Conspirituality hosts dissect the Turning Point USA Women's Leadership Summit, exposing its blend of "Gold Star Science," anti-feminist rhetoric, and pseudoscience promoted by speakers like Alex Clark and Hilda Labrada Gore. They critique pricing tiers sponsored by the NRA and Rumble, a "burn book" for progressives, and the hypocrisy of entrepreneurs blaming feminism while relying on modern technology. Ultimately, the analysis reveals how the event's "resistance" branding masks a push for conformist values, anti-trans narratives, and debunked health theories like raw milk curing diabetes. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to the comeback of Gold Star Science, Beauty, and Backbone.
Welcome home.
This is absolutely insane.
I have seen so many young girls that are showing up for this event.
We're flipping the tables and we're rewriting our own story.
This is your wake-up call.
Do not conform.
Do not be discouraged.
Do not delay.
Let your mind be renewed.
Let your spirit be bold and courageous.
Let your hands start your feet.
Welcome to the resistance, Derek.
This is your wake-up call.
Your spirit is looking mighty bold today, Julie.
And for listeners who can't see us, Julian was dancing away during that first clip.
So we're in for quite an episode today.
I'm feeling bold.
I'm inspired.
You just heard one of the Instagram clips promoting the upcoming Turning Point USA Women's Leadership Conference, or actually Women's Leadership Summit.
It's bright and colorful.
There's uptempo dance music.
There's B-roll of young women dancing and clapping their hands in the crowd.
There's really glamorous female speakers up on stage.
All of the promo video that I've been looking at is from last year's event in Dallas, which they claim had 3,000 participants.
And I'm sure that's pretty close to true.
We're going to hear a couple more clips, but I want to start by saying that we could pause, Derek, after each sentence in these videos and do a few minutes of analysis because it's all so loaded and the messaging is so rich with various types of hypocrisy and contradiction and pseudoscience.
First off, the speaker that we just heard in that clip is one of your absolute favorites.
So I'm very happy for you, Derek.
This is Alex Clark.
I love her.
I just have to flag the line she had in there, which is, welcome to the comeback of Gold Star Science, Beauty and Backbone.
Your comments, please.
Well, first, we obviously have to send Mallory to the conference this year to cover it and to get her leadership skills up.
So, Mallory, guess what?
You're going to Dallas in, what, June?
She sent you this clip, right?
She sent me one of them.
Yeah, I'll get to that.
No, you found that clip.
She had sent me another one we're going to cover today.
But Alex Clark is yet another disaffected liberal who was interested in media and made their way through the ranks of radio before she seized an opportunity to go full conservative with Turning Points USA in 2019.
In fact, she studied radio, TV, and journalism in high school, and then I believe in college.
And her aspiration was to work at Teen Vogue, which if you're not familiar, was very political, very left-leaning for a long time until I think last year they completely gutted the politics department like so much media.
They did a lot of excellent work.
I was able to write an article about male eating disorders for them about two years ago now, and I really enjoyed reading them.
Alex Clark launched Poplitix in 2019 to cover entertainment and politics through a conservative frame.
She coined the term cut servative to create a space for other young, right-leaning women.
And as her fame grew, she started veering into health.
But as Mallory discovered last year, she admits that she does not fact-check guests because that would, you know, it would just take too long.
So, Brian artists, you want to come up here and say that nicotine cures autism?
I'm not going to fact-check that.
You've done your homework.
You've done your research.
I'm going to trust you on this.
And in fact, I'm going to put my box of nicotine patches right next to me and then sell them on my downline because you say that's a good thing.
That is, of course, via her most recent podcast, which is called Cultural Apothecary.
And it has become a giant Maha propaganda vector.
And she feels comfortable saying things like, as you flag gold standard science, even as she spreads misinformation about birth control and vaccines.
All right, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theory and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
Weston Price Dental Myths00:08:57
And of course, anything and all things Turning Point USA.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky.
And if you are able to support our work as independent media analysts and journalists, you can do so at patreon.com/slash conspiratuality, where you will get access to all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes for the low, low price of $5 a month, as well as accessing our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions, if that is easier for you.
All right, so let's get into it.
This year's Turning Points USA Women's Leadership Summit is slated for the first weekend of June.
I went to the website to find out more and saw that registration for the whole three days is priced in tiers, but they really do want to bring in a young crowd.
