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Conservative students at one of the most liberal universities in the country are pushing forward with a Turning Point USA event that founder Charlie Kirk was scheduled to headline before he was assassinated.
“The day of our first meeting where we were going to announce that Charlie was coming to campus was the day that he was assassinated,” John Paul Leon, a junior at University of California Berkeley and president of the university’s Turning Point USA chapter, told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
“And since then, I’ve been working on it with the university and with the Turning Point national organization just to get the event going,” he added.
On Nov. 10 — two months to the day after Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination while speaking at Utah Valley University during his “American Comeback Tour” — Berkeley’s Turning Point USA chapter will host a stop of the “This Is the Turning Point” tour.
The event will feature comedian and filmmaker Rob Schneider and Christian author Frank Turek, appearing in place of Kirk.
While he could not disclose the security plans, Leon said the event will enforce a no-bag policy and employ strict safety measures for attendees and speakers.
“Internally, we’re spending lots of time to ensure that security is really tight and really secure and having our own meetings just completely dedicated to security themselves,” Leon said.
Since Kirk’s assassination, Leon said the mood on campus has been “somber,” but students are pushing forward to honor Kirk’s legacy.
“The way the chapter has been affected by all this has largely been — there’s largely been a lot of passion behind it, I have noticed — and it’s almost a feeling of people who are scared of what may come, but also feel the need to essentially fight back or push harder than ever before,” Leon said.
Leon, who is a junior double majoring in economics and philosophy and minoring in public policy, said chapter membership has surged since Kirk’s death.
“There’s many people who were not in the chapter before who are current students who got a newfound interest in supporting Turning Point USA and join Turning Point USA as a result,” he said. “And of course, our membership increased dramatically.”
Despite the growth, Leon said the chapter has faced intensified backlash.
“We’ve definitely faced a lot of pushback,” Leon said. “We have, you know, posters going around campus calling us fascists and Zionists. We have people walking by every time that we have, you know, we table on campus for our event who call us fascist. And at first that was always the case, right? Before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, people would always walk by and call us fascists and you kind of shrug it off, and you would just kind of laugh at it because they’re becoming the caricature that the right has created of them.”
However, since Kirk’s assassination, the Turning Point USA chapter president said that type of rhetoric has “become a lot more sinister when you think about it because it’s almost as though these are the same types of people who want you dead.”
Leon said that he believes what his group is up against is a “spiritual battle.”
“It really is, in my view, really is a spiritual battle,” Leon said. “It always has been, and Charlie Kirk understood that.”
UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof told Fox News Digital in a statement that “UC Berkeley always works to support the rights and ability of all speakers to participate in events hosted by student organizations without regard for their beliefs and perspectives.”
Mogulof added that the “event in question will be held in Zellerbach Hall, a venue rented by the Berkeley chapter of Turning Point USA, and qualifies as a ‘Major Event’ because it is expected to have an audience of over 300 people. We will therefore be following the protocols defined by the Major Events policy.”
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