In April, I wrote about Turning Point USA.
I called it a manufactured movement because that’s what concerned me most about it: something presented to young people as grassroots rebellion is in fact backed by an enormous national organization with money, staff, media, messaging and a very specific political agenda.
Now that organization has reached a high school here in the Verde Valley.
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In June, a Turning Point USA forum was held at Camp Verde High School’s Phillip England Center. Republican candidates for the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors participated. And there’s already local talk about expanding Turning Point’s presence elsewhere in the Verde Valley.
So I think this is a good time for parents, students, teachers and everyone else who cares about our public schools to understand exactly what Turning Point USA is bringing with it.
Because this organization has spent years telling Americans that liberals and educators are indoctrinating young people.
So let’s talk about indoctrination.
Turning Point USA describes its high-school program, Club America, as a student movement dedicated to “free thinking.” But let’s look a little deeper at what Turning Point itself says it provides those supposedly independent student chapters.
Weekly activism pamphlets.
Videos.
Speakers provided free of charge.
In-person support from Turning Point USA staff.
National training.
Organizing resources.
And incentives for activism, recruiting other students, collecting student information, posting on social media and finding students willing to establish still more chapters.
This isn’t a little group of teenagers independently deciding to meet after school and discuss conservative ideas. There’s an enormous political infrastructure standing behind them.
Turning Point USA reported more than $115 million in revenue in its latest publicly available tax filing. The organization now says it has 3,570 high-school Club America chapters involving more than 58,000 student activists.
It isn’t shy about what it’s trying to accomplish, either.
Turning Point says Charlie Kirk created the organization to “win the American Culture War” by instilling conservatism, faith, family and patriotism in young people. Its current website says winning that culture war requires an organized network on high-school and college campuses and in communities across the country.
Read that again.
This isn’t my description of their mission.
It’s theirs.
And that distinction matters. Because students absolutely should encounter political ideas. They should argue about them. Question them. Read people they disagree with. Form clubs. Protest. Debate. Change their minds five times before lunch if that’s where their thinking takes them.
That’s education.
But when students are being handed political messaging from a national organization with more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue, professional staff, speakers, media operations, recruitment programs and an explicitly ideological mission, let’s stop pretending we’re talking about nothing more than a spontaneous student club.
Especially when the organization behind it has spent years accusing everyone else of indoctrination.
Turning Point’s own high-school resource library currently recommends Ben Shapiro’s Brainwashed, describing American education as a “leftist indoctrination camp” and offering it as guidance for conservative students navigating supposedly liberal schools.
There’s something almost breathtaking about the hypocrisy.
Apparently exposing young people to ideas about racism, LGBTQIA people, gender, inequality or histories that make some Americans uncomfortable is indoctrination.
But handing teenagers a prepackaged political worldview, a particular version of Christianity and ideas associated with Christian nationalism, weekly activism materials, national speakers, professional organizers and books telling them their teachers are brainwashing them?
That’s “free thinking.”
No.
You don’t get to define indoctrination as everyone else’s ideas and education as your own.
And we’ve already seen what Turning Point’s version of fighting ideological enemies can look like. For years, Turning Point USA operated the Professor Watchlist, a searchable database identifying professors the organization accused of promoting leftist propaganda, racial ideology, LGBTQIA ideas and other supposedly radical beliefs.
Professors who appeared on that list have described receiving rape threats, death threats and sustained harassment.
Here in Arizona, ASU President Michael Crow wrote to Charlie Kirk asking him to remove ASU faculty from the list after professors received threatening emails and voicemails. Crow defended their right to teach, conduct scholarship and express their views without intimidation.
Turning Point never responded to him. And many of the professors remained on the list.
Months later, ASU instructor David Boyles, who had appeared on the Professor Watchlist, was followed and confronted after leaving his class. He was pushed to the ground and injured. Two men affiliated with Turning Point later admitted guilt as part of agreements requiring them to complete court-ordered diversion programs — educational courses that allowed them to avoid criminal convictions if they successfully completed the requirements.
Crow had warned them about where intimidation could lead.
They ignored him.
This month, after ten years, the Professor Watchlist disappeared from Turning Point’s website. Turning Point has not publicly explained why or said whether the removal is permanent.
But taking something off a website doesn’t erase it.
The internet has a long memory. Archived versions remain. Screenshots remain. Names and accusations were copied, reposted and circulated elsewhere. Once you spend a decade publishing a list designed to identify people as ideological enemies, removing the original page doesn’t suddenly pull all of that information back out of the world.
Ten years of it existed. That history doesn’t disappear because the webpage does.
