 It didn't take long for Turning Point UK, hailed as the nationalist right's answer to momentum, to descend into a chaotic crab barrel of mutual recriminations, parody accounts and even Hitler Apology. Needless to say, the internet and left twitter in particular was absolutely loving it. If only there was some German word perhaps to describe the pleasure one feels at another's misfortune. It was only 18 months ago that Activate, remember the hashtag retweet hashtag imploded after a mere two weeks in the public eye, after members got caught talking about gassing chabs and a charming imposter found his way onto the Navarra media sofa. And this all got me thinking, why is it that conservative youth organisations always turn out so weird. Back in the 1980s, the Federation of Conservative Students, whose former chairman include David Davis and strangely enough John Burkow, considered themselves a ballwork against socialism's pernicious influence in UK universities. If Margaret Thatcher considered herself a dry conservative, the FCS were positively desiccated. There were vocal supporters of extremist right-wing guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola and printed the now notorious Hang Nelson Mandela posters. They ended up getting disbanded by Norman Tebe in 1987 after their interest antics saw them getting branded as the right-wing equivalent of militant. It's tempting to see Turning Point UK as just another baffling flub in a long and rich history of right-wing youth organisations taking things a bit too far. But I think there's something else going on here, because unlike the FCS, who had relatively little overlap with their Reaganite counterparts, Turning Point UK are utterly inseparable from the American alt-right. Their gatherings have been swanky transatlantic affairs featuring that now infamous Q&A in which Candace Owens appeared to defend Hitler's domestic policy. Also involved is prominent Trump donor and noted conspiracy theorist John Mappin, who so far has remained tight-lipped about the organisation's funding sources. And while Turning Point UK say that their ambitions are to energise a student movement across the UK, their advertising focus has been skewed stateside. A Facebook ad ahead of their launch wasn't seen by a single soul in Britain. Instead, all the targeted views were in Texas, Ohio and London, Borough of California. Their American cousins Turning Point US don't seem that bothered by the student engagement bit of their mission statement either. None of their paid-for adverts on Facebook are targeted at anyone under the age of 24. Instead, their core audience is aged 45 and over. The weirdness of conservative youth organisations isn't just the inevitable consequence of swimming against the current of your generation's values. All that bombastic talk of cultural Marxism and campus snowflakes isn't intended for the millennial ear anyway. They're not actually trying to be the new momentum. Their role is to rile up economically secure but culturally anxious baby boomers to normalise reactionary ideas in extreme electoral patterns. Their establishment-backed astroturfers dressing up as grass-root social movements and most of them have graduated bloody ages ago anyway. This isn't counterculture, it's classic counter-revolutionary strategy, only now with memes.