TPUSA FIRES Brand Ambassador at Behest of Jared Holt’s Right Wing Watch

411

Ashley St Clair was fired by Turning Point USA on Monday after Jared Holt inquired to the organisation about photos of her taken with other right-wing figures at a dinner.

St Clair, a popular influencer with TPUSA, attended a dinner last week after the Defend Free Speech Rally in Miami organised by Enrique Tarrio, the current leader of the Proud Boys. The dinner had a wide variety of attendees from all across the conservative spectrum, including Kathy Zhu and Jacob Wohl, and Nick Fuentes and Tim Giornet, better known as Baked Alaska. Photos were posted of the dinner by Zhu on Twitter, and many were pleasantly surprised to see a group of people who hadn’t always gotten along be cordial and friendly to one another.

Fuentes and Giornet have been previously described as “far right” and “white nationalist,” which meant Jared Holt, and his hard-left media outlet, Right Wing Watch, and made swift work of cancelling St. Clair.

Holt and his team messaged TPUSA about the photos: they confirmed that they had dropped St. Clair in a statement:

TPUSA is a large national organization that touches hundreds of thousands of people all across the nation. Ashley is no longer one of our thousands of volunteer activists and ambassadors. Charlie [Kirk] and TPUSA have repeatedly and publicly denounced white nationalism as abhorrent and un-American and will continue to do so.

St Clair stood by her actions and defended herself to Holt’s organisation, saying that she had attended a “diverse dinner,” and that despite the fact that some attendees had been “vicious to her in the past,” she is “not above confronting… or forgiving people”:

I’m a strong Jewish woman and don’t need to be told where I can and cannot go. I’m sick of guilt-by-association twitter journalism that leaves out all context and meaning. The focus of the dinner was civility. I’m not accountable for anything anyone else posts online and I myself have been a victim of bigoted trolling. Attending a dinner for a civil conversation is not an endorsement for anybody’s views.

Many on Twitter, including attendees of the dinner, were quick to denounce the decision of TPUSA to drop St Clair:

Tarrio told National File said he was disappointed with the actions of TPUSA:

Turning Point USA is showing they’re not pro-First Amendment if they’re willing to fire one of their better brand ambassadors because an Antifa supporting website asked them to. It’s disappointing to see Turning Point USA bow to pressure from a left wing outlet.

Some on the right, however, applauded the actions of Turning Point, including Will Chamberlain and Ian Miles Cheong, both of Human Events:

Zhu and others were quick to fire back at their accusations:

CJ Pearson, a self-described proud black American and young conservative commentator, said that Chamberlain’s tweet was an example of “flagrant cowardice” and “cancel culture at its worst”. Pearson told National File that it is important that the right do not allow the left to dictate who those on the right can socialise with, and that conservatives should not subscribe to any terms that the left uses to defame right-wingers:

I think it’s a shame to see certain people on the right do the left’s bidding for them. We have constantly seen that leftists don’t care about any person on the right… [so] it is a shame to see Will Chamberlain and those like him using George Soros funded reporting to rip away the livelihood of someone who did nothing more than just take a picture.

Fuentes has repeatedly stated that he is a white nationalist, an accusation he labelled as a “totally false smear,” and also claimed that Chamberlain, in an ironic twist, “openly fraternizes” with Holt himself:

National File reached out to Fuentes and Chamberlain, but both were unavailable to be reached for comment. Charlie Kirk, head of TPUSA, was reached by phone, but refused to comment on the story.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR