Because the creator of a sequence that has attracted 1.2bn reads, Rachel Smythe is without doubt one of the world’s main webtoons creators. However in her native New Zealand, virtually nobody appears to know what she does.
“If I’m going to a celebration, folks can be like: ‘I don’t know what that’s,’” stated Smythe, whose graphic novel primarily based on her ‘Lore Olympus’ sequence topped the New York Occasions bestseller record final yr. “And once I inform them that I bought a job with an app that was based in Korea, they are saying: ‘Rachel, it appears like a rip-off — are you going to be OK?’”
Webtoons, comedian strips which can be designed to be learn on a smartphone, are South Korea’s newest cultural export to interrupt out of Asia after the worldwide success of Ok-pop superstars BTS and Netflix sensation Squid Recreation.
They’re already large enterprise in Japan. In January final yr Piccoma, the Japanese webtoon subsidiary of Korea’s Kakao Leisure, achieved month-to-month revenues of $96mn, making it the second-top grossing non-gaming app on the planet. It was second solely to TikTok, surpassing YouTube’s app and Tinder.
Now webtoons are breaking into the mainstream. All of Us Are Lifeless, a South Korean zombie apocalypse coming-of-age drama that started life as a digital comedian on the Naver Webtoon platform, was on the finish of February probably the most watched non-English language present on Netflix. Kakao webtoons Itaewon Class, Shifting, and Dr Mind have been efficiently was TV sequence on Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+ respectively.
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However Smythe’s expertise illustrates how webtoons nonetheless stay unknown to many outdoors East Asia, at the same time as they collect a burgeoning military of younger non-Asian followers and goal the American market.
One of many pioneers of the trade is Kim Jun-koo, a software program engineer who was pissed off by the sluggish loss of life of conventional Korean manhwa comedian books within the wake of the Asian monetary disaster within the late Nineties.
His webtoon platform Naver Webtoon, which he based in 2004, is now the world’s largest, boasting 750,000 creators and 82mn month-to-month energetic customers. Gross merchandise quantity, a metric for the sum of money spent by customers throughout the app, elevated from $492mn in 2019 to $900mn in 2021.
“A webtoon will not be a digital model of a comic book e-book. It’s a comedian that has been created digitally,” stated Kim. “In Korea, comedian books have been fading away, it was an instance of a dire scenario resulting in innovation.”
Main platforms like Naver Webtoon and Kakao Webtoon supply creators instruments to create and add webtoons at no cost, giving audiences a near-unlimited vary of content material.
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“There isn’t a style limitation in webtoons, and the genres are very various,” stated Jang Min-gi, professor of media communications at Kyungnam College. “Customers can see them on the transfer, entry them in a short time and think about them in a really quick span of time.”
With a whole bunch of hundreds of creators and tens of hundreds of thousands of month-to-month readers, webtoon corporations are in a position to deploy a variety of monetisation methods. Some use a YouTube-style mannequin of attracting massive audiences with free content material, others a Netflix-like mannequin of attracting paying subscribers for the preferred sequence or a “microtransaction” fee mannequin favoured by gaming apps.
“The enterprise mannequin has now developed extra into making readers pay for the subsequent episodes in the event that they wish to learn them instantly . . . if the story is enjoyable and compelling, readers gained’t wish to wait,” stated Tune Jin-woo, head of platform operation administration at Kakao Leisure, which operates Kakao Webtoon.
Analysts and trade leaders describe a “virtuous circle”, whereby profitable diversifications into different media entice legions of worldwide followers, who’re then turned on to webtoons as they search out the supply of their favorite tales and characters.
“It prices rather a lot to supply movies and cleaning soap operas, particularly fantasy movies, whereas making comics requires little cash however can have good visible results,” stated Park Jeong-seo, head of webtoon enterprise at Kakao Leisure.
In addition to exporting their very own audiences to international platforms, Korean platforms have set about “importing” international audiences by means of offers giving them entry to what Kim Jun-koo describes as “tremendous IP”.
In 2019, Kakao Leisure entered right into a collaboration with American comedian e-book writer DC Comics. Naver Webtoon has entered into partnerships with DC, its rival Marvel, Archie Comics, and Hybe, the South Korean enterprise behind BTS.
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Each platforms have constructed loyal audiences in Europe, Latin America, and south-east Asia. Naver Webtoon, which affords providers in French, Spanish and German, is launching its personal European company, whereas Kakao Webtoon launched in Thailand and Taiwan final yr.
