Despite being a political junkie and longtime fan of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, Shasta College senior Raymond Randolph hesitated to speak up about politics on campus. But Kirk’s killing during a Turning Point USA event at a Utah university in September changed that.
“God was calling me up to the plate,” Randolph said.
The day after Kirk’s death, Randolph reached out to Turning Point, which Kirk had founded, to start a chapter at his college in Redding. As the chapter’s president, he said he’s not alone in feeling mobilized after the killing.
“It drove a lot of people like me to get up and do something,” he said.
While conservative students say they’ve felt hesitant to speak aloud in the past, they now say emerging Turning Point chapters have helped them break out of their shells in California, with one student even describing them as a “safe space.”
As of March this year, Turning Point USA said it has 1,462 active college chapters nationally. Over 70% of those were founded after Kirk’s death. Turning Point’s presence has nearly tripled on California campuses as of March, with 78 of the state’s 119 active college chapters founded after the slaying.
But conservative views continue to be overshadowed by more liberal voices on California campuses as tensions persist in and outside classrooms, students and professors say.
“Most of [the liberal students] think we’re racist, most of them think we’re fascists … especially in California,” Randolph said.
Kameron Tessier, president of the statewide California College Democrats organization, said Turning Point’s rhetoric is “disgusting and very bigoted” and must be investigated on campuses.
“I’m a firm believer in the 1st Amendment, but also the 1st Amendment has its consequences,” said Tessier, a senior at UC Santa Cruz. “If they are pushing actively dangerous rhetoric on campuses, then I think it’s worth it for administrations to look into that.”
Among Kirk’s most controversial comments include calling the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake,” spreading COVID-19 misinformation and saying some gun deaths each year were worth it to protect the 2nd Amendment.
Creating red spaces in blue places Students founded a Turning Point chapter at Claremont McKenna last spring. After Kirk’s death, college security supervised each of the chapter’s events. Several students heckled a vigil they held after Kirk’s shooting in September. And at a February campus Turning Point tabling event, dozens of partially nude bikers rode by in protest of the national organization’s viewpoints.
Bike protest organizer Luca Davis called Turning Point’s values “un-American” and said the national organization’s harmful rhetoric should not be tolerated on campuses. A junior at Pitzer College, which is part of the Claremont consortium, Davis said he hoped that having dozens of students laughing and blasting music as they biked by the tabling event would act as a visible “foil” to Turning Point’s values.
Despite the tension, a Turning Point student leader said that membership has grown substantially since Kirk’s death, and most members are underclassmen.
Gabriel Khuly, a 19-year-old Floridian, said he became disillusioned by Democratic politics after he moved to California to attend Claremont McKenna for college.
“You really only get to see how stupid and bad Democrat policies are once you get to [really] see them,” he said, citing the high concentration of homelessness on Skid Row and high food prices.
The self-described “gadfly” and well-known conservative on campus said he noticed his right-leaning peers often don’t feel fully comfortable sharing their views, both in and out of the classroom.
“There is still a sort of desire … to at least partially conceal those views,” he said.
Khuly has received a lot of flak for voicing his political opinions on campus, particularly on the anonymous, campus-based social app Fizz. In late September last year, Khuly wore his MAGA cap and, alongside his friends, debated students on abortion and climate change at a table outside the campus dining hall. Later, a post on the campus app called him “the most insufferable, weird, and [expletive] guy on the planet,” receiving more than 1,500 upvotes.
Khuly said “he could not care less” about the retaliation.
“These sorts of people, they don’t exist in the real world,” he said. “They exist online, they exist on college campuses, they exist at bougie millennial coffee shops … they’ll block up the streets for traffic for some protest or whatever, but outside of that, they don’t exist.”
Up north in Shasta County, voters aged 18 to 20 are more likely to register Republican than those aged 21 to 29. But Shasta College itself, according to Randolph, is still a liberal hot spot, where speaking against liberal viewpoints wasn’t really allowed — until his Turning Point chapter came along.
“People have said that they’ve gotten a lot of relief now that they know we’re on campus.”
In some instances, tensions have boiled over, like at Turning Point’s final tour stop at UC Berkeley in November. Fights broke out, with one man hospitalized after he was struck in the head. Police in riot gear arrested several people. In March, a heated exchange occurred at Cerritos College between Democratic congressional candidate Shonique Williams and Republican students and activists.
Political conflict in the classroom
Scott Waller is the chair of the Political Science Department at Biola University in La Mirada, which Niche calls the most conservative college in California — and the 24th most conservative in the nation.
During both of Trump’s administrations, Waller said he has noticed an increased “anxiousness” in the classroom.
“If a student expresses his or her displeasure with the current Trump administration, they will know that there are students similarly animated in a very virulent way to defend the Trump administration,” he said. “That creates some tension in class.”
Yet, some educators relish in-classroom conflict. Stephanie Muravchik and other scholars across the Claremont Colleges analyzed millions of college syllabuses last year to see how professors teach about some of the most contentious subjects in academia, including the ethics of abortion and the Israel-Hamas war. They argued that only a small fraction of professors teach the full range of controversy in the classroom.
Professors must build “more contention” into the classroom in order to encourage healthy intellectual debate, the Claremont professors wrote in an October online magazine op-ed.
In sections of her “Introduction to American Politics” class, Muravchik runs simulations with students taking on characters across the political aisle on topics such as social media regulation and constitutional ratification.
“They get to argue in a civil way,” she said.
Freshman Ava Khansari was in Muravchik’s American Politics class last fall. She said she found the simulations eye-opening. In one simulation, as she took on the role of TikTok Chief Executive Shou Chew in a debate on deregulating social media, Khansari said she realized her true viewpoints “went the opposite direction” to her character’s views.
“I really did change my viewpoints on certain topics,” she said.
Malhotra is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and California student journalists.
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