(A Nov. 12 update responding to the U.S. Department of Justice’s “investigation” is at the end.)
Berkeley: End Fascist Turning Point’s Youth-Oriented Campaign of Incitement to Violence!
- Condemn in Action Turning Point’s Packaging of the Program of a Neofascist America!
- Protest Turning Point to Make Clear It Is a White Nationalist, Neofascist Organization!
- Donald Trump’s Program for a Fascist America Must Be Defeated Here and Now at UC-Berkeley!
- Defend Black, Latino/a, LGBT+, Immigrant, and Minority Students, Faculty, and Staff from All Fascist Intimidation and Attacks on Individual Liberty and All Human Rights!
- UC-Berkeley Must Not Normalize Fascism on Campus or in Our Communities!
Protest Turning Point Event Monday, Nov. 10, 2025
4:00PM at Zellerbach Hall (Lower Sproul Plaza), UC-Berkeley (near Bancroft + Telegraph)
(Doors open 5PM, Event starts 6:30PM)
The recent, pathetic series of campus events held by the late Charlie Kirk’s American neofascist Turning Point organization are ugly attempts to maintain Kirk’s extremist authoritarian movement with a handful of well-publicized post-Kirk “forums”/rallies at a number of colleges and universities. Despite the nonsensical campaign after Kirk’s death to portray his performances at various far-right crowd-pleasing stage shows as serious intellectual “debates” with liberals and socialists, the truth is that Kirk’s rallies were held overwhelmingly in front of safe, far-right audiences on traditionally conservative campuses. Kirk himself was a gross racist and misogynist whose “debate” consisted of crude, bigoted one-liners and arguments out of the stock-and-trade of traditional fascist propaganda.
His aim in building Turning Point was to recruit college youth to higher and more violently active levels of support for Trump’s more-and-more openly-fascist agenda for America. Does any serious person really think Kirk was really promoting “free speech” and engaging liberal and radical students and teachers in “free intellectual” debate with his long-ago-discredited false and paranoid theories and his repetition of bigoted, hatemongering demagogy?
Any Berkeley undergraduate who has made it through an expository writing class or engaged with an American history course could easily make chopped garbage out of Kirk’s bigoted stupidities.
And anyone can find online numerous statements by Kirk and his followers which expose the vile character of his real message and influence. A few examples of Kirk’s and Turning Point’s typical rhetoric should make clear that Turning Point’s actual method for our university community is not about “free speech” or “freedom of debate.” It is about the intimidation of free speech—especially in an academic setting. It is about bringing an end to free debate. Its real aim is to popularize and normalize the violent method of the January 6, 2021 mob attack on democratic government at the Capitol in Washington, DC and to cultivate submission to the police-state regime Trump is spreading across the country. Turning Point wants to start recruiting—now—some young thugs for Trump’s inevitable attempt at military occupation of the Bay Area—including in particular our campus, with its rich traditions of free speech and intellectual debate.
Berkeley students, teachers, and the entire Berkeley community can and must make sure Turning Point fails in its mission—Charlie Kirk’s mission—of crushing intellectual freedom and ending the possibility of open dissent and protest of Trump’s neofascist program for America.
The real Charlie Kirk was a fascist white nationalist and misogynist who promoted fascist propaganda to recruit youth in college campuses for Trump’s fascist government. Kirk and his extremist followers may have sought a certain intellectual and lipstick-on-a-pig reputation. But their rhetoric was—taken as a whole in the context of the era of Donald Trump—demagogically violent, based on and aimed at the basest and most ignoble of human attributes—ignorance, submissiveness, hate, and fear—not intellectual freedom! No serious thinking person could believe that statements by Kirk and Turning Point such as the following were intended to be or functioned as contributions to the promotion of “free debate”: “If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?” (The Charlie Kirk Show, December 8, 2022) or “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors,” (The Charlie Kirk Show, Nov. 16, 2023), or “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” (America Fest, December 2023). Charlie Kirk’s and Turning Point’s college events have not been open, honest, intellectual debates—as various right-wing and even some liberal journalists misleadingly asserted after his death. Kirk’s “question and answer” sessions have in reality been staged shows providing a demagogue the opportunity to repeat a script of crude, bigotry-spewing, outrageously stupid racist and misogynist talking points for the crude entertainment of marginal crowds of mindless right-wing extremists and occasional curiosity-seekers. Kirk was not challenging progressives and left-wing radicals. He was attempting to mobilize a fascist youth contingent for Trump’s police state. It is not a matter to promote “free debate” to declare “reject feminism, submit to your husband “ (August 26, 2025) or to proclaim, “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, April 1, 2024) or to call gay activists and LGBT+ people pedophiles: “We have a new [Navy] ship named after gay pedophile Harvey Milk.” (Nov 8, 2021)
This abuse-promoting and violence-inciting demagogy should not be permitted to be “normalized” anywhere. Nor should our campus community permit the normalization of KKK-like statements like: “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023), or “America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, April 30, 2025).