“We’re now specializing in increasing into the US, which is the world’s largest content material market. To turn into profitable there, we have to make webtoons tailor-made for American tastes,” stated Park Jeong-seo of Kakao Leisure, which acquired Los Angeles-based webtoon writer Tapas Media final yr in a deal value $510mn.
Naver Webtoon’s 14mn American customers constituted 17 per cent of its world readership, in contrast with 25 per cent in South Korea, 15 per cent in south-east Asia, 8 per cent in Japan and 4 per cent in Europe.
Final yr, it accomplished the $600mn acquisition of Canadian firm Wattpad, a platform for user-generated written content material with 94mn customers of its personal.
In addition to giving the corporate entry to new customers in international markets, executives consider the acquisition will assist them to drive up the standard of their creations by partnering with promising illustrators.
“There are two strategies of telling tales — one visible, and one written — so if we deliver these collectively, it’s only going to be stronger,” stated Aron Levitz, president of Wattpad.
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Naver Webtoon CEO Kim Jun-koo stated that whereas his firm’s ambitions have been backed by its deep-pocketed mother or father, Korean net portal Naver, “we’re planning to have extra aggressive acquisitions, and if we’d like bigger funding, then we’re planning to assessment an IPO or exterior financing.”
As webtoon platforms goal the US, analysts have questioned whether or not Korea’s “digital snack tradition” will resonate with an American viewers.
However executives and creators are putting their confidence in a bunch of customers that they argue is routinely missed: younger ladies and teenage women. Of Naver Webtoons’ US customers, over 70 per cent are below 24. Younger ladies represent 80 per cent of Wattpad’s readership.
It was this demographic that powered Rachel Smythe’s ‘Lore of Olympus’ webtoon primarily based on the Greek fable of the romance of Persephone and Hades to the highest of each digital and bodily best-seller charts.
“Younger ladies are so passionate and simply have a lot to offer, but typically the issues that they like are insulted and seemed down upon,” stated Smythe.
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“However that is an app the place the issues that they like are celebrated and handled with respect. I believe that’s why it’s doing so properly.”
John Everett Benson, a master stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.
His son Christopher said he died in a hospital but did not specify the cause.
Mr. Benson practiced the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock; slate was his preferred medium. He did so, precisely and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had before him, working out of an atelier in Newport called the John Stevens Shop. Founded in 1705, it is one of the oldest continuously run businesses in the country.
The art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, the brief span of a life, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months.
For the inscriptions for the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s, he averaged an hour and a half carving each letter, some of which are nearly a foot tall. He and his team at the time, two young carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months completing the painstaking work.
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He carved the words on the pedestal that supports Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he also carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Center. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are where lapidary artists show off their chops, their calligraphic feats and flourishes — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He also worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, Yale University and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.
Mr. Benson, who was known as Fud, was 25 when began his first major commission: to mark John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery and carve selections from his speeches onto a low wall made from seven granite blocks. (He changed into clean bell bottoms when Jackie Kennedy came to the shop in Newport to approve his design.)
Stone carvers on public sites invariably draw a crowd. And, inevitably, someone will ask, “What if you make a mistake?” As Mr. Benson, Mr. Hegnauer and Mr. Roberts worked at another site, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, onlookers asked and asked, so much so that Mr. Benson requested that a flyer be made to put an end to the incessant questioning.
Q: What happens if they make a mistake?
A: Don’t worry, they won’t.
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“Why go to all this kind of trouble to get a name on a building?” Mr. Benson said in “Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter” (1979), a documentary about his work made by Frank Muhly. “Why carve it into the stone? Why carve it in this particular fashion?” He added: “There’s a tremendous emotional appeal about a carved letter. It partakes of the substance of the building. And of the carved letters, this particular style” — Mr. Benson favored what is known as a V-cut — “shows very clearly that the letter is made of the same stuff as the building itself. There are lots easier ways to do it, let me tell you.”
John Everett Benson was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Newport, R.I., one of three children, and grew up in an 18th-century clapboard house overlooking Narragansett Bay. His mother, Esther Fisher (Smith) Benson, known as Fisher, was a Philadelphia-born Quaker who used “plain speech” at home, deploying “thee,” “thy” and “thine” for “you,” “your” and “yours.”
