Turning Point USA Arrives at UC Berkeley for Last Tour Stop After Charlie Kirk’s Killing

Protests are expected as Turning Point USA, the conservative student group founded by Charlie Kirk, makes its final college tour stop at UC Berkeley on Monday evening, two months after the controversial founder was shot and killed at a Utah university.

Kirk was originally set to headline the sold-out appearance as part of the American Comeback Tour, a series of college campus visits across the country that were meant to mark a triumphant year for the organization.

From Republicans’ sweeping 2024 congressional wins to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the theme was “definitely very resonant of the current climate on the national level,” said John Paul Leon, the president of UC Berkeley’s TPUSA chapter.

Since Kirk was killed during the opening leg of his tour in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10, though, the organization has rebranded the events to memorialize him, calling the dozen or so stops that resumed two weeks after his death “This is the Turning Point.”

It’s “a sort of notion that everyone’s now coming together to play their part and try to fill in the gap that was the giant that Charlie Kirk left,” Leon told KQED. Appearances at the University of Mississippi and Auburn University have featured his wife, Erika, Vice President JD Vance, Eric and Lara Trump, among other high-profile conservative figures.

More than 300 people are expected to attend Monday’s event at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, which will feature comedian and actor Rob Schneider and author and “Christian apologist” Frank Turek.

It’s also likely to draw protesters, as previous TPUSA appearances at University of California campuses have. In 2019, conservative activist Hayden Williams and anti-TPUSA protesters got into a fight on Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, where he’d been invited to recruit students.

At nearby UC Davis, protesters and counter-protesters, some wearing Proud Boys apparel, clashed with pepper spray and knocked over security barricades ahead of a planned speaker event in 2022.

Around 12:30 a.m., three people were arrested while trying to hang a cardboard bug and post anti-TPUSA fliers on Sather Gate in protest, the Daily Californian reported.

After Kirk’s shooting, UC President James Milliken sent a letter advising campuses to review procedures for events “where speakers or performers and the crowds they draw require extra security attention.” The letter urged schools to use indoor venues and add longer and more thorough “door opening” protocols such as security sweeps, bag checks and ticket scanning.

Leon said Berkeley’s TPUSA club is taking additional security measures to ensure safety. Attendees will need a photo ID and won’t be allowed to bring bags or water bottles into the venue. Noisemakers, signs and banners are also prohibited, and other items could be deemed prohibited at the door, according to the event’s description online.

Campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof said the school would not share its security planning ahead of Monday’s tour stop, but he said it will follow campus policies for major events.

After Kirk’s killing, Leon said TPUSA has seen significant growth, even at the notoriously progressive campus in Berkeley. Last year’s weekly meetings averaged fewer than 30 students, he said, but their smallest crowd this fall has been about 60.

“It’s a national movement,” Leon said, adding that many Berkeley students who were previously afraid to join “have this deep, deep sense that they need to do something about what’s going on in the world,” blaming the left for a rise in political violence and polarizing rhetoric.

He said Kirk, who founded TPUSA at 18, advocated for free speech, limited government and values that “maintain the traditions and cultures of the West, not destroy them, not hate the West.”

Critics, however, have long considered Kirk’s positions and debate style to be divisive if not outright bigoted.

He called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former appeals court judge for the District of Columbia and member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a “diversity hire” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.”

He advocated against gay marriage and health care for transgender people, and in an interview with anti-trans activist and former college swimmer Riley Gaines, invoked violence against trans college athletes, saying that instead of allowing a trans person to compete in the NCAA championships, “someone should have just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or ’60s.”

He was often accused of antisemitism, and he called Islam “a danger” to America.

Kirk used his organization as a mouthpiece to spread Christianity, advocate for gun rights and a “return of family values,” and oppose affirmative action and LGBTQ rights.

He would often debate students who disagreed with these positions in viral “Prove Me Wrong” videos, setting up a booth on campus and inviting people to debate him in front of a crowd.

“TPUSA is coming to our campus to spread their message of hate, intolerance, and fascism,” UC Berkeley’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter and multiple pro-Palestinian student groups said in a statement on social media last week. “We stand with people of color, migrants, LGBTQI+, the poor and all oppressed people.”

In addition to planned protests, UC Berkeley’s Queer Alliance and Gender Equity Resource Centers plan to hold community spaces for students during the TPUSA event.

The Daily Californian reported that the Cesar Chavez Student Center would close at 1 p.m. and the Student Learning Center would hold its services online.