On Tuesday, in a convention center in West Palm Beach, Florida, amid
chants of “USA!” and “The wall is going to be built!,” Donald Trump,
Jr., kicked off a three-day annual summit for Turning Point USA, a
conservative nonprofit. Based outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is
to foment a political revolution on America’s college campuses, in part
by funnelling money into student government elections across the country
to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is secretive about its funding
and its donors, raising the prospect that “dark money” may now be
shaping not just state and federal races but ones on campus.

Turning Point touts its close relationship with the President’s family.
The group’s Web site promoted Don, Jr.,’s appearance for weeks,
featuring a photo of him raising a clenched fist. Its promotional
materials include a quote from the younger Trump praising Turning Point:
“What you guys have done” is “just amazing.” Lara Trump, the wife of
Don, Jr.,’s brother Eric, is also involved with the group. In West Palm
Beach on Wednesday, she hosted a luncheon promoting Turning Point’s
coming Young Women’s Leadership Summit. The group’s twenty-four-year-old
executive director and founder, Charlie Kirk, told me that he counts
Don, Jr., as “a personal friend.”

Turning Point casts itself as a grassroots response to what it perceives
as liberal intolerance on college campuses. Kirk has called college
campuses “islands of totalitarianism”; he and his supporters contend
that conservatives are the true victims of discrimination in America,
and he has vowed to fight back on behalf of what he has called his “Team
Right.” Kirk is a frequent guest on Fox News, and last summer he was
invited to give a speech at the Republican National Convention. That was
where he met Donald Trump, Jr., and “hit it off” with him, Kirk said.
After the convention, Kirk divided his time between Turning Point
activities and working for the Trump campaign as a specialist in youth
outreach. “I helped coördinate some rather successful events with him,”
Kirk told me, referring to Don, Jr., “and I also carried his bags.” When
friends threw Kirk a surprise birthday party earlier this year, Don,
Jr., attended, as did Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump White House
adviser.

As Turning Point’s profile has risen, so has
scrutiny of its funding and tactics. Internal documents that I obtained,
as well as interviews with former employees, suggest that the group may
have skirted campaign-finance laws that bar charitable organizations
from participating in political activity. Former employees say that they
were directed to work with prominent conservatives, including the wife
of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in aid of Republican
Presidential candidates in 2016. Perhaps most troubling for an
organization that holds up conservatives as the real victims of
discrimination in America, Turning Point USA is also alleged to have
fostered an atmosphere that is hostile to minorities. Screenshots
provided to me by a source show that Crystal Clanton, who served until
last summer as the group’s national field director, sent a text message
to another Turning Point employee saying, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like
fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”

Clanton, who resigned after serving as the group’s second-highest
official for five years, at first declined to comment. “I’m no longer
with Turning Point and wish not to be a part of the story,” Clanton told
me over e-mail. Later, in a second e-mail, she said, “I have no
recollection of these messages and they do not reflect what I believe or
who I am and the same was true when I was a teenager.”

John Ryan O’Rourke, the former Turning Point
employee who received the text messages from Clanton, requested that the
messages “not be used in any article or background information
concerning Turning Point” and declined to comment on them. Kirk said in
an e-mail that “Turning Point assessed the situation and took decisive
action within 72 hours of being made aware of the issue.” Soon after,
Clanton left the organization.

While Kirk served as the public face of Turning
Point, Clanton, its former field director, acted as its hands-on boss,
according to former employees. In a 2016 book that Kirk co-authored with
Brent Hamachek, “Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free
Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations,” he described
Clanton as “the best hire we ever could have made.” He called her
“integral to the success of Turning Point while effectively serving as
its chief operating officer.” He added, “Turning Point needs more
Crystals; so does America.”

Former Turning Point employees say that the organization was a difficult
workplace and rife with tension, some of it racial. Gabrielle Fequiere,
a former Turning Point employee, told me that she was the only
African-American hired as a field director when she worked with the
group, three years ago. “In looking back, I think it was racist,” she
said. “At the time, I was blaming myself, and I thought I did something
wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a model, recalled that the young
black recruits that she brought into the organization suddenly found
themselves disinvited from the group’s annual student summit, and that
when she herself attended, she watched speakers there who “spoke badly
about black women having all these babies out of wedlock. It was really
offensive.” (Kirk, through a spokesman, denied that any such incidents
occurred, and said, “These accusations are absolutely baseless and even
absurd.”)