His father, John Howard Benson, was an artist who had become enamored of the stone carver’s art. He bought the John Stevens Shop with a $1,200 loan in 1927, when he was 26, and began to revive its business.
The elder Mr. Benson was, like his son, a polymath skilled at calligraphy and carving, and he elevated the practice, reaching back to the Roman tradition of carving large, elegant capital letters designed first with a brush and ink on paper. In his time he was known as the country’s finest stone carver, and he worked on many commissions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a professor.
Fud was 15 when he began apprenticing in the shop, and his first commissions were gravestones for two clients’ pets. He was 16 when his father died of a heart attack in 1956. His mother ran the business while he studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he took over the shop after he graduated in 1961.
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Mr. Benson was eloquent, erudite and prone to grand gestures. He was agile enough to perform a Fred Astaire chair trick — stepping from seat to chair back in a graceful arc — though he sometimes overestimated his abilities. During a youthful fascination with firearms, he shot himself in the leg. He was better on the fiddle, and played traditional Irish music and sea chanteys with a local band, the Reprobates, in Newport’s bars.
In addition to his son Christopher, a painter, Mr. Benson is survived by his wife, Karen Augeri Benson, a lawyer, whom he married in 1988; another son, Nick, a stone carver; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Furgiuele in 1959 ended in divorce in the early 1970s. Mr. Benson’s older brother, Thomas, a sculptor and art and antiques restorer who died in 1987, was a founder of the Newport Museum of Yachting. His younger brother, Richard, known as Chip, a noted photographer and printer, died in 2017.
Mr. Benson’s last monumental work was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, designed by Lawrence Halprin as a series of outdoor “rooms” made from red South Dakota granite onto which Mr. Benson carved the president’s notable quotations and speeches, including the “Four Freedoms” speech.
In 1993, Mr. Benson turned the business over to his son Nick and returned to sculpture. Like his father, Nick began his apprenticeship at age 15. His father’s praise was hard won, Nick recalled, and was delivered sort of sideways: “Well, Jesus,” he might say, “it doesn’t look like you need me.”
Nick Benson carved the World War II, Martin Luther King and Dwight D. Eisenhower memorials in Washington, and he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010 for preserving the art of hand letter carving.
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Mr. Benson’s headstones were his bread and butter. His orders, from a who’s who of Americans, were backlogged for months and even years. He made Tennessee Williams’s headstone out of pink Tennessee marble, as he did for George Balanchine. Lillian Hellman’s, a flat slate marker on Martha’s Vineyard, is engraved with the years of her birth and death and is embellished with a delicate feather quill. (Curiously, he ended up carving the gravestone of Ms. Hellman’s nemesis, Mary McCarthy, when she died in 1989, five years later.)
Jean Stafford declared in an article for The New York Times in 1971 that she had ordered hers ahead of time, “because I knew they would make me something beautiful.” (She died eight years later.) Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, ordered hers in 1999, when she commissioned one for her husband, the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who died that year. She kept hers in her library in Virginia until her own death in 2014.
“They’re simple, well-established objects,” Mr. Benson told the writer Philip Kopper in 1977. “All you can do is try to make the lettering as beautiful as you can. And that’s a darlin’ way to spend a day or two.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Leaders of France’s leftwing New Popular Front moved to shore up their new alliance for forthcoming snap elections after it was rocked by a far-left party purge of moderates.
Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon enraged colleagues and the leaders of other parties late on Friday when he removed several of his critics and proponents of the alliance from his party’s list of candidates.
He included in the list Adrien Quatennens, a protégé and controversial MP from Mélenchon’s France Insoumise — France Unbowed, or LFI — party, who has a conviction for domestic violence, prompting a furious reaction from other NPF leaders.
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On Saturday, Mélenchon was defiant about his purge, telling news outlet 20minutes.fr that “political coherence and loyalty in the left’s largest parliamentary group are imperative for governing”.
But on Sunday, Quatennens withdrew his candidacy in what appeared to signal a partial retreat by Mélenchon.
“If you don’t think I should be prime minister, I won’t,” he told France TV, addressing his NPF comrades.
The creation of a united leftwing front is a crucial development in the run-up to the elections on June 30 and July 7. It could seriously harm the prospects of candidates for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance by making it much harder for them to qualify for the second-round run-off.
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The leftwing parties are deeply divided on the economy, EU policy and Ukraine, but have buried their differences to maximise their chances against Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National.