It's just 50 bucks for 13 to 26 year olds, and then it doubles to 100 for what they call young adults, which is 27 to 35.
It doubles again to 200 when you hit 37 years old.
I guess you're making a ton of money or you've got a sugar daddy, right?
VIP pricing gets you more access, so to the VIP lounge and the meet and greets, and that ranges between $300 and $450, depending on your age.
When does the senior discount start to slip in?
Because I think we've crossed that.
I'm getting my AARP cards now that I'm 50.
So I should be getting a discount here.
Yeah, you know, they have a button on the website for seniors, but it goes directly to the CPAC registration site.
They've already got that covered.
So this all makes sense because Turning Points USA got its start on college campuses.
It's become this major political force pushing younger generations toward conservative religious-coded politics instead of towards more progressive politics, which has been the norm for a long time.
They've held these young women's leadership summits since 2015.
And as far as I could tell using my internet skills, it looks like this is the first year that they've opened it up beyond the word young.
They just dropped the word young and it's a women's leadership summit.
Well, as a fellow AARP card candidate, at the very least, you know, we got to question your internet skills.
I looked into the 2025 edition and here is how Southern Poverty Law Center described it.
Quote, the theme, Welcome Home, promoted a return to, quote, traditional America.
The venue was decorated with pastels, gingham prints, bows, and embroidery, and reflected a hyper-feminine aesthetic that seemed to be inspired by the antebellum American South.
The event was sponsored by such organizations as the National Rifle Association.
I'm sure they're trying to get more women to buy guns.
Patriot Mobile and Rumble, a video sharing platform known for hosting extremist content.
In the vendor hall, attendees could purchase clean vitamins for conservative women or apply for a fellowship with the Heritage Foundation.
Oh my God.
One Barbie Pink TPUSA booth had a Mean Girls-style burn book where attendees could write insults next to unflattering photos of progressive leaders.
Wait, wait, this is cute-servative.
This is cut servative, right?
That's what that is.
And it's not political, right?
This is really for everyone as we'll get into more clips.
I'll keep going with SPLC here.
The page for former First Lady Michelle Obama accused her of secretly being a man with higher testosterone levels than former President Barack Obama, a contemporary example of the racist stroke portraying black women as masculine and therefore justifiable targets of violence.
On the page dedicated to U.S. rep Nancy Pelosi, the first woman elected House Speaker, one note read, die, while another called her an evil witch.
Another ominously warned, your time's sick, coming soon.
I love the sick.
I love how people are grammatically correct, just to point out that when people are making threats like this, they often get the grammar wrong.
Yeah, and they're taking notes from the QAnon shaman's visit to the Capitol.
That whole thing that you just read reminds me of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, this comedic kind of faux game show that runs on NPR, where they have a segment where they'll read three different accounts of something bizarre sounding that happened in the world, and you have to guess which one is actually real because they all sound so ridiculous.
This could easily be a parody.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
You can have your Patriot mobile phone where you're looking on Rumble at like, you know, how to buy a new assault rifle or something.
So speakers include Erica Kirk in this upcoming summit.
She's on like her grieving widow national tour in sequins, you know, and with her hair always perfectly done.
Which is going to last for a long time, it seems.
She's going to milk this for as long as possible.
Yeah, and who knows where she'll end up in the potential administration in the future.
And then, of course, Alex Clark, who we've talked about, anti-trans activist and famous fifth-place swimmer Raleigh Gaines, and rising star conservative Christian podcaster Alibeth Stuckey.
Now, there are others, but I don't really recognize any of them.
And their specialties, Derek, are things like Christian parenting or being an anti-woke activist or a patriotic educator.
But there was one bio in there that really jumped out at me.
The woman's name is Hilda Labrada Gore, and she goes by holistic Hilda, apparently online.
And the quote here is that she empowers women to show up as the healthiest version of themselves by following ancient health practices.
It says that she's traveled around the world, exploring Mongolia, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Kenya, Australia, and Albania, seeking to learn the healthy habits of indigenous people.
She's got a course called The Mother Code and is the lead ambassador for, of course, an animal-based supplements line for women.
She hosts a podcast based through the Weston Price Foundation.
So this is like straight down the line of maha, but with this little extra twist of indigenous wisdom, which I thought is a new wrinkle for a group that is notoriously kind of white supremacist, even if they're not open about it, right?
Well, they will give a head nod to ancient practices, even as their own.
