Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is not a big Star Wars fan, but he sees a parallel in the epic story to former President Donald Trump and the trials he is facing.
“It’s very similar to the Star Wars saga,” he said in an interview. “You have ‘a new hope.’ And then the ’empire strikes back,’ and then it’s the return of Trump, or the ‘return of the Jedi,'” he said.
Kirk, just beginning to promote his fourth major book, Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, said that Trump, in his 2016 race, represented voters eager to fight America’s lurch into “wokeness.”
“So, Trump’s the new hope. And then they came back, and they did mail-in ballots and [Democratic elections lawyer] Marc Elias and Zuckerbucks, and we were at the lowest of the low in late January of 2021,” he said of the efforts to defeat Trump in 2020. “But now it’s the return of Trump.”
“When the story is written, it’ll be like, wow, Trump going down the escalator all the way to, God willing, a triumphant return when he was at this low. It’s incredibly compelling. I mean, there’s never been anything like it,” Kirk said, adding, “We’re living through a movie. We’re living through a book. This is kind of literary, and if it ends up that way. When you look at the macro, decadelong story of Trump, it’s rather remarkable.”
Right Wing Revolution was released on Tuesday and is the latest from Winning Team Publishing, founded by Donald Trump Jr. and Trump adviser Sergio Gor.
Trump represents something of a model for Kirk’s latest book, which charts the history of “woke” politics and suggests ways to kill it.
Kirk wrote that “woke” politics has been around for a long time but became supercharged during the Obama administration. He said it has its own hierarchy based on who liberals believe to be the most offended or dismissed.
“The simplest way of seeing this might be to look at the steady creation of bizarre new vocabulary within the world of ‘woke.’ The collective acronym for America’s non-heterosexuals was once GLB [gay, lesbian, and bisexual]. Under the pressure of feminists in the early gay rights movement, that acronym gave way for LGB, for the express purpose of putting women in a stronger position,” he wrote.
“In the ’90s, the ‘T’ was added. But the label has never been stable since. Once ‘T’ was in, every oddball made-up sexual minority wanted a spot. There’s been LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA, 2SLGBTQIA+, and even — I swear I am not making this up — LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM. No single person ordered this prolonged expansion of what is sometimes now called the Alphabet Soup community. Rather, its expansion is driven by rank-and-file ‘woke’ weirdos.”
“In a single line, wokeness is a mental illness that believes itself to be the cure,” wrote Kirk, whose group recently hosted a huge convention in Detroit that featured many GOP stars, including Trump and possible running mates.
Among his antidotes to end “wokeism” is to call it out and then ignore the predictable attacks from critics.
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“Care more about your family, care more about your country, care more about your state. However, care less about what they call you. So that’s the one thing where you should care less where you’re like, ‘I couldn’t care less.’ And I can tell you, it is incredibly liberating,” said Kirk, who has been criticized by both political sides.
“One of the lessons of Trump that I think is really great is that you just keep pushing forward regardless of what they call you, you double down, you triple down,” he said of the former president, who regularly faces attacks from the Left and anti-Trump Right.