Last updated (12/13/22): This piece will be continually updated with more examples as they become available.

Turning Point USA is often associated with the time its members wore diapers in an attempt at “triggering” liberals, but this should not be the only public failure the group is remembered for. The conservative organization, which focuses on increasing right-wing political influence on college campuses, has a long history of involvement in racist incidents that are now permanently linked to its name.

TPUSA’s founder and executive director, Charlie Kirk, has repeatedly denied that his organization is racist, yet the incidents of blatant bigotry involving members of TPUSA keep happening, even as leaks show white nationalists plotting to infiltrate it. Kirk, the right-wing “boy wonder” who has used Fox News to turn fearmongering about left-wing ideology on college campuses into a profitable grift, has also successfully leveraged his “perfectly incoherent” sycophancy for the Trump administration into a cozy relationship with the president’s family -- a relationship seemingly unaffected by TPUSA’s pattern of racism.

Here are incidents of racism involving TPUSA:

• Former TPUSA National Field Director Crystal Clanton sent text messages to another TPUSA employee that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.” Kirk had previously said about Clanton: “Turning Point needs more Crystals; so does America.”

• After firing Clanton when her racist text message became public, Kirk hired Shialee Grooman and Troy Meeker. HuffPost reported that Grooman had written several anti-gay and racist tweets that included the n-word and Meeker had also tweeted an anti-Black slur. HuffPost also reported that former TPUSA Midwest regional manager Timon Prax was pushed out because of his record of using “bigoted language in tweets and texts,” including racist jokes and messages that “made fun of black people and referred to them as slaves.”

• A former TPUSA field director recalled watching speakers at one of the organization’s annual student summits who “spoke badly about black women having all these babies out of wedlock. It was really offensive.” Speaking to The New Yorker in 2017, the former employee said that “looking back, I think it was racist.”

• TPUSA defended Florida Atlantic University professor and TPUSA chapter faculty adviser Marshall DeRosa after The Nation reported his ties to white nationalist group League of the South.

• In her resignation letter addressed to TPUSA field director Frankie O’Laughlin and regional manager Alana Mastrangelo following the group’s disastrous diaper protest, far-right Infowars personality Kaitlin Bennett pointed out that O’Laughlin had “liked” tweets from white supremacist YouTuber James Allsup.

• Kirk’s own Twitter feed has featured anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tweets, and he once tweeted a flawed statistic that minimized police brutality against Black people: “Fact: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male, than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer.”

• At a December 2017 TPUSA conference, attendee Juan Pablo Andrade was recorded telling several other conference attendees, “The only thing the Nazis didn’t get right is they didn’t keep fucking going!”

• Members of the TPUSA chapter at Florida International University shared “racist memes and rape jokes” in the group’s chat messages. According to the Miami New Times, a prominent chapter member had to tell other TPUSA members to “avoid using the n word and don't reference Richard Spencer too much and don't Jew hate ... all the time.”

• TPUSA Director of Urban Engagement Brandon Tatum told antisemitic YouTuber Bryan “Hotep Jesus” Sharpe that Sharpe was banned from TPUSA events because of “the optics of the antisemitic rhetoric.” Tatum summarized TPUSA’s position as being “between a rock and a hard place” because while “personally, none of us have a problem with you -- we want you here. It’s the optics. The media.”

• TPUSA originally listed Gab, a white supremacist-friendly social media platform, as a sponsor for its 2018 Student Action Summit but “quietly dropped the company” shortly before the event.

• TPUSA’s Iowa State University chapter reportedly invited white nationalist YouTuber Nick Fuentes to speak on campus.

• Speaking at the December 11 launch of Turning Point UK, then-TPUSA Communications Director Candace Owens said, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. ... I have no problems with nationalism.”

• TPUSA Chief Creative Officer Benny Johnson kicked off a TPUSA event by saying, “Oh my God, I've never seen so many white people in one room. This is incredible!”

• Riley Grisar, president of TPUSA’s University of Nevada chapter, praised white supremacy, saying, “We’re going to rule the country! White power!” and using the n-word in a video uncovered by the anti-fascist website It’s Going Down News.