I mean, the contradictions within Maha, we've covered many of them, and that is also one of them.
So if Kennedy were to find, oh, let's actually, you know, talk about Weston Price for a moment because he is famous for identifying dental records of a supposedly indigenous culture to make the argument that I believe that one was sugar is horrible, which of course sugar is bad in excess.
But that became his sort of platform by which he started espousing many forms of pseudoscience.
So you can have Kennedy saying sugar is terrible.
You know, we have this tribal indigenous community saying this, and you could still have the sort of soft eugenics that Maha espouses.
They go together because they won't, you know, recognize the contradictions.
And Weston Price, I mean, the fact that they still exist, they really do represent the old school of misinformation.
They've been pushing for saturated fats and high cholesterol for a long time.
They've been against fluoride, you know, dating back to Birch Society, but the foundation itself was founded in 1999.
They also believe raw milk cures diabetes.
They believe that magnets can treat stroke victims.
They think that sunlight is the best thing for melanoma, which is, of course, the most extreme form of skin cancer.
Oh my god.
And they also state that root canals block the flow of qi through dental meridians.
Oh boy.
And obviously they love vaccines.
They're all for vaccines.
Goes without saying.
The term crank magnetism was actually coined in 2007 to describe their work.
We should be fair though, Derek, because nobody knows how magnets work.
Like it's one of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe.
And of course, you know, just because science hasn't discovered the dental meridians yet, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Yes, I know people who swear by all of these kinds of treatments.
Yeah, I think that Western Price, like dental records shtick, is often pulled out to back up ideas of like a paleo diet that comes from the time before agriculture.
So it's like grains and then what grains, you know, break down to in terms of sugar.
That's the reason why we have terrible teeth compared to these ancient people.
I'm always fascinated by how they latch onto things like this.
Food Purity Contradictions00:14:19
And then we actually do.
There is some amazing anthropological work of photographs of indigenous people who never wear shoes.
And their feet look like another animal because they're dexterous, they're flexible, they're strong because they're gripping the earth all the time.
And as sort of a longtime minimalist footwear, you know, advocate who's dealing with plantar fasciitis right now, but for different reasons, because I wasn't working them out enough, but still, like, tight toe boxes are terrible.
That is something that I've been teaching and espousing for decades of my life.
But the Price Foundation and people like that will always go towards these really weird examples of their own hobby horses when it comes to indigenous wisdom.
Whereas we would be much, I'm not saying don't wear shoes, like that's not my argument at all.
But like when we have actual photographic evidence and data over how much better a health intervention could be, it's like crickets.
They don't even notice those sorts of things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're looking for the most outlandish, like weird theory that will bolster up whatever product they're selling or whatever kind of elaborate ideology they want to invest in as opposed to something that practical and basic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're not going to they're not going to invest in footwear and try to sell them.
But if they did, then they would actually use that, which we do have harder data to support.
Yeah.
So the tone of this particular bio, which I pulled out from the rest, it struck me as resonant with the branding of the conference because I doubled back to the homepage and it says that the conference is curated for her capital H-E-R with periods after each of those letters.
And they're each supposed to stand for something so holistic, empowered, and redeemed.
And each of those words has like this little blurb underneath it on the homepage.
Under holistic, it says, and I really felt like I could be looking at any kind of new age or yoga teacher or coaching website from 10 years ago.
For the woman leaning into ancestral wisdom, whole foods, movement that builds resilience, and habits that support hormonal, mental, and spiritual health, she understands that modern convenience comes at a cost, and she chooses discernment, personal responsibility, and informed self-care instead.
I have to say, whoever the fuck designed their collateral needs to be fired also.
You know, the her, you recognized, it sort of actually mimics the artist her in terms of all capitals.
Yeah, sometimes she designed, but in a much gaudier way.
The H is dark green, the E is pink, and the R is purple.
And I'm just allergic to bad design, and this is truly awful, which actually reflects the content of the conference.
So maybe it is fitting.
All right.
Everything is coherent here.
All right, Derek, you're in luck because I've got more Alex Clark for you from the promo materials.
Oh, goody.
When women were kicked out of the home, pushed into the workforce.
That was when big food saw the perfect opening.
They said, ooh, yeah, don't worry about cooking.
Here's a TV dinner.
Here's a lunchable.
Here's a microwave tray of chemicals.
And look where that got us.