They have united behind a joint programme with a radical tax-and-spend agenda, adding to investors’ jitters ahead of the election. Mélenchon said the left’s programme envisaged tax rises worth €123bn a year.
In a sign of the commitment to the new alliance — which spans Eurosceptic far-left populists and pro-EU social democrats — former socialist president François Hollande said he would run for parliament as an NPF candidate.
However, Mélenchon’s purge of his party just hours after the New Popular Front’s campaign launch created serious strains within the alliance. Olivier Faure, the socialist chief, called it “scandalous”.
“It’s totally petty, small of him, settling scores when the challenge now is to prevent the far right from taking power,” Alexis Corbières, one of the MPs removed as a candidate, told France Info.
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Another, Raquel Garrido, posted on X: “Shame on you, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is sabotage. But I can do better. We can do better.”
Political parties are scrambling to assemble their lists of candidates for the election before the deadline of 18.00 on Sunday.
Hollande’s candidacy in his home region of Corrèze took his colleagues by surprise. If elected, Hollande would become only the second former head of state to take a seat in the National Assembly since the start of France’s fifth republic. The other was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
Hollande said it was “an exceptional decision for an exceptional situation”, given that the far right is closer to power than at any moment since France’s liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.
To salvage as many seats as possible, Macron’s centrist alliance is trying to strike reciprocal local deals not to stand against each other with centre-right candidates that refuse to back RN.
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The centre-right Les Républicains party is also in disarray after its leader Éric Ciotti unilaterally agreed an alliance with the far right
Furious colleagues on the party’s executive unanimously voted to expel Ciotti, but the decision was overturned by a Paris court on Friday night, leaving it unclear who was in charge of the list of candidates.
People arrive before Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at the “People’s Convention” of Turning Point Action Saturday in Detroit.
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Sporting a “Pretty Girls Vote Republican” baseball cap and several buttons, including one reading “Gun Rights are Women’s Rights,” Lauren Kerby was surprised to be asked who she plans to vote for in the fall.
“Obviously Trump,” she said with a laugh. “I came here for a reason.”
Here is the ‘People’s Convention’, run by Turning Point Action, the advocacy wing of Turning Point USA, one of the largest national organizations focused on engaging students on conservative issues.
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Turning Point – which rose out of concerns about free speech on college campuses, has grown into an unapologetically pro-Trump machine, focused on organizing for the former president ahead of the 2024 election.
It hosts events like these, attracting voters like Kerby and hundreds of others like her who want to party, young conservative style.
And this is certainly a Trump show. At the Huntington Place Convention Center in downtown Detroit, a bejeweled presidential seal with Trump’s face in the center rests on the hood of a gold-painted Mercedes-Benz. At a nearby booth among dozens, vendors are selling “America First” cowboy hats and shirts reading, “Voting Convicted Felon, 2024.”
The festivities this year come as Turning Point Action works to significantly expand its organizing presence in key swing states ahead of the general election, including Michigan, home to this year’s conference.
Just five months out, enthusiasm for Trump is high among younger attendees. NPR spoke with more than a dozen voters under 30, who remain committed to Trump, motivated by to vote for him largely because of his isolationist ideas and focus on the economy and immigration.
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Supporters cheer as Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at the “People’s Convention” of Turning Point Action Saturday, June 15, 2024 in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
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Their unwavering support stands in contrast to sentiment of many younger Democratic voters, who remain unsure or unenthused about backing President Biden again.
Trump took the stage Saturday night as the event headliner. He ticked through his proposed second-term agenda and criticized Biden’s record, making little mention of the youth-focused nature of the event, outside of publicly thanking Turning Point founder and longtime supporter, Charlie Kirk, who is a millennial.
“[Kirk’s] got his army of young people,” Trump said. “These are young patriots. They don’t want to see… what’s been happening in our country.”
The former president’s remarks came after two days of speeches from conservative firebrands and high-profile Trump allies, including Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump’s daughter in law Lara Trump, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)
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This year’s conference also comes just over two weeks after a New York jury found Trump guilty of criminal charges, a decision that could negatively impact his chances with younger voters. The latest Harvard youth poll, published in March, found a potential guilty verdict increased Biden’s lead by 10 percentage points among young Americans overall.
Much like their unwavering support in the election, though, voters at the event are unphased by his conviction. His mugshot is displayed on the posters and t-shirts of attendees.
