sneak peek: the far-right at Stony Brook U. (Patreon)

Written for The Stony Brook Press, and shared here with their permission.

Right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) recent victory at Stony Brook University is a disaster for students, educators, and workers. Stony Brook’s recognition of the billionaire-backed, far-right affiliated organization has outraged students, nearly 600 of whom signed a petition against TPUSA’s on-campus presence. After months of Turning Point agitating the community, including its September rally against COVID-19 vaccine mandates which brought far-right pundits to campus, Stony Brook has rewarded their organization’s tacit white supremacism, far-right dark money, and conspiracy theories. As we go into the spring semester, we must ready ourselves for even more vicious behavior from this now officially recognized and emboldened crew of bigots.

Stony Brook is not the first university Turning Point has afflicted. The group claims to have 1400 chapters across the United States. Conservative student Charlie Kirk and the late entrepreneur Bill Montgomery founded Turning Point in 2012 with financial backing from the late Republican megadonor Foster Friess. The organization recruits students to promote conservative and libertarian economic dogma, aiming to “educate students about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” Turning Point’s website, a gaudy nightmare in red, white, and blue, boasts that its student activists are “the community organizers of the right.”

Turning Point’s projects have included “Critical Race Theory”, now morphed into a far-right buzzword for any time a school acknowledges that American racism exists, promoting COVID-19 misinformation, and the trans community, which Turning Point viciously persecutes. The group helms Professor Watchlist, a watchdog site that lobbies for the firing of liberal, progressive, and leftist academics, while Turning Point extolls the virtues of free speech. 

The Anti-Defamation League characterizes Turning Point as “alt-lite”, or adjacent to the alt-right, while the Southern Poverty Law Center has condemned its “blooming romance with the alt-right.” Countless Turning Point members have exhibited racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and queerphobic behavior, which the organization has sometimes publicly distanced itself from while privately continuing to work with said members. The leadership exhibits the same far-right and even fascist views that alarm even fellow conservative organizations like Young Americans for Freedom: co-founder Charlie Kirk recently called for citizens to protect “white demographics” at the Southern Border, while former communications director Candace Owens once defended Hitler.

This isn’t some niche of Republicans with Nazi-sympathetic ideologies. Turning Point has national traction in conservative and libertarian politics, and has forged an alliance with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. On January 6 2021, Turning Point deployed seven buses with about 350 people to the Capitol rally (a few days before, Kirk announced in a now-deleted tweet that his organization would send “80+ buses full of patriots to D.C. to fight for this president”). Kirk subsequently condemned the rally, created by a movement he has fed for years.

In December, Turning Point convened the embarrassingly named and endemically transphobic AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, where thousands of people gathered to see a roster of guest speakers which included Tucker Carlson, Sarah Palin, transphobic congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (who used a racial slur during her speech), and the recently exonerated Kyle Rittenhouse, whom the audience applauded for murdering two people. Republicans like Liz Cheney, who are mildly abashed by their party’s embrace of Donald Trump, fail to understand political reality: groups like Turning Point USA are the Republican Party.

In addition to its support from major conservative politicians and pundits, Turning Point is funded by numerous right-wing billionaires and dark money foundations for its promotion of free market capitalism, including Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, various Koch Brothers-associated sources, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer. The Mercers, whose money propelled Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory, invested nearly $20 million into dark money fund Donors Trust, which in 2019 gave Turning Point $906,000.

Donors Trust, a bastion of Republican dark money, was a major force behind Trump’s election. It’s known for its ties to the Koch Brothers, billionaire businessmen Charles and the late David, infamous financiers of Republican politics. Friends of Turning Point co-founder Foster Friess, the Koch Brothers have ties to multiple Turning Point financiers, including Donors Trust and the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). It is clear that Turning Point is part of the same far-right dark money network, which has also engineered the backlash against so-called “Critical Race Theory”.

The COVID-19 misinformation campaign has come out of this network. Turning Point has helped prolong this plague by promoting misinformation about the pandemic, including an entire webpage dedicated to COVID untruths, despite the group’s co-founder Bill Montgomery dying of COVID in 2020. Recent investigative reporting from The Daily Poster’s Walker Bragman and Alex Koch has shown that the Kochs, among others, funded groups that promote COVID misinformation so they could reopen their companies and raise profits. This isn’t some movement of principled objection to government overreach: it’s a group of plutocrats trying to make money.

Turning Point has ridden into Stony Brook on the back of this campaign. In September 2021, during one of Turning Point’s tabling sessions prior to its acceptance to Stony Brook, where the group was advocating the right-wing policy of school choice, I confronted the group in a recorded exchange I then posted to Twitter. 

Conversation inevitably turned to government control and vaccine mandates. Turning Point members made various false claims about COVID-19 vaccines including that they were all produced from stem cells (Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use cells isolated from fetal tissue in test stages, while the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops concurs that fetal tissue was not used in production) and that vaccines don’t prevent COVID.

