In 2012, Charlie Kirk, fresh from high school, skipped college to focus on college reform. The organization he founded and leads, Turning Point USA, asserts that its field program, in fiscal year 2020, “organized 800 new high school and college chapters,” “hosted 244 instructional campus events,” and “reached 142,534 students.” Kirk and Turning Point have been accused of exaggerating the organization’s accomplishments. But with then-President Trump a regular fixture of its annual Student Action Summit and revenue up from about $80,000 in its first year to nearly $40 million in 2020, TPUSA may be, as Eric Kelderman put it in The Chronicle, “the dominant force in campus conservatism.”
That’s not good.
Turning Point says it “educates students about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and capitalism” and favors “nonpartisan debate, dialogue, and discussion.” Consider that fib as you listen to the June 30 episode of Frontlines, a daily TPUSA podcast hosted by Drew Hernandez. That episode focuses on protesters of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, or, in Hernandez’s words, “these psychopaths, these baby killers, death cultists,” some of whom are “literally demon-possessed.” Hernandez knows who instigated the protests: Satan. God “moved in a miraculous way … overturning Roe v. Wade.” But “Satan is going to retaliate in a very vicious way because this is about murdering babies.”
The idea that there are spiritual forces at work in the world is not to be mocked. But nonpartisan dialogue about capitalism, this is not…
A populist conservatism that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to McCarthyism confronts colleges that are more left-liberal than they have ever been and more vulnerable to the charge that progressive orthodoxy has distorted the way in which it conceives of its work. One shouldn’t underestimate how volatile this mix is. But one shouldn’t catastrophize, either.
