In the past decade, leaders within TPUSA and in college chapters have faced backlash for using racial slurs, saying they “don’t really have an issue” with Adolf Hitler “[wanting] to make Germany great,” and making statements in support of “white power.” 

• 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.” Last year, Clanton was hired as a clerk on the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals for chief judge William Pryor. [The New Yorker, 12/21/2017] [The Hill, 12/22/2017] [Reuters, 07/11/2022]
• After reportedly firing Clanton when her racist text message became public, Kirk hired Shialee Grooman and Troy Meeker to replace her. HuffPost reported that Grooman had written several anti-gay and racist tweets that included the N-word, and that 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.” [HuffPost, 04/25/2018]
• University of New Mexico TPUSA chapter members held an “affirmative action bake sale” that charged students different prices based on their race. [KOAT News, 09/22/2017] 

• 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.” [The New Yorker, 12/21/2017]
• In her resignation letter addressed to then-TPUSA field director Frankie O’Laughlin and then-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 nationalist YouTuber James Allsup. [Liberty Hangout, 02/12/2018] [Salon, 03/25/2018] [MMFA, 04/08/2019] 
• 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!” Andrade was formerly an adviser for the pro-Trump America First Policies group and Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council. [Mediaite, 05/10/2018] [The American Independent, 05/10/2018]

• 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.” [Miami New Times, 10/16/2018]
• Former TPUSA Director of Urban Engagement Brandon Tatum told antisemitic YouTuber Bryan Sharpe, known online as “Hotep Jesus,” 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.” [Right Wing Watch, 04/18/2018] [MMFA, 10/26/2018]
• 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.” [MMFA, 02/08/2019]

• Former TPUSA chief creative officer and serial plagiarist 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!” [Twitter/X, 03/30/2019]  
• Riley Grisar, former president of TPUSA’s Las Vegas chapter, praised white supremacy, saying, “We’re gonna rule the country! White power!” and using the N-word in a video uncovered by the antifascist website It’s Going Down. [It’s Going Down, 05/09/2019]
• Former TPUSA high school outreach director Kyle Kashuv apologized on May 22, 2019, 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, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. 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. [Twitter/X, 05/22/2019] [Fox News, 07/28/2018] [Turning Point USA News, 05/16/2019] [The Daily Beast, 05/23/2019] 
• Former Michigan State University chapter president Sergei Kelley asked on X (formerly known as Twitter), “At what point is your skin dark enough to qualify for reparations?” Kelly also retweeted British neo-Nazi Mark Collett fearmongering about a “white couple” who were allegedly “brutally set upon in an airport and the white man desperately tries to protect his girlfriend.” [MMFA, 07/01/2020] [MMFA, 07/17/2020]
• 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.” [Talking Points Memo, 07/12/2021] 
• An Instagram account called Basic Facts Matter, which is associated with TPUSA, has targeted Black victims of police brutality and spread racist talking points about abortion. [MMFA, 08/25/2022] 
• The president of Turning Point USA’s University of Missouri chapter made a racist social media post mocking the death of Black students at the University of Virginia. The post included use of the N-word. [The Kansas City Defender, 12/08/2022]
• Leaked group chat messages from Towson University Turning Point students allegedly revealed members using racist and anti-LGBTQ slurs. [The Towerlight, 10/04/2022]
• Clemson University’s TPUSA chapter held an “Affirmative Action bake sale” on the first day of Black History Month with a poster showing different prices listed based on customers’ race. [WYFF News 4, 02/02/2023]
• On his Youtube show, Johnson said that a “mongoloid horde” of “woke intersectional failures” could ruin American cities and called former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot a “cultural barbarian.” [MMFA, 03/01/2023]

Kirk has repeatedly denied that his organization espouses racism or harbors bigots, but previous reporting has proven that to be false time and time again. TPUSA chapters have invited white supremacist allies like John Doyle and Kai Schwemmer to their campuses, and white supremacist influencer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has bragged that his followers have infiltrated and influenced Turning Point USA. 

