Broken old men
Lyz Lenz got to the bottom of MAGA's appeal.
His name was Bill Montgomery. He’d spotted Kirk as a young conservative activist, and together, the two of them had founded Turning Point in 2012.
“Why? Why did you want to found this group?”
Montgomery told me about his daughter, who had gone to college and come back questioning everything that he believed in. These colleges were turning children against their parents and their country, he told me. His daughter barely spoke to him. He blamed her professors. “But isn’t she an adult?” I asked. “Isn’t she capable of thinking for herself?”
I don’t remember being mad at Montgomery. He seemed a little broken. He’d seen a world he didn’t like, and he was going to fix it, and fix it, until the next child of some other lost man went to college, but this time they wouldn’t come back with uncomfortable questions that demanded answers. This time, they’d fall in line.