Dispatch RELEASE
From Echoes to Protest: Virginia Tech Confronts TPUSA
Last week, Virginia Tech’s local Turning Point chapter welcomed Megyn Kelly and Governor Glenn Youngkin to Burruss Auditorium. Initially, Charlie Kirk was supposed to attend the event and speak to Tech students, but with his passing last week, Kelly and Youngkin took his place.
On September 24th, they preached to and then answered questions from a room of over 2,000 Virginia Tech students and general admissions attendees. The question segment with Megyn Kelly made the news on CNN, when a student asked Kelly about the DOJ article, which demonstrated that “since 1990, far right extremists killed six times more people than far left extremists.”, (CNN). Kelly responded by calling the student a liar and said, “It is overwhelmingly left-wing violence”, despite the DOJ research paper’s findings (CNN).1
This attitude and response from Kelly were to be expected when a student asked her anything political. As a Tech student in attendance myself, I heard that Kelly and Kirk’s fans asked her for her workout routine and for advice on how to be MAGA in their workplace without getting ‘punished’ for what they say on the clock. Personally, I felt embarrassed by the lack of hard-hitting questions asked by the student body, and I left the event questioning how the night would've gone differently if Charlie Kirk had been there - maybe he would've been able to fill the auditorium with students wanting to converse, not just pander.
While Governor Glenn Youngkin spoke, he announced a $100,000 donation to TPUSA for them to fund more chapters across Virginia. Do I think it's good to support young political students who want to start clubs and conversations? Yes. But I also realize that our state governor is funding a partisan group of students who, until September 10th, followed a man who spread hate about abortion, trans people, and against gun control. The irony is obvious: Glenn Youngkin is funding a group of students who are against gun control and tolerance, when gun violence killed the Founder of Turning Point, Charlie Kirk.
The event opened my eyes to the extremities of TPUSA, so seeing a student protest facing the ticket line for hours made me proud to be a Tech student. Before getting in line, I joined the protest, which I had seen promoted on social media the week coming up to the TPUSA event. The students protesting were upset that Tech was giving Turning Point a platform, and they felt they had no say in who VT welcomed onto campus. When I think of this night, I think of the protest outside and of Megyn Kelly’s biased answers to real, founded questions.