• 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. [MMFA, 10/28/2018] [Right Wing Watch, 12/19/2018]
• TPUSA defended Florida Atlantic University professor and TPUSA chapter faculty adviser Marshall DeRosa after The Nation reported his ties to SPLC designated hate group League of the South. [MMFA, 04/12/2018] [The Nation, 03/21/2018] [SPLC]
• TPUSA’s Iowa State University chapter reportedly invited white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes to speak on campus. [HuffPost, 05/10/2019] [MMFA, 09/05/2018]
• TPUSA 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 supremacist and antisemitic figures, including Fuentes and Tim Gionet (also known online as “Baked Alaska”). [Right Wing Watch, 09/30/2019] [MMFA, 11/20/2017]
• Turning Point USA’s University of Alabama chapter invited two associates of Fuentes, Kai Schwemmer and Tyler Russell, to speak at a conference. The chapter’s vice president, Brandt Wiggins, is also an associate of Fuentes, and was scheduled to speak at the event as well. Wiggins has pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory, and wrote on social media that white people should “HAVE WHITE BABIES.” [MMFA, 09/12/2022] [Twitter/X, 07/24/2022] [Twitter/X, 07/24/2022]
• In late 2021, Turning Point USA held a four-day conference called “AmericaFest” in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, that was attended by far-right extremists Greyson 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 attack and has tweeted, “The pride flag is equivalent to Italy's fascist flag.” TPUSA gave Jackson press credentials to cover their Arizona event. [AZ Mirror, 12/23/2021] [CNN, 06/29/2021 [Twitter/X, 12/22/2021] [X/Twitter, 12/19/2021] 
• Nazi flags were displayed outside a TPUSA summit at the Tampa Convention Center in July 2022. The event’s organizers denied having any affiliation with the demonstrators displaying swastika and SS flags. [Insider, 07/24/2022]
• Research analyst Ben Lorber has documented the many ties between TPUSA chapters and Fuentes’ “groypers,” despite the supposed history of rivalry between the two groups. [Daily Kos, 04/19/2022]
  • On July 24, 2022, Lorber tweeted that TPUSA leader at Texas A&M University, Carson Wolf, was a “diehard Nick Fuentes acolyte” before adopting a more moderate outward facing posture. [Twitter/X, 07/24/2022] 
  • On July 24, 2022, Lorber tweeted that Jack Andersson runs the TPUSA chapter at University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as a white nationalist organization called National Traditionalism with AJ Willms, another “white Christian nationalist.” [Twitter/X, 07/24/2022] [Twitter/X, 07/24/2022] 
  • On July 15, 2022, Lorber tweeted that TPUSA’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, 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. (Bowyer’s name does not appear in the final event listing or in a YouTube post listing the speakers.) [Twitter/X, 07/15/2022] [Twitter/X, 07/15/2022] [Political Research Associates, 07/28/2022] [Eventbrite, 07/22/2022] [YouTube, 07/22/2022]  
  • On July 13, 2022, Lorber tweeted that Gen-Z influencer Lance Johnston, a regular at TPUSA events, attended a speech Fuentes gave in Dallas outside CPAC in 2021. [MMFA, 08/25/2022] [Twitter/X, 07/13/2022] 
  • On March 23, 2022, Lorber tweeted that high school student Konner Earnest started the TPUSA chapter at The Woodlands High School in Woodlands, Texas, and says he watches Fuentes’ show. [Twitter/X, 03/23/2022]
• The Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Notre Dame invited white supremacist allies Kai Schwemmer and John Doyle to speak to students. [Twitter/X, 12/06/2022] [MMFA, 09/12/2022] [Political Research Associates, 07/20/2021]
• In 2022, Doyle was invited by the TPUSA chapter at UC Santa Barbara to speak. On X, the university clarified that the event was not registered with the university and was held off-campus. [Twitter/X, 04/19/2022] [Twitter/X, 04/20/2022]
• The University of Delaware Turning Point chapter also invited Schwemmer for a public debate. [Facebook, 11/22/2022] 
• On X, Benny Johnson announced that he hired Josiah David Moody as his “digital specialist.” Moody is also a “groyper” who attended Nick Fuentes’ rally with Fuentes affiliates Dalton Clodfelter and Sneako. [Twitter/X, 05/09/2023] [Twitter/X, 07/17/2023] 
• In a speech given in Florida, Nick Fuentes bragged to his audience that Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA had adopted his messaging. “It’s a pretty clear dynamic,” he said. “Turning Point USA, or Leadership Institute, whatever you want to say — every day, groypers who believe in this message, who believe in me, are infiltrating the highest ranks of their leadership, but we’re all here today 100 percent ideologically aligned. This is a revolution.” [MMFA, 07/19/2023]
• On X, Kirk posted “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.” That tweet was celebrated widely through young neo-nazi circles, with Fuentes posting on Telegram, “Groypers Won.” [MMFA, 08/23/2023] [Telegram, 08/15/2023]

Kirk has also spouted racist rhetoric repeatedly on his radio show and professed support for the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Kirk has fearmongered that “prowling blacks go around for fun to go target white people,” called George Floyd “a scumbag,” and blamed the wildfires in Maui on “pagan Hawaiian culture.”  

