Republican Teddy Turner Blames Jane Fonda for His Dad Ted Turner's Leftist Tilt

Teddy Turner, a son of billionaire media mogul Ted Turner who’s now running for Congress as a Republican in South Caroliina, blamed his father’s 1991 marriage to Jane Fonda for his jaw-dropping turn to the Left.

“I was raised in a different time at the Turner household … a very conservative household with capitalism and all of that kind of stuff,” the younger Turner told Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.”

“He started becoming more and more environmentalist and then Jane helped move things over as well," Turner told Malzberg. “Then when you start hanging around and everybody you’re hanging around with is liberal, then you tend to move more liberal.”

Some around the MRC remember an earlier turn than 1991 – for example the 1987 Turner documentary “Portrait of the Soviet Union,” which comically claimed, “Once, the Kremlin was the home of czars. Today, it belongs to the people.”

In its Teddy profile, Politico implied disgust at his father-bashing -- something I doubt they'd imply for Ronald Prescott Reagan. “Turner joked about nightmarish Thanksgiving get-togethers and called out his father for his liberal environmental views — tweaking him as a hypocrite who drives a green car only to hopscotch around the country on his CO2-spewing private plane.”

“I’m like, ‘Dad, you can’t drive the Prius to the jet,” Turner said.

Teddy Turner, a 49-year-old high school teacher, said that unlike his media-mogul father, he has remained consistently conservative.

“I’m not a liberal,” he said. “People say how did you separate from your dad? I didn’t separate from my dad. My dad separated from me.”