December 21, 2018

81-Year-Old Commerce Secretary Addresses Conservative Youth Summit

Wilbur Ross told the unenthusiastic crowd that lazy young people need to “get off the couch.”

Andrew Harnik/AP

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Thousands of high school- and college-age conservatives have assembled this week in Palm Beach, Florida, for the Turning Point USA student action summit to address the future of the conservative movement. One representative of the Trump administration came to address them and give voice to the millennial appeal of the right: 81-year-old Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

Turning Point USA has close ties to the Trump administration, and its leadership training event over the summer in DC featured a number of White House officials and Cabinet members, including then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who declared that colleges were creating a “generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes.”

The Florida student action summit, however, seems to be suffering from the mass exodus from the administration that’s taken place after the midterm elections in November. Ross is the only member of the administration on the schedule. The commerce secretary is reportedly on the outs with President Donald Trump because, among other things, he keeps falling asleep during meetings.

On Friday, following energetic, youthful conservative activists like undercover provocateur James O’Keefe and millennial blogger Allie Stuckey, the octogenarian businessman gave perhaps the dullest speech of the conference. He read haltingly from prepared notes, in a presentation that had kids streaming to the exits like generals fleeing the White House. If more of them had stuck around, though, they might not have been so thrilled with what he had to say.

Wilbur Ross addresses a mostly empty ballroom at the Turning Point USA student summit. 

Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

Ross complained that more than 1 million jobs are going unfilled today because lazy young people just aren’t interested in going to work, due to lack of motivation and perhaps an infatuation with godless socialism. He implored the attendees, “If people sitting on the sidelines don’t realize that good jobs are readily available with high pay, please do the entire country a great service and encourage them to get off the couch and into the workforce. If we could move a lot of these nonworking Americans onto payrolls, they would be far better off and people would have their faith in capitalism restored.”

After running through some mind-numbing data points about the future of asteroid mining and other space business, Ross wrapped up his speech by telling the students in attendance, “Please help to get your contemporaries into the workforce…God bless America.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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