To 20-year-old James Hart, the verdict has little effect.
“I don’t really think, at this point, anyone’s feelings changed. I think everyone knows who they’re going to vote for. We know Trump. Trust me – we know Joe Biden,” said Hart. “We know their policy. We know how they’re going to act. And I trust Trump.”
Where young conservatives stand
For Kerby from Berkeley, Mich., supporting Trump partially stems from his push for isolationism, including limiting U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
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“He’s focused on what’s happening here,” she said, pointing instead to Trump’s focus on reducing illegal immigration.
“Not saying that other places don’t matter, but we should matter first,” Kerby’s friend, Elaina Luca, 21, added. “When you’re in a family, you make sure that your family is okay first.”
Luca is also backing Trump. As a mom with two young kids, she’s most concerned about rising prices.
“When I drive around and see a nice house, I like to look up how much it’s sold for,” she explained. “In today’s economy, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, how did these people even afford that? …And it’s like, ‘Oh no, they bought it in 2012 for like $150,000 and now it’s worth like $1 million.”
“How am I supposed to get a house to raise my children to live in?” she wondered aloud, “I don’t want to pay for a house for the rest of my life.”
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Turning Point’s 2024 strategy
Former President Donald Trump walks on to the stage to give the keynote address at Turning Point Action’s “The People’s Convention” on Saturday in Detroit, Michigan.
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While Turning Point’s non-profit side has held student conferences for nearly a decade, also sprinkled with appearances from Republican politicians and conservative media figures, this conference marks just the second for Turning Point Action.
The activist network has morphed into a more pronounced political force, planning to ramp up its organizing ground game ahead of the election.
“It’s night and day,” said Turning Point Action spokesman Andrew Kolvet. “Any activities we did, in 2022 for example, in the midterms, was like the Stone Age compared to the level of sophistication and just the resources that we’ve poured into this project to develop it.”
Kolvet is talking about the group’s “Chase the Vote” initiative, a get-out-to-vote campaign focused on reaching low-propensity voters in swing states that launched earlier this spring. Trump recently endorsed the program during a separate Turning Point event in Arizona, another pivotal state in 2024.
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Turning Point hopes to raise $100 million to build up on the ground organizing staff and plans to work with the Trump campaign on canvassing – a notable change from past election cycles following new guidance from the Federal Election Commission.
Despite the roots of Turning Point, the program is not solely focused on young voters, though Kolvet said that will always be tied to Turning Point’s work.
Growing up under Trump, now it’s time to vote
Despite enthusiasm for Trump at Turning Point, Republicans face a steep challenge to bringing in more young voters. Voters under 30 have traditionally voted for Democrats andin 2020, Biden won the age group by a 24-point margin.
Plus – young voters tend to be aligned with Democrats on their key issues – notably on abortion access, addressing climate and curbing gun violence. And despite struggling in polling, Biden still maintains a lead with young voters overall in multiple youth polls.
But among some young conservatives, albeit a proportionally smaller group, Trump’s style of Republican politics – once fringe and now mainstream – is overwhelmingly what they want for their political future.
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An attendee wears a “Team Trump” cowboy hat as people watch speakers during Turning Point’s “Peoples Convention” on Saturday in Detroit.
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“The pro-Trump, MAGA element definitely appeals more towards young conservatives and young Americans in general,” said 19-year-old Ohio student, Gabe Guidarini, a member of the College Republicans of America. “It actually addresses the problems that they face.”
He argued young people have trouble connecting to “old school Republican rhetoric” focused on cutting taxes and government spending, because they are not able to progress financially. And given the time period Gen Z has grown up during, Trump’s deviation from political norms is appealing, he explained.
James Hart agrees. Though the 20-year-old now lives in Tallahassee, he grew up in Detroit. “I was raised Democrat,” he said.
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That is, until 2016, when his family flipped for Trump.
“His personality is what got my family to say. ‘Hey, you know, maybe the Democrats aren’t the greatest,’” he said. “Honesty is the best policy. And up here in the Midwest, we’re honest. We say it like it is. And Trump did that.”
Now, as Hart gets ready to vote for the first time, his mind is made up.
“I think most young people are going after Trump-like candidates,” he said. “We want the fire. We want the passion. We’re tired of the same old, same old. We want bold policy that actually is going to lead with results.”