• Former TPUSA high school outreach director Kyle Kashuv apologized on May 22 for his use of racial slurs while in high school. Kashuv joined TPUSA after becoming a prominent pro-gun activist following a deadly shooting at the school he attended, Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. On April 26, Kashuv spoke at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, and as of May 16, he stepped down from his position at TPUSA. As reported by The Daily Beast, right-wing activists and Parkland students circulated a Google Doc and screenshots of texts attributed to Kashuv in which he had used the n-word repeatedly.

• TPUSA has cut ties with Ashley St. Clair, a conservative social media personality and one of the organization’s brand ambassadors, after she was photographed at a dinner with multiple white nationalist and antisemitic figures, including Fuentes and Tim Gionet (also known online as “Baked Alaska”).

• According to Talking Points Memo and The Informant, TPUSA advisory council member Rip McIntosh sent an email newsletter that “said Black people have ‘become socially incompatible with other races’ and ‘American Black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.’” The essay in the newsletter copied and pasted much of its text from the white nationalist website American Renaissance. The newsletter “included Turning Point’s logo and a fundraising appeal for the group.”

• Turning Point USA’s University of Alabama chapter invited two associates of white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to speak at a conference next month. The two “groypers” are Kai Schwemmer and Tyler Russell, both of whom have espoused white nationalist or white supremacist ideas. The chapter’s vice president, Brandt Wiggins, is also an associate of Fuentes, and is scheduled to speak at the event as well. Wiggins has pushed the great replacement theory, and wrote on social media that white people should “HAVE WHITE BABIES.”

• In late 2021, Turning Point USA held a four-day conference called “AmericaFest” in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, that was attended by far-right extremists Grayson Arnold and Micajah Jackson. Arnold previously posted a meme referring to Nazis as a “pure race,” and advocated shooting refugees, according to CNN. Jackson attended the January 6 riot wearing an armband of the fascist street gang the Proud Boys, and has tweeted, “The pride flag is equivalent to Italy's fascist flag.” TPUSA gave Jackson press credentials to cover their Arizona event.  

• Plagiarist and meme enthusiast Benny Johnson told the attendees at TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Conference in June to have “more babies” to make “more Americans,” implicitly pitting “Americans” against immigrants. In the context of the right’s embrace of the great replacement theory, there are clear racist undertones to this remark.

• Nazis waved flags outside a TPUSA event at the Tampa Convention Center in July. The event’s organizers denied having any affiliation with the Nazis, who waved swastika and SS flags.

• In April, 2021, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk defended Tucker Carlson’s invocation of the racist great replacement theory, arguing nothing Carlson said was “controversial,” and that the theory is “factual and it's true.”

• An Instagram account called Basic Facts Matter, which is associated with TPSUA, has targeted Black victims of police brutality and spread racist talking points about abortion, as Media Matters has previously reported.

• Research analyst Ben Lorber has documented the many ties between TPUSA chapters and Fuentes’ “groypers,” despite the supposed history of acrimony between the two groups.

  • TPUSA leader at Texas A&M, Carson Wolf, was a “diehard Nick Fuentes acolyte” before adopting a more moderate outward facing posture.

  • Jack Andersson runs the TPUSA chapter at UW Madison, as well as a white nationalist organization called National Traditionalism with AJ Willems, another Christian nationalist.

  • TPUSA’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bower, was scheduled to appear at a conference organized by American Virtue, another group that has attempted to distance itself from Fuentes but nonetheless has numerous links to the groyper movement. (Bower’s name does not appear in the final event listing or in a YouTube post listing the speakers.)

  • Gen-Z influencer Lance Johnston, a regular at TPUSA events, attended a speech Fuentes gave in Dallas outside CPAC in 2021.

  • High school student Konner Earnest started the TPUSA chapter at The Woodlands High School in Woodlands, Texas, and says he watches Fuentes’ show.

• The president of Turning Point USA’s University of Missouri chapter posted a racist joke mocking the death of Black students at the University of Virginia. The post included use of the N-word.

• The Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Notre Dame invited white nationalist allies Kai Schwemmer and John Doyle to speak to students. 

• The University of Delaware Turning Point chapter also invited Schwemmer for a public debate. 

• Leaked group chat messages from Towson University Turning Point students allegedly revealed members using racist and anti-LGBTQ slurs. 

Media Matters is updating this piece as more incidents of racism linked to TPUSA come to light.