Fequiere said that Clanton fired her on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, on the
grounds that she was not performing her job well. “I was the only black
American employee they had, and they fired me on M.L.K. Day—it was so
rude!” Fequiere told me. She added, “I felt very uncomfortable working
there because I was black,” but she said she had seen white employees
mistreated, as well. “My Democratic friends had told me that some
Republicans didn’t care about the poor and minorities, and I thought it
wasn’t true, but then I found the people they were talking about!”

Speakers at Turning Point events on various college campuses have been
accused of going out of their way to thumb their noses at ethnic and
cultural sensitivities. The conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,
for instance, whose appearance Turning Point co-hosted with the College
Republicans at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, said that despite
being gay, he hated “faggots,” lesbians, and feminists, who, he said,
“fucking hate men.”

In an effort to mock campus opposition to hate speech, members of the
Turning Point chapter at Kent State University staged a protest last
fall in which they appeared on campus wearing adult diapers and sucking
on pacifiers while proclaiming “Safe Spaces are for Children.” The
protest stirred widespread ridicule, and Kirk’s spokesman said that he
disapproved of the display and later issued guidelines against other
chapters repeating it.

Kirk grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, and was an Eagle Scout; in a 2015
speech to the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley, he said that his
“No. 1 dream in life” was to attend West Point, but the slot he
considered his went to “a far less-qualified candidate of a different
gender and a different persuasion” whose test scores he claimed he knew.
(Kirk said he was being sarcastic when he made the comment.) An older
acquaintance encouraged him to forgo college and launch a conservative
analogue to the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org. Kirk acknowledged
in an interview that it is something of an irony that he heads an
organization devoted to waging political warfare on campuses when he
never actually attended college himself. “I joke that I wasn’t smart
enough to go to a four-year school,” Kirk told me, although he noted
that he continued his studies at a community college.

MoveOn, however, has one part set up as a super PAC, and another as a
501(c)4 “social-welfare group,” both of which are legally allowed to
engage in political elections. It also has a policy of disclosing the
names of anyone contributing five thousand dollars or more. In contrast,
Turning Point is a 501(c)3 charity. This means that, unlike MoveOn
donors, Turning Point donors can take tax deductions for their
contributions and remain anonymous. In exchange for these benefits,
however, the Internal Revenue Service strictly prohibits charities such
as Turning Point from engaging either directly or indirectly in
political elections.

Several former Turning Point employees told me in interviews that they
felt they were asked to participate in activities that crossed lines
drawn by campaign-finance laws for groups like theirs. Payden Hall, who
worked for Turning Point during the 2016 Presidential campaign, told me
that Clanton, who was her boss, e-mailed her at her Turning Point
address to make arrangements for her to coördinate with Ginni Thomas,
the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to help Ted
Cruz’s Presidential campaign. “That’s where the ambiguity began,” Hall
recalled. Soon after, she said, Ginni Thomas, who was supporting Cruz’s
candidacy and is on Turning Point’s advisory council, left a voice
message for
Hall and her sister, who also worked for Turning Point, saying that she
was sending two hundred Cruz placards to them to distribute in the
coming Wisconsin Presidential primary.

“Crystal gave Ginni Thomas my private mailing address without my
permission,” Hall recalled. “They gave out employees’ personal
information to the wife of a Supreme Court Justice.” The next thing she
knew, she said, hundreds of Cruz placards arrived at her home. “We threw
them out,” Hall said. She was a Cruz supporter, but, she says, “We
wanted to volunteer on our own terms, not to give in to pressure from a
boss. I felt that if it wasn’t crossing a legal line, it was crossing a
professional one.”

Trevor Potter, a former Republican commissioner on the Federal Elections
Commission who is the founder and president of the Campaign Legal
Center, a nonpartisan campaign-finance-law watchdog group, said that
Turning Point is barred from aiding political campaigns. “Under the law,
a 501(c)3 can’t engage in political action or give anything of value to
a campaign, including students, or the names of students,” he said. “If
what Turning Point USA was doing was helping Republicans on campus and
feeding them to campaigns, that’s a political operation, and it sounds
as if it crosses the line.”