Skyrocketing chronic disease, infertile young women, kids who are totally morbidly obese, and families who don't eat together, let alone thrive together.
I love this so much.
So this was the clip Mallory originally sent me, which I shared with you and then kind of kicked off this episode.
It's just another example of the single cause fallacy.
And it's something that conservatives have latched onto for a long time.
So of course, the post-World War II era was one of the most successful for America in terms of industry and in terms of building a society.
And they point to that as just indicative of this is what we need to get back to.
Of course, it's pre-civil rights, it's pre-feminism.
So it tracks that Clark would make that argument.
But they latch on to the modern movement, at least where the conservatives have intersected with the health advocates via Maha.
They'll make these claims that, you know, it's actually your refrigerator that has created all of our health problems.
Because of course, that was, you know, it was, and there is some truth to the fact that microwave, you know, and frozen dinners started to make their way.
And it was this whole, again, anti-feminist argument.
But during the early 20th century, contaminated food, milk and water caused a ton of foodborne infections like typhoid fever, tuberculosis, botillism, and scarlet fever.
Refrigeration was a very successful public health response that controlled these diseases.
So of course they hate it.
It is actually a fundamentally food safe technology because it reduces illnesses and death, but it's not one of the many definitely natural supplements that Alex sells on our podcast.
So it has to be evil.
You know, the actual drivers of obesity are things like the social determinants of health, ultra-processed foods, which is one of them in excess, reduced physical activity, genetics.
It's not cold storage and it's not microwaves.
Infertility and chronic diseases have multiple causes, but since Maha specializes in reductionism, they have to make these sorts of arguments.
So none of this is actually surprising.
Yeah.
And it's classic, like lost golden age vibes because they're never referencing like what specifically refrigeration and faster cooking methods actually do that are so bad.
They're just like, it must be bad because when we were really living the way we were supposed to, we just kept the food in the pantry and we made everything from scratch.
And the woman was in the kitchen cooking and everything, which everything just worked the way that it's supposed to.
And obviously, that's going to be more nourishing, right?
And it is one of those areas where when I was more in the wellness propaganda space, I didn't have a microwave for a very long time because I was like, oh, this must be terrible.
And then at some point, I actually read up on it.
And no, reheating food or heating food in microwave is not bad for you by any measure.
But in the wellness world, because you're not actually, you know, going out in the yard and pulling them and then getting your big copper pot and the fire and the logs in the backyard, you know, and milking your radishes or whatever the fuck you're doing this week, it must not be healthy.
And I was, I was there, and now I use my microwave all the time.
Yeah, no, I was, I have to be humble about this.
I was there too.
I was there too.
I was very against nuking food.
I was very against ever setting foot in a, in a, in a drugstore.
You know, there were times I needed to, and I was like, I hope no one from my yoga class sees me here because it would be a terrible admission of weakness and lack of spiritual kind of enlightenment that I'm actually like in here buying an antihistamine or something.
But even there, you just said it, but like nonchalantly, but nuking food.
Yep.
Like it's just, there's all this war imagery that always comes up in these non-political health spaces that just try to fear monger you into not using these sorts of technologies.
Yeah.
And it's totally vibes-based.
It's relying on a kind of set of intuitive emotional associations and identifications.
All right.
It's making me think also of ballerina farm, which we're going to cover next week.
Like your whole, your whole shtick there about making the wood fire and milking the radishes.
Yep.
Oh, yeah.
This is going to be, we're deep in this.
So next Thursday's episode, get ready for the ballerinas.
We're coming after you.
You can't pirouette away.
All right.
Last clip here and then we'll be out.
So yeah, more women, men, and kids in the kitchen cooking real food.
How is this political in the least?
Feminism told women to chase their corporate dreams for their validation while their kids were eating seed oils and their marriages were collapsing.
Well, we're done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop.
When we reclaim our food, we reclaim our health and we reclaim power.
And that is what terrifies the left.
They've got pronouns, but we've got purpose.
I wonder who's ghostwriting her speeches because I mean, I hate it, but it's like there's a bunch of good slogans in there.
There's a reason she presents well for her crowd for sure, especially in prepared speeches.
When you actually watch when she goes off script in Ad Lib, it gets much messier.
So yeah, I mean, I don't know if she's writing or not.
You know, I think the coining of the term conservative, I mean, for what it is, she is good at branding.
I mean, she studied media and you can actually tell that.
And she presents, again, for her crowd very well.