Turning Point has had to be covert about its ideological leanings. In practice it hasn’t done so, but students unfamiliar with its techniques can easily be fooled by the group’s talk of personal liberty, or its co-opting and subverting of progressive language with questions like “should a person’s zip code determine their success?” to promote school choice. This is how indoctrination works: an interest group will lure in uninformed students with deceptive language and slowly introduce them to their ideology. 

The Turning Point field representative who led the group repeatedly stressed “we’re nonpartisan, we’re not working with any political affiliation.” When I mentioned Turning Point’s backing from Foster Friess (who she had never heard of), the organizer stated “we are a partisan organization in that we’re a charity,” referring to Turning Point’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. After Turning Point’s acceptance to Stony Brook, a group leader told The Statesman “we’re nonpartisan, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t be recognized by the university.” While Turning Point is legally nonpartisan, the fact the organization is helmed and funded by conservatives to promote conservative legislation seems to render the word “nonpartisan” meaningless.

The organization is in step with right-wing orthodoxy on COVID and vaccines. Turning Point co-organized the September 12 rally against vaccine mandates, which was rampant with vaccine misinformation. Despite the group’s insistence that it merely opposes a vaccination mandate, the rally’s speakers and attendees decried vaccination itself; I entered the crowd and saw one protester carrying a sign which said “Vaccines known to cause: seizures, encephalitis, autoimmunity.” Guest speaker Gavin Wax, who has documented ties to white nationalists, told the crowd he was less likely to get COVID than vaccinated people were, while another speaker who said he was discharged from the military for not getting vaccines years ago advocated for “diversity of health.”

The rally was populated by far-right figures such as Wax, student pundit Isabella DeLuca, and Ian Smith, a COVID-denying gym owner who once killed a 19-year-old. Ashley St. Clair, a transphobic children’s author and former TPUSA brand ambassador whom the organization (at least publicly) cut ties with after she was photographed with white nationalists, was prominently advertised as a guest speaker, although I didn’t spot her at the rally. The function was co-organized by local far-right unit Long Island Loud Majority, which shut down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in support of Trump, has ties to congressman Lee Zelda, and is being monitored by Southern Poverty Law Center. I also spotted Dominick Thorne, now a Suffolk County legislator, distributing campaign materials at the rally.

The campus Turning Point chapter’s claims of racial diversity in their ranks, while true, does not refute the fact they brought white nationalists to campus. Nor does it change that the group asked students if “biological men” should participate in women’s sports, a flagrantly transphobic question. The group’s presence is dangerous to Stony Brook’s student community, which is racially diverse and full of queer people.

Stony Brook’s administration could have prevented this risk to students. Turning Point frequently held tabling events on campus before being accepted as a chapter. Its Instagram touted the “Official TUSA Chapter at Stony Brook University” as early as September. These acts seemingly run afoul of Stony Brook’s Code of Student Responsibility, which prohibits “unrecognized groups/organizations” from “[using] the University name, logo, equipment, or facilities” and “[hosting] events/activities on campus.” 

On a purely legal level, Stony Brook’s choice to recognize Turning Point is reasonable. Unless there’s a cut-and-dried example of a group violating university rules, Stony Brook can’t decline a chapter’s application, lest the university risks losing federal funding. It’s unclear whether Turning Point’s conduct at the time of its acceptance violated these rules. Still, the fact University President Maurie McInnis made a statement affirming free speech rights days before TPUSA’s rally, with  a follow-up message days later weakly affirming Stony Brook’s commitment to diversity suggests the administration was unwilling to fight this battle.

This wouldn’t be the first time Stony Brook bowed to a group with billionaire ties. In 2011, Stony Brook accepted a $150 million donation from billionaires Jim and Marilyn Simons and their Simons Foundation. Jim Simons, a former chair of Stony Brook’s Department of Mathematics, also founded  hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, or RenTech, which in September 2021 agreed to pay the IRS $7 billion in  one of history’s biggest settlements after years of tax avoidance.

Stony Brook, for its part, renamed its medical school the Renaissance School of Medicine in 2018 after receiving more than $500 million in donations from RenTech employees. One of RenTech’s founders, by the way, is TPUSA donor Robert Mercer. While this by no means shows that Mercer is leading a concerted effort to inject far-right ideology into Stony Brook, it does show that educational institutions and political organizations are beholden to capitalists and dark money.

The result is a culture of money and avarice that promotes white supremacism, patriarchy, queerphobia, and authoritarian capitalism. Stony Brook is by its very nature unequipped for threats like this. It is up to the progressive and leftist student community, sympathetic professors, and other school workers to keep Turning Point USA and dark money at bay. Let us hope the community is up for the challenge. If not, it’ll be a particularly dark day when Charlie Kirk or Kyle Rittenhouse come to Stony Brook.