Reached by phone, Ginni Thomas declined to comment. Clanton’s lawyer,
Robert Grabermann, said that if she e-mailed Hall “at her TPUSA email
address, it was an honest oversight and sincere mistake on Ms. Clanton’s
part. Ms. Clanton categorically denies using TPUSA resources to aid any
political campaign activities. She fully understands the 501 (c)(3)
guidelines, and has on many occasions consulted with legal counsel to
ensure that all personal campaign involvement was compliant with 501
(c)(3) rules.”

Susan Walker, who worked for Turning Point USA in Florida, in 2016, told
me that the group did aid Republican political campaigns. Walker said
that a list she created while working for Turning Point, with the names
of hundreds of student supporters, was given without her knowledge to
someone working for Marco Rubio’s Presidential campaign. “That list had,
like, seven hundred kids, and I worked my ass off to get it,” she said.
“I had added notes on every student I talked to, and they were all on it
still.” The Rubio operative, she added, “shouldn’t have had that list.
We were a charity, and he was on a political campaign.”

E-mails and interviews from other former Turning Point employees in
South Carolina and Ohio showed crossover between Presidential-campaign
work and work for the charity, as well. In South Carolina, a chain of
e-mails shows, Kirk asked a Turning Point USA employee to round up
students to support Cruz at the behest of two officials with a pro-Cruz
super PAC. In a January 25, 2016, e-mail, Drew Ryun, a Turning Point
advisory-council member who was helping run one of the pro-Cruz super
PACs, asked Kirk to get another Turning Point employee to “send” the
super PAC “as many kids as possible.” Ryun, a former deputy director of
the Republican National Committee, explained that he needed “as many
kids as you can generate for a WSJ piece on efforts in” South Carolina.
After Kirk agreed to help, the e-mail thread shows, Kirk coördinated
with Dan Tripp, Ryun’s associate at the pro-Cruz super PAC, who headed
its operations in South Carolina and is the founder and president of Ground Game Strategies.

“Yes!” Kirk answered Tripp when asked for help from Turning Point. “What
part of SC?”

“Greenville, Spartenburg or Anderson Counties,” Tripp replied.

“Time of day and how long?” Kirk asked.

“I’m thinking 2 hours late Sunday afternoon. Canvassing, training and
pizza,” Tripp responded.

“You got it, will recon shortly,” Kirk e-mailed back. Kirk explained
that a Turning Point employee in South Carolina named Anna Scott Marsh
would be the point person, and added that “Anna will be helping. Let’s
rock this!”

Soon after, e-mails show, Marsh, the Turning Point employee, promised to
round up the requested recruits. “Sending something out tonight, and
will send you a list hopefully tomorrow . . . 
I’m sure we can find some solid students here.” Marsh declined to comment about her e-mails.

Asked about these practices, Kirk referred me to a statement from his
lawyer, Sally Wagenmaker: “Turning Point USA works diligently to comply
entirely with all relevant laws and regulations governing not-for-profit
organizations. Turning Point USA focuses on fiscal conservatism, free
market economics, and related student education and advocacy, all
completely within applicable Section 501(c)(3) legal constraints.”

Ryun confirmed that the exchanges occurred, but said that Kirk e-mailed
him “via his personal e-mail and on his personal time!” Tripp, too,
confirmed the e-mails, but said, “We welcomed many volunteers to our
efforts and were grateful for their support. It would be quite troubling
if campaign finance rules were interpreted to prevent conservative
volunteers from exercising their right to be involved in the political
process.”

In a phone interview, Kirk declined to identify the donors who have
supplied his group’s eight-million-dollar-plus annual budget, noting
that many prefer to remain anonymous. But Kirk has spoken and
fund-raised at various closed-door energy-industry gatherings, including
those of the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association and
the 2016 annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of
America. In our interview, Kirk acknowledged that some of his donors
“are in the fossil-fuel space.”

Kirk’s ties to fossil-fuel magnates are controversial because Turning
Point has helped organize opposition on campuses to students calling for
schools to divest from fossil-fuel companies. Turning Point distributed
a guide for college students with a foreword by Kirk, titled “10 Ways
Fossil Fuels Improve Our Daily Lives.” In it, he argues, “Across the
nation, college students are clamoring for their campuses to divest from
fossil fuel . . . students are indoctrinated to believe the myth that fossil
fuels are dirty and renewable energy is a plausible alternative . . . ”
Turning Point, which also runs an online “Professor Watch List” that
targets professors it believes are liberal, blamed “leftist professors”
in its booklet for having “perpetuated” these “myths.” In the interview,
Kirk told me that “We think targeting fossil fuels is rather unfair, and
it is not really in the best interests of the universities to favor one
type of political agenda over another.” It’s a message that “went
great,” he said, when he delivered it at energy-industry meetings.

