The Turning Point USA activist’s fans at CPAC have not been deterred by remarks that appeared to defend Hitler

She is a 29-year-old woman of colour who has mastered social media and whose speeches draw roars of approval from devoted fans.

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She is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman and political rock star from New York. She is Candace Owens, a rightwing activist and agent provocateur at Turning Point USA (TPUSA), an organisation that has effectively become Donald Trump’s youth wing.

Owens, who is African American, was among the most enthusiastically received speakers at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor near Washington.

“The truth is on our side as conservatives,” she proclaimed, ahead of speakers including Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. “Truth number one: America is not a racist country. The people that continue to tell us that have a vested interest in racism.

If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine Candace Owens

“Truth number two: abortion is murder … A hard-hitting truth is that the most unsafe place for a black child is not on the streets, it’s not when they see a police officer, it’s in their mother’s womb … Truth number three: racially motivated police brutality is a myth, but father absence is not.”

The remarks would be shocking in liberal circles but they were lapped up at America’s biggest annual gathering of grassroots conservatives. TPUSA held its first CPAC party this week and it was one of the conference’s hottest tickets, with guests including Donald Trump Jr and the Texas senator Ted Cruz: a sign of how the organisation has eclipsed the likes of Breitbart News as an essential Trump torchbearer.

Started by conservative “boy wonder” Charlie Kirk in a garage in Illinois in June 2012, TPUSA says it now has a presence in more than 1,300 university campuses and schools across America and more than 150 full-time staff. It describes its mission as being “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government”. But it has also become Trump’s most potent weapon on university campuses, where he is typically a toxic figure.

Among those who embraced it is James Stevens, 20, a student who joined TPUSA two years ago and is now a chapter president at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.

“I joined it because conservatives on college campuses were being suppressed and sidelined,” he said, while attending CPAC on Friday.

Asked what reaction he gets from contemporaries, Stevens replied: “It’s always a surprise for them because I am a college student and most college students are liberals. I am also a gay conservative so that surprises them as well because they have had people constantly telling them in their ears that conservatism is bad.”

TPUSA is a non-profit based on conservative views and not linked to particular candidates, Stevens added, but it backs the president strongly.

“Trump has changed this country and put it on the path to success. Trump is living our organisation’s values to a T, so we support him.”

Now 25, Kirk has made countless TV appearances, was the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican convention and has earned lavish praise from Trump, whom he has interviewed fawningly. His only rival as a TPUSA celebrity is Owens, a regular on Fox News who has a million followers on Twitter. (Ocasio-Cortez, six months her junior, has more than three million.)

I joined Turning Point USA because conservatives on college campuses were being suppressed and sidelined James Stephens, Kutztown University

Owens, who until recently was herself a liberal, now revels in challenging the left’s orthodoxy with tweets such as: “I love masculinity and I know that there is no such thing as a society, without strong men. This is why I reject feminism.” She has pushed a campaign she calls “Blexit” – the exit of black people from the Democratic party, from “permanent victimhood” and “the false idea that we are somehow separate from the rest of America”.

But she suffered a self-inflicted wound last month when she appeared to defend Adolf Hitler. Defending the concept of nationalism, she told an audience in London: “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany.”

Owens later claimed she had been quoted out of context and issued a clarification, saying that she was trying to explain why Americans wrongly equate the word “nationalism” with Hitler. But this, and other missteps, have caused internal dissent and infighting within TPUSA.

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Traditional conservatives, reeling from the ascent of Trump, are appalled by a group devoted to shaping the next generation of Trumpians.

Charlie Sykes, editor-in-chief of the website the Bulwark and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “It’s indicative of the rot in the conservative movement that an organisation like that has the prominence it does. If I had to make a scale of the worst grifters on the right, Turning Point USA would be top of the list.”

He added: “It’s important to reach out to young people but Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens are the wrong people to do that. When Owens stands up and defends Adolf Hitler, that should be a red flag. The fact she’s now a rock star at CPAC tells you what’s happened to the conservative movement, as does Charlie Kirk’s combination of shallow thinking and shameless sycophancy. He is a ‘thought leader’ who rarely rises above bumper sticker thinking.”

Yet TPUSA has been embraced and elevated by the Trump administration, Sykes noted.

“You want to talk about a repellant form of conservatism? You have it right there.”