Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA Has Long Been Target of Leftist Intolerance, Violence

“We got him.”

With those words, Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox announced Friday morning’s arrest of Tyler Robinson, 22, in connection with Wednesday’s assassination of Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk.

Local, state, and federal sleuths located the killer just 33 hours after Kirk’s heinous killing at a speech to Utah Valley University in Orem.

Kirk’s gruesome death at the unthinkable age of 31 is just the latest and most lethal act of intimidation and political violence against Turning Point USA. The conservative youth powerhouse long has endured left-wing activists who labored mightily to mute its message of individual freedom, limited government, and American exceptionalism.

“According to our Deplatforming Database, Kirk was the subject of at least 14 attempts to stop him from speaking on campuses since 2021,” wrote Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Over the years, FIRE has repeatedly written to colleges that sought to silence Kirk’s organization and supporters.”

For TPUSA, too many campuses are less about dialogue and more about strong-armed censorship.

• Earlier this year, TPUSA invited Olivia Krolczyk to address a University of Washington forum titled “Protect Women From Men: The Threat of the Trans Agenda.” Protesters encircled the event space, got loud, and then pulled a fire alarm. Krolczyk and her TPUSA hosts barricaded themselves in the room until campus police officers rescued them.

• Last year, just 10 minutes into Ian Haworth’s “conversation about Israel” at the University of Kentucky, protesters shouted him down. They eventually left. Then someone triggered a fire alarm. University police escorted Haworth and his TPUSA hosts from the building.

• Central Connecticut State University’s TPUSA chapter showed “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM” in 2023. Demonstrators with drums and bullhorns were so loud that they drowned out the documentary, forcing TPUSA to scrap the screening. 

• Former college swimmer Riley Gaines discussed men in women’s sports at San Francisco State University, also in 2023. Protesters screamed through Gaines’ speech and then chased her down a hallway. Gaines and TPUSA organizers hid for two hours in a campus computer room, until San Francisco police officers saved them from this seething mob.

• At the University of New Mexico in 2022, TPUSA asked Tomi Lahren to cover immigration and race. “Student protesters chanted, banged on the walls, and pulled a fire alarm,” FIRE reports. “Lahren was escorted out by police.”

• Stephen Davis tried to speak at the University of California at Davis in 2022. TPUSA canceled its own event after fights erupted outside the venue. Administrators led Davis and TPUSA organizers to safety.

• The Leadership Institute’s Hayden Williams volunteered in 2019 to man a TPUSA literature table at University of California at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the 1960s Free Speech Movement. This irony was lost on local software engineer Zachary Greenberg. He was arrested for flipping the table over and then sucker-punching Williams. His black eye darkened subsequent TV interviews. Six days after Greenberg’s assault, Williams told Fox Business Network anchor Stuart Varney: “I still have ringing in my ears and other symptoms of a concussion.”

Leftists blithely claim that “both sides” behave this way. Nonsense. That’s like saying that “both vehicles” use gasoline. One is an 18-wheel truck, and the other is a Volkswagen Jetta. 

Zachary Greenberg sucker-punches Turning Point USA volunteer Hayden Williams at the University of California at Berkeley in 2019.

Regarding TPUSA, FIRE’s database lists 15 “Substantial Event Disruptions,” as compared to postponed gatherings or petitions to disinvite speakers. Among these hardcore challenges to TPUSA’s free speech, 13 (86.6%) came from the Left, while two (13.3%) came from the Right. (Oddly enough, supporters of President Donald Trump heckled Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle and then disrupted a 2019 TPUSA gathering at UCLA after a question-and-answer session was canceled.) 

These figures parallel those among the 206 Substantial Event Disruptions in FIRE’s database: 178 (86.4%) came from the Left, and 28 (13.6%) came from the Right. Between “both sides,” the Left is 635.3% more substantially disruptive than the Right.

“The assassination of Charlie Kirk is the logical conclusion of the campus equations that dissent equals hate, and that hate causes harm to marginalized groups and therefore must be silenced, stigmatized, and excluded,” Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald told me. “The horrors of the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump have not ended such violence. So, it would be sadly premature to conclude that the Kirk assassination will remain an outlier.”

Mac Donald herself struggled to speak at Southern California’s Claremont McKenna College in 2017. 

“Black Lives Matter protesters had blockaded the entrance to the auditorium so that no one could get in,” Mac Donald recalled. “I had been covertly escorted in, earlier, by campus security through winding passageways under the auditorium. I spoke to an empty room; I was supposed to have had dinner with students before my talk. My remarks were livestreamed. Outside, the activists pounded on the auditorium’s glass walls. As the second question was relayed to me via a computer, security decided I should leave. I was escorted out through the kitchen and into a waiting squad car.”

Kirk leaves behind Erika, his widow; two young children; and some 3,500 chapters, 250,000 members, and millions of new fans who learned about him posthumously.

The Left now must decide if it will keep using its signature thuggishness, violence, and even homicide to disrupt TPUSA’s post-Kirk events or if it finally will calm down and pursue the civil discourse and open debate that defined Charlie Kirk’s work until Wednesday afternoon, when he gave his final answer.

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