And that history matters when an organization says it wants access to younger students. It matters because high-school students are still developing their understanding of politics, religion, identity, history and themselves.
That isn’t an insult to teenagers. It’s part of being a teenager. They should have room to explore, to be wrong, to encounter ideas their parents hate and ideas their teachers hate and ideas they hate. They should learn how to evaluate a source, recognize propaganda, test an argument, find evidence, understand history and decide what they believe without an adult political machine deciding the destination before they begin.
Critical thinking isn’t teaching a child which conclusion to reach.
It’s teaching them how to determine whether the conclusion holds up.
That’s where my concern about Turning Point becomes much larger than Camp Verde.
The organization now reports thousands of high-school chapters. Republican administrations in multiple states have formally partnered with Turning Point to encourage Club America chapters throughout their public-school systems.
Turning Point has an entire K–12 education operation. It says it has distributed more than 1.6 million curriculum kits and resources.
It also has Turning Point Faith, which describes its mission in part as “eliminating wokeism from the American pulpit” and organizing churches around what it calls biblical values.
These aren’t disconnected projects. They’re institution building.
And Americans should have learned by now to pay attention to institution building.
Political movements don’t acquire lasting power only by winning the election happening this November. They build organizations and train people. They create media ecosystems, develop legal networks and establish pipelines into government. They create language that eventually becomes ordinary. And they identify young people, train them, connect them to one another and build the next generation of the movement.
I’ve written before about what decades of patient institution building accomplished through organizations such as the Federalist Society. It’s one of the clearest examples of how political influence can be built over decades, far beyond any single election.
Power thinks in generations.
The rest of us had better learn to do the same.
Turning Point USA is telling us quite openly that young people are central to its strategy. Its high-school operation isn’t hiding in the shadows. It doesn’t need to. It’s advertising what it’s building. It calls it a culture war.
I don’t want our children recruited into somebody else’s culture war. They deserve an education that makes them curious, independent and difficult to manipulate. They should be able to hear a polished adult with a microphone make an argument and immediately think, Where did you get that idea?
Teach them to recognize evidence instead of assertion. To know history well enough to recognize mythology. To understand that faith and fact are not interchangeable, that patriotism doesn’t require obedience, and that thinking for yourself means being willing to reach a conclusion nobody handed you in advance.
That’s critical thinking. And it’s the exact opposite of indoctrination.
And yes, that standard applies to ideas I agree with too. If all we’re doing is replacing somebody else’s predetermined answers with ours, we’re not teaching critical thinking either.
But pretending that there’s no difference between a student exploring political ideas and a national political organization deliberately constructing a pipeline into thousands of American high schools doesn’t protect free thought.
It hides the machinery behind it.
That’s why what’s happening in Camp Verde matters beyond Camp Verde.
And it’s why Sedona and Mingus should be paying attention now, before this becomes another story we notice only after the infrastructure is already in place.
Ask questions.
What organization is affiliated with the club?
What materials does it provide?
Who pays for them?
What outside speakers will students encounter?
What information about students is collected or shared?
Are professional political organizers interacting with minors?
What activism are students encouraged to perform?
What relationship does the national organization maintain with the local chapter?
And perhaps most importantly:
Are students being taught how to think—or being organized around what someone else has already decided they should believe?
Those are reasonable questions for any political organization operating around children.
Turning Point USA has spent years demanding scrutiny of teachers, professors, schools and universities.
Fine. Then bring that same scrutiny here.
If a national political organization is operating inside our public schools, parents and communities should know what it teaches, who funds it, what information it collects, who interacts with students and what those students are being encouraged to do.
That isn’t censorship.
That’s paying attention.
Camp Verde already has Turning Point activity in its high school. There’s talk of expanding its presence elsewhere in the Verde Valley. Sedona and Mingus should understand what that means before another chapter simply appears and everyone starts treating it as though it was always here.
And our kids deserve something better than being recruited into anyone’s political machine.
Give them history. Give them evidence. Give them books and ideas that challenge what they think they know. Let them argue. Let them question. Let them change their minds.
Most of all, teach them to recognize when someone else is trying to do their thinking for them.
Including the people who arrive promising to teach them how to think for themselves.
Very fine article if disturbing. One of the things that always strikes me is how psychological projection is playing out in these situations. The very things Turning Point and company accuse the left of doing, they are doing. Students should be exposed to ideas as a part of a healthy education. But no ideas should be imposed upon them in a dogmatic fashion. That's indoctrination, not education, the very thing Turning Point and company complain about.
This is important information. It amounts to cult brainwashing, something I have seen in my former work cohort.