Emily Taylor

Charlie once spoke at Cambridge University in a room that was totally against him. When he talked about it on his show, he said: “We need to be unafraid to go into those environments… We need to be unafraid to go into the place where we’re not always going to be applauded. We’re not always going to be celebrated. We’re not always going to be welcomed with open arms.” Vanity Fair put me on their New Establishment list and I understand why some are asking why I would sit down with them. The answer is two-fold: 1) They were going to write something whether I participated or not. I could leave their audience with a story about me told entirely by other people, or I could speak for myself. 2) Growing our movement means going places where everyone doesn’t already agree with us. That’s what our students do on campuses every day, by the way. They set up a table and talk to whoever walks up, including people who disagree with them. They don’t pack up and go home just because someone says something they don’t like or flips their table or spits on them. I ask them to have that courage every day and I should be willing to do the same thing. As conservatives, we know that legacy media outlets are often hostile to us. But it doesn’t make sense to retreat until every magazine, university, cultural institution and media platform we disagree with comes to our side. Charlie didn’t do that, neither do our students, and I won’t do it either. Will they take digs at me? Of course. They spent plenty of time on my appearance, clothes and mannerisms rather than our growth, momentum, and resilience. There are things in the piece that lack context, that were petty, and in some cases even sort of mean, but that was to be expected. But now faith, freedom, and family are sitting in the pages of Vanity Fair, and a whole lot of people who don’t follow Turning Point USA are reading about those principles. To keep taking back ground as conservatives, we need to boldly walk into the left’s “safe spaces,” sharing our values, and talking about why America is worth fighting for. If we actually want to win the culture, we can’t just surrender huge parts of it to the left and then complain that they control it. There are a lot of opinions about the list and the profiles. Mine is that we need more dialogue, not less, and a lot more conservatives willing to walk into rooms where we aren’t expected, aren’t always welcomed, and certainly aren’t guaranteed applause. My plan is to keep walking into them.