But when you actually start to like read transcripts and break down what she's saying, it just like most of these people goes off the fucking rails.
Of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's good rhetoric.
It's good propaganda.
Yeah.
And it's almost like she got an education and pursued a career because feminism helped her get out of the kitchen.
We don't have to talk about that right now, though.
I love the transition.
She says, cooking real food.
And everyone's like, yeah.
She's like, how is this political in the least?
And then she pauses for like two seconds and says, feminism told women to chase their corporate dreams for their validation while their kids were eating seed oils and their marriages are collapsing.
Yeah, this is what I was hinting at before when I was talking about politics and health.
It was, you know, preempting this clip.
And it's an argument that, you know, Will Cole makes this argument of fucking carnivore.
Paul Saldino, you know, made an argument which then seeped into Kennedy's more recent speeches.
It's this idea that it's not political.
And the fact that she can like hold both of these things in her mind at once, saying it's not political.
And then they have a mean girl's burn book, you know, and it's she is deeply integrated in TPUSA.
It's not like they're inviting her in as an occasional speaker.
She's been with them since 2019.
She was very close with Charlie Kirk.
And I'm sure she has a say in the programming.
So to say it's not political and then to go and do that is just mind-baffling.
But it's also because it gives it the crowd cover.
It's saying, oh, it's their kumbaya liberal moment, right?
It's like, we're really doing this for everyone, and you don't see the value of what we're doing.
So we're going to rise above.
We're going to go high when you go low.
And then they immediately go low.
And a last thought, I also just have to say they've got pronouns, but we've got purpose.
I mean, yeah, it's kind of like the language flip we were talking about, you know, on this past Thursday's episode.
But I hate to tell you guys and women, you have pronouns too.
Like that's just, it's part of language, it's part of the English language construction.
So you're going to have to just deal with that.
Yeah.
And it's what you're saying is also just perfect.
Like the attempts to say, well, this is not political.
This is common sense.
This is this is just good values.
This is just us wanting to be redeemed in the blood of the Savior and, you know, eat healthy food and have women remember their correct place in society.
But it's not political.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
All right.
So there's something else here that I was sort of hinting at it a moment ago that runs through everything that I've seen about these events, as well as this whole MAGA, Maha, especially Christian conservative ecosystem.
And it's that in addition to the feud pure food purity or holistic health and life coaching vibes that have kind of crossed over from liberal culture into MAGA, there's also this really glaring contradiction that I always noticed.
Like you have these really strong, assertive, real boss babe women who are clearly making money as entrepreneurs or influencers.
They're media figures.
They present themselves in very glamorous ways in terms of their outfits and their hair and their makeup.
They're not looking demure.
You know, they're actually looking very, very like done up and kind of sexy.
Their hair, their makeup, all of that.
And then somehow they try to combine it with messaging that says feminine, excuse me, feminism robbed women of their femininity and their God-given role as essentially being submissive to men.
It fooled them into thinking that either a masculine style career was more important than being a wife and a mother, or it sold them on this liberal lie that you can have it all.
And it just comes across as hypocritical to me.
Like they've benefited from all the advances feminism made, certainly into the 80s and the 90s.
And they're pursuing, therefore, these high-profile careers.
But at the same time, they're doing so while telling other women, and especially younger women who look up to them, that they should embrace pre-feminist traditional religious gender roles.
It fits in with the Maha ethos, too, because all of the people involved have benefited unknowingly from public health interventions, including vaccines.
Because somewhere along the way, some of their family members benefited from vaccines and they probably personally have as well, along with everything else.
So it's just this constant construction of I want to return to this amazing place before these technologies existed, but I'm going to take advantage and exploit monetarily these technologies because I can do both of them.
And I have a whole cohort of people who won't see that contradiction, who will actually lavish in it.
And I can pull one over on them.
Yeah, it's a special kind of grift, I think, to present yourself in this way that is.
if you just scratch the surface a little bit, obviously contradicting everything about the message that has gotten you into that position.
It's like, wait, don't pursue a career, but here I am pursuing a career in which I tell you not to pursue a career.
The Technological Grift00:00:20
Keeping conform to like, and also like in that opening intro, right?
It was like, don't conform.
Like it's this, welcome to the resistance.
Like we're the ones who are saying that you're really kind of like an outside of the box revolutionary, but then we're going to sell you on all of these very old School traditional kind of Values.