Dan Crenshaw is building a young activist army
The lawmaker is trying something new in electoral politics, getting people to pay to come see him. It’s working.
By HAILEY FUCHS
09/16/2021 04:30 AM EDT
An hour or so into Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s conservative youth confab at the downtown Hilton Hotel in Houston this past weekend, technical difficulties began to mar the affair.
A video call with Jordan Peterson, the provocative right wing professor the New York Times once called a “custodian of the patriarchy,” began to glitch. As staff tried to fix the sound, Crenshaw, standing on the stage in the hotel’s ballroom, improvised. Turning to the audience, which had pushed up close to hear him speak, he began taking questions.
“What are we gonna see next, Governor Crenshaw or President Crenshaw?” one attendee asked.
The crowd — hundreds of teenagers and 20-year-old conservatives largely from Texas — went absolutely wild.
“Like a good politician, I have to say Congressman Crenshaw is what you’ll see next,” Crenshaw said. “I don’t know, you know, but to answer that honestly, always will keep options open.”
It was a brief moment in a two-day affair that saw more than 2,000 young people gather to hear from conservative media luminaries like Ben Shapiro, Benny Johnson and Megyn Kelly. And while the weekend gave the whiff of a bar mitzvah for the MAGA faithful — with purple, blue, and green lasers shot over the crowd and techno and pop music blaring from the speakers — political veterans also called it an innovative approach to campaigning from Crenshaw and his congressional campaign committee, which paid for the event.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/16/crenshaw-activist-army-511963
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