Last May, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an investigative report on what it called Turning Point’s “stealth plan for political
influence.” The story recounted accusations on multiple campuses that
the group had funnelled money into student elections in violation of the
spending caps and transparency requirements set by those schools. It
detailed how student candidates backed by Turning Point had been forced
to drop out of campus elections at the University of Maryland and Ohio
State “after they were caught violating spending rules and attempting to
hide the help they received from Turning Point.” It also quoted Kirk
saying in an appearance before a conservative political group in 2015
that his group was “investing a lot of time and money and energy” in
student-government elections. (In the story, Kirk denied any wrongdoing
and said it was “completely ludicrous and ridiculous that there’s some
sort of secret plan.”)

A copy of a Turning Point brochure prepared for
potential donors that I obtained provides a glimpse into the group’s
tactics. (A former Turning Point employee said the brochure was closely
held, and not posted online so that it couldn’t leak.) Its “Campus
Victory Project” is described as a detailed, multi-phase plan to
“commandeer the top office of Student Body President at each of the most
recognizable and influential American Universities.”

Phase 1 calls for victory in the “Power 5” conference schools, including
the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Pacific 12
Conference, the Big 12 Conference, and the Southeastern Conference.
Phase 2 calls for winning the top student-government slots in every
Division 1 N.C.A.A. school, of which it says there are more than three
hundred. In the first three years of the plan, the brochure says, the
group aims to capture the “outright majority” of student-government
positions in eighty per cent of these schools.

Once in control of student governments, the brochure says, Turning Point
expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda.
Among its planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on
campus, the implementation of “free speech” policies eliminating
barriers to hate speech, and the blocking of all campus “boycott,
divestment and sanctions” movements. Turning Point’s agenda also calls
for the student leaders it empowers to use student resources to host
speakers and forums promoting “American Exceptionalism and Free Market
ideals on campus.”

Today, Turning Point claims to have a presence on more than a thousand
college campuses nationwide, and to have “a stronger, more organized
presence than all the left-wing campus groups combined.” Kirk told me
his group had started three hundred new chapters in the past year. The
Campus Victory Project brochure names more than fifty four-year colleges and
universities where it claims the group helped effectuate student
government victories in the 2016–17 year, including the University of California, Los Angeles, Syracuse, Purdue, Michigan State, Wake Forest, and the University of Southern California, and it names a hundred and
twenty-two more schools whose governments the group hopes to
“commandeer” in Phase 2. The brochure notes that completing the task
will take money: specifically, $2.2 million.

Kirk, in his interview, denied that any of these funds would directly
pay for students’ campaigns. “We do not directly fund any of these
candidates,” he said. Instead, he explained, “We will support them
through levels of leadership,” including training and what he called
“leadership scholarships.”

The prospect of “dark money”—contributions from anonymous donors to
national ideological groups—flowing into campus elections has alarmed
some students. “Students were outraged that our elections were being
influenced from outside,” Danielle Di Scala, who last year was
vice-president of the student government at Ohio State University, said. “I’d
never seen that before, but it’s starting to be a trend. The problem,”
she told me, “is it can price some student candidates out of the market
when others are getting money from groups with unlimited funds.”

Andy MacCracken, the executive director of the National Campus
Leadership Council, said he worries that campus elections are
“particularly vulnerable” to outside money, “because there aren’t really
any standard rules.” MacCracken says it’s been “shocking to see how much
of an operation there is from Turning Point,” adding that “there’s
really nothing comparable that I’m aware of from left-wing groups.” The
push, he suggested, reflects a recognition on the part of conservatives
about the future value of student leaders. “I can totally imagine
they’re thinking that if we can win this on campuses, they will be the
thought leaders down the road. This is a way to win it efficiently at
the start. The challenge, though,” he says, “is that so much of this is
in the dark.”

A Glimpse into Turning Point USA’s Tactics