• Kirk’s X feed has featured anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim tweets, and he once tweeted a flawed statistic that minimized police brutality against the Black community: “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.” [SPLC, 02/16/2018]
• In 2020, Kirk warned Black athletes against calling for diversity because “Black people tend to be more athletically inclined to be good at basketball.”  [MMFA, 08/03/2020]
• In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Kirk said that Black Lives Matter wants to “fan the flames of a race war in our country.” [MMFA, 09/01/2020] 
• Kirk also called George Floyd “a scumbag” during a speech in Minnesota where he derided urban spaces and claimed that the state “built by wonderful Scandinavians” is “being destroyed now, rather intentionally.” [Minnesota Reformer, 10/06/2021]
• After Tucker Carlson asserted his support of the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory on Fox News, Kirk defended him, saying, “Nothing he said there is controversial. It's factual and it's true.” Later on in the show, Kirk said that Carlson made him “so proud” for doubling down on the racist conspiracy. [MMFA, 04/13/2021]
• Kirk reaffirmed belief in the theory when he claimed that the Biden administration intentionally let Afghanistan fall in order to bring refugees into the United States, saying that, “Joe Biden wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently.” [MMFA, 08/16/2021]
• Kirk suggested the U.S. should “deputize a citizen force, put them on the border” in order to protect “white demographics in America.” [MMFA, 09/23/2021]
• After her nomination to the Supreme Court, Kirk said that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “is what your country looks like on critical race theory.” [MMFA, 03/23/2022]
• Kirk claimed that “British colonialism was the most benign global empire ever” and that “certain cultures are better than others.” [MMFA, 09/09/2022]
• Kirk said that Vice President “Kamala Harris has now become the jive speaking spokesperson of equity.” [MMFA, 10/05/2022]
• At a 2022 TPUSA Live Free event, Kirk asserted that “There is a deliberate and venomous anti-white campaign in our country.” [MMFA, 10/24/2022]
• After Brittany Griner was released from prison in Russia, Kirk asked, “If you're a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine?” [MMFA, 12/08/2022]
• Kirk suggested it was “affirmative action” for Republicans to nominate Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) for Speaker of the House. [MMFA, 01/04/2023] 
• On his show, Kirk said, “I don't believe Black History Month is worth the kind of full month that it is, at all.” [MMFA, 01/20/2023]
• On the topic of slavery, Kirk remarked, “There's a lot more to that story than people would ever want to acknowledge and admit.” [MMFA, 01/20/2023]
• Charlie Kirk and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec claimed concern about equity is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. [MMFA, 02/16/2023]
• After his removal from Fox News, Kirk passionately defended Carlson’s racist text messages. He said, “Tucker Carlson did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong.” [MMFA, 05/03/2023]
• Kirk exclaimed on his show, “The war on white people continues.” [MMFA, 06/15/2023]
• Kirk called Juneteenth a “neo-segregationist federal holiday” and “pagan garbage” and said the day “is mandatory to work at Turning Point USA.” [MMFA, 06/16/2023]
• After he resigned as Tucker Carlson’s head writer following resurfaced racist and sexist posts in an online forum, Kirk hired Blake Neff as his show’s producer. According to CNN, Neff, responding to a 2018 thread with the subject line, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” He replied, “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no.” [MMFA, 06/22/2023] [CNN, 07/11/2020] 
• Kirk called Ketanji Brown Jackson a “recipient of affirmative action” who is “unqualified” for the Supreme Court. He then said she was more of “a race activist from Brooklyn then a Supreme Court justice.” [MMFA, 06/29/2023]
• Kirk called for bans on collecting racial data at schools to “really crack the whip on affirmative action.” [MMFA, 06/30/2023]
• Kirk said that affirmative action does not address the “real problem” of “Black crime” and Black fathers supposedly abandoning their children. [MMFA, 07/06/2023]
• Kirk went on an unhinged racist rant on his radio show: “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people -- that’s a fact.” [MMFA, 05/19/2023] 
• On Kirk’s show, Neff called “Michelle Obama's college thesis “ethno-narcissism.” [MMFA, 07/14/2023]
• In a rant, Kirk claimed that “Joy Reid, and Michelle Obama, and Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks,” that “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” [Los Angeles Blade, 07/14/2023]    
• Kirk hosted the white nationalist-approved “Students for Ye” organizer, Daniel Schmidt, on his radio show to complain about “white genocidal rhetoric.” Schmidt has been applauded previously by Fuentes and has made antisemitic remarks on X. [MMFA, 07/27/2023] [Telegram, 07/17/2023] [Twitter/X, 01/18/2023]
• Kirk claimed that the Democratic Party coalition includes “resentful, government-addicted minorities and people that want government benefits.” [MMFA, 08/11/2023]
• Kirk defended Daily Wire host Matt Walsh's resurfaced racist comments, arguing that “heritage and culture are connected and that America was founded by Anglo-Saxons and based upon Anglo-Saxon laws and traditions.” He went on to say, “If anyone thinks immigrants don't bring their culture with them, they haven't visited the streets of Los Angeles, Houston, or New York lately.” [MMFA, 08/15/2023]
• Kirk called Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis a “thug.” [MMFA, 08/16/2023]
• Kirk blamed the Maui wildfires on “pagan Hawaiian culture.” [MMFA, 08/17/2023]
• On X, Kirk claimed rising rates of “close calls” for potential accidents by airlines are due to “race-based affirmative action hiring” of air traffic controllers. [Twitter/X, 08/22/2023] 
• After playing a clip of MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan on his show, Kirk said, “Send him back to the country he came from,” and that “if we had sane immigration policy we would say adios Mehdi Hasan,” later calling him “a foreigner.” [MMFA, 08/29/23] 

Correction (4/3/24): One example has been removed from this piece because it was inaccurate. See details here.