Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, a city that tends to vote around 90-95% democrat, conservative ideas were, to put it gently, non-existent. The narrative that your parents and teachers pushed was the reality; it was the truth. We were the good guys and those who disagreed with us were motivated by pure evil, or at the very least, completely uninformed.
Years later, moments still stand out, my parents waking me up early in the morning in 2016 with fear in their eyes. I had been up with them the night before, listening to them discuss the incoming results of the 2016 presidential election, gripping to their every word as state by state was called, Clinton for Illinois, Trump for Texas. Eventually I was ushered to bed, unknowing the outcome of what to 9-year-old me could be the end of the world. I rub my eyes to find my parents sitting next to each other on my bed, an unusual sight, they rest their hand on my chest in comfort as they tell me what had happened: Trump had won. I was on the verge of tears. I was scared, terrified for what was to happen, kids at school saying it would be the end of the world.
This was my reality growing up: we are the good guys, they are the bad, and why would I have any reason to doubt that? My teachers gave indications and interjections in class that tell me they agree, the people on the TV shows and videos my mom would watch also seemed to agree, this must be the truth then. Entering high school, things began to change, I began to get curious. Why is overturning Roe V. Wade bad? Why would you never vote for Trump? How do Republicans just seem to have it all so wrong?
These questions led to suspicion of the narrative I was being fed, which in turn, led to many more questions. I was so curious about the world around me, and I truly felt like I was only being told half of the story.
And then it happened, on Sep. 8th 2024, Jubilee, the online entertainment channel, released a new video: “1 Conservative vs 25 Liberal College Students.” Curiosity got the best of me, and I began to delve into the over 90-minute video. I quickly became addicted. Not only was the format of constant action and drama captivating, but I was being introduced to a side of the political spectrum that had only previously been demonstrated as a construct of what is wrong and what is evil. From cultural issues to political candidates, Kirk seemingly defended his conservative ideals against the vicious attacks of 25 heated liberal college students in a way that was intellectual and academic, using means far from the racist and biblically based tactics I was told to believe was the basis for conservatism.
Ok cool, that’s my story of how I became a conservative, and while I find it important to share to shed light on an experience I know many of my fellow peers can relate with, why am I starting this club at Connecticut College? Turning Point USA? Charlie Kirk? Didn’t he say that radical line about abortion that one time? Or didn’t he say that gun deaths were the unfortunate cost of the 2nd amendment only to be shot in the neck (by a fully legally purchased rifle)? While these are true, I would like to take this opportunity to explain the aspirations for our club, and their far reach beyond the clips you may have seen on TikTok of its founder. Turning Point is built on 3 pillars: free speech, free market, and limited government, with recent shifts in the organization promoting faith in Christ as the foundation behind the institution.
Two of these pillars remain relatively self-explanatory: free markets endorse the capitalist system which our ultra-successful economy is based on, and limited government advocates for reducing the existing government bureaucracy back down to a controlled and intentional level. While both are still massive ideas, filled with claims that require intellectual and academic substantiation, our chapter’s focus will revolve around the first pillar, the free speech that Charlie Kirk fought tooth and nail to uphold every day of his career.
Free speech sounds like a simple concept, creating an environment where the unrestricted marketplace of ideas can be discussed, absent government intervention, and even while certain administrations attempt to attack this constitutional right, our club’s main purpose will serve to encourage such polarizing conversations to occur in the first place. Political polarization is very much real, and very much happening. The less we talk to each other, the more it flourishes. Our club exists to combat this, and to fight back in a time when the Overton Window of modern academia, the range of socially acceptable ideas at any given moment, has been displaced so thoroughly that entire categories of overwhelmingly conservative argument, pertaining to the sovereignty of borders, the costs of administrative expansion, the relationship between economic freedom and political liberty, have been rendered not merely contestable but embarrassing within the institutions that confer intellectual respectability, the articulation of those arguments passes to whoever is willing to bear the social cost of articulating them without the blessing of those institutions.
Kirk was willing. That his manner of articulation does not satisfy the aesthetic requirements of academic discourse is a consequence of the same displacement that made his articulation necessary; one does not produce a Frankfurt School by excluding from legitimate intellectual life the tradition that would have generated one. Turning Point USA exists at Conn, at this institution and at institutions like it, as the organizational form of a refusal: a refusal to accept that the positions it advances are unsayable, and an insistence that the Overton Window, having been moved by institutional means, may by institutional means be moved again. Whether one finds the organization’s program adequate to the depth of the problem it has diagnosed is a separate question, and a serious one. That the problem is real, and that the institution housing this publication has declined to engage it, is not.
