A place where conservative teenagers feel free to be themselves

By the end of the night, Austin Juersivich, an 18-year-old attending a conservative leadership conference for high schoolers, had nearly lost his voice. That didn’t stop him from beaming.

“That tells you how much I liked it,” Mr. Juersivich, of Akron, Ohio, said with a raspy voice on Tuesday.

The four-day gathering, organized by Turning Point USA for about 700 high-school-age conservatives from across the country, is being marketed as a leadership conference that gives teenagers the tools needed to network, organize and campaign while hearing from a who’s who of politics and the news media.

“They’re teaching us about how to handle politics and how to live in a world where some things aren’t good to say in public and how to deal with backlash on that,” said Genna Montalbano, a rising junior from Houston.