Raising Them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement—and Its Plot for Power

Journalist Spencer (the memoir She’s Gone Country) draws a captivating and alarming portrait of the activists and donors spreading right-wing ideology to young voters. Tracking the rise of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, talk show host Candace Owens, and libertarian organizer Cliff Maloney, Spencer intersperses accounts of her subjects’ political awakenings with vignettes of training conferences, activist gatherings, and campus dustups. Kirk, a precocious political misfit from a diversifying Chicago suburb, decided to forego college on the advice of a 71-year-old Tea Party activist and spent his senior summer fundraising across the Midwest. Maloney, a theater kid from a hardscrabble Philadelphia suburb, surveyed the down-and-out patrons of the seedy pool hall he managed and concluded that government dependency was the problem. Owens, who spent her childhood in a “cramped, cockroach-infested” Stamford, Conn., housing development, chafed at her elevation to local cause célèbre when she reported receiving “a series of disturbing and searingly racist voice mails” to her high school teacher. Behind these and other activists is a network of donors who spend “hundreds of millions of dollars annually” on indoctrinating young conservatives, putting Republicans “ten steps ahead” of Democrats in youth outreach, according to Spencer. Marked by its impressive access and vivid prose, this superb political investigation offers a stark warning for the left. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary. (Oct.)