Trump is attempting to ramp up his Gestapo force attacks on our immigrant communities with ICE raids, both because he needs to feed racist and xenophobic demagogy to his base and because he has been emboldened by the weakness of the Democratic Party’s opposition, the endless impotent legalism of the American lower federal courts, and the increasingly authoritarian, pro-fascist mentality and decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The massive mobilization on Saturday October 18 of the new movement against the Trump presidency and the follow-up wave of defeats for Trump’s Republicans in the November 4 elections in California and across the country have dealt Trump and his submissively neofascist Republican party a resounding, humiliating defeat. Trump desperately needs to improve his chances of winning in the next midterm elections and keep alive his wish to remain in office beyond his current constitutionally limited two-term presidency. Kirk’s and Turning Point’s talking points are not just “controversial”; they are dangerous. It is not only disgusting but also, in the immediate historical context, dangerous—and typical fascist propaganda—to proclaim, as Kirk and Turning Point have done: “The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day on our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, March 1, 2024).
The actual Charlie Kirk could not have stood up to real debate with any serious progressive or socialist spokesperson. His reputation for promoting real discussion with leftists is a fiction, possible to promote only after the actual Kirk was dead.
Kirk’s extremist stage shows were characterized by a set of stupid one-liners, never the slightest intellectual threat to the actual arguments of progressives and left-wing radical intellectuals and students. Like all fascist movements, Kirk’s Turning Point was not an example of the power of his long-ago discredited arguments, but, like Trump’s demagogic stupidities, of the dangers of inciting a mob mentality to higher levels of intimidation and violence.
It is this intimidation of liberal and left-wing students and intellectuals and the incitement of a thug mentality in our campus that makes a Turning Point event so dangerous. Yet these aims are the only real functions of a would-be-Nuremburg-style rally by Turning Point at UC Berkeley. The Berkeley community must stand up to block this vile and dangerous political infection from spreading with a bold, angry display of protest in defense of democracy against the program of a fascist America.
Berkeley is the perfect place to draw a line in the sand against Trump’s neofascist America.
By allowing this event to go forward unopposed, UC-Berkeley would be paving the way for an escalation of Trump’s authoritarian power. Indeed, a “re-election” campaign is on the table, unless we can mobilize now to express the strength of our opposition as the only force that can stop the rise of fascism.
California has been at the forefront of the national movement against Trump’s fascist takeover of the American government. Thousands have mobilized bravely to the streets to defend immigrants being hunted by Trump’s fascist ICE thugs. The mass mobilizations in LA and the rest of California have set an example for the movement to act in Chicago, New York, and other cities nationwide.
Turning Point has lost their star fascist demagogue recruiter and are desperate to recruit new faces so they can continue playing a role in organizing young racist voters and mob members for Trump. Fascism must not be normalized in our campus. UC Berkeley must stand on our tradition of being a bastion for democracy and equality. Time and time again, we have mobilized and pledged to make this campus and the Bay Area a real sanctuary for real freedom and equality. We must stand on that commitment now.
BAMN’s response to Department of Justice investigation (Nov. 12, 2025):
The announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that it is investigating UC-Berkeley means: (1) Trump and his fascist MAGA movement were completely freaked out by the success of the anti-fascist rally led by Berkeley students on November 10, (2) they have decided that somebody must be punished and that DOJ’s job is to decide who that should be, and (3) where the DOJ goes, ICE is sure to follow.
Whoever the DOJ decides will take the fall, it will be based on completely phony, unsubstantiated charges. The DOJ is most likely to blame the UCB administration for the complete failure of Turning Point’s fascist recruitment rally in Berkeley. To be fair, the UCB administration did everything it could possibly do to suppress student involvement in the anti-fascist demonstration, including telling black, Latina/o, immigrant, and other minority students to stay home or leave campus rather than defend their right to be on the campus and defend themselves and the whole campus against the threat of young fascist gangs. The militarization of the campus led to several buildings being closed, depriving students of access to vital services on their own campus, while providing a defense of the fascists made in close consultation with Turning Point that involved a small army of police, private security guards, and potentially even federal agents. But the reason to focus on the University administration would be that the Trump administration believes that UC is the most likely university cohort who would agree to pay massive amounts of money to Trump, to prevent an attempt to withhold even greater sums of money from the Trump administration for research.
The most important response by Berkeley students, the campus community, and the Bay Area to the DOJ threat is to start organizing our campus, our community, our schools, and our neighborhoods to stop ICE raids and, in particular, the kidnapping of international and undocumented students from the Berkeley campus. Monday’s demonstration proved that the Berkeley student body is prepared to rise up and provide leadership to every other campus on how students must act to defend democracy, human rights, free speech, the rights of Palestinians, and the rights of the American working class and poor, from the endless fascist assaults by the Trump administration. This includes recognizing first and foremost that the way to defeat Trump is to take action to stop his fascist movement from recruiting fascist street thugs to attack every progressive gain in the nation’s history.
-BAMN
