Has Turning Point secretly been a flop this whole time?
Running diagnostics on Charlie Kirk’s empire on campus and online
So many new faces in the crowd … I feel God in this Chili’s tonight! If you just subscribed, thank you. We hit the bestseller charts because of you. I promise reading this Substack will be worth your time, every time. Never hesitate to reach out with questions, thoughts, ideas, musings, comments, even (and especially) criticism. And shout out to Aaron Parnas for being the funnel, wishing you rest in the thick of your newborn nights.
“Good luck with bookin that stage u speak of”
I’ve seen this first ballot, hall of fame Rihannaism projected on the back of my eyelids every time I’ve blinked since Tuesday night. I’m convinced that Candace Owens has this quote lying in wait, ready to launch from her Twitter drafts when TPUSA’s arena tour inevitably gets downsized. I’ll resist the urge to retweet.
While Candace is busy praying on Turning Point’s downfall, I’m focused on analyzing it. I launched this Substack September 9th, 2025. I wrote about libs wearing glasses. It was light, fun, easy. The next day, Charlie Kirk was killed. It challenged everything I thought I understood about how the digital culture influences the political one — and vice versa.
So in that respect, the story of Who Broke It has felt, to some degree, intertwined with the story of TPUSA. And it’s not to say I have an emotional stake in their success or failure, but more that we’re driving wheel-to-wheel on a highway, and I’m just curious to know where they’re going.
Everyone I talked to at CPAC compared what a fucking dud that weekend was to the success of TPUSA’s AmFest back in December. That affair pulled in 31,000 attendees. But comparing that annual conference to their current six-stop college jaunt is like comparing Coachella to, well, a six-stop college jaunt. How Turning Point is turning out smaller communities tells us a lot about its health. And reader … it’s looking positively jaundiced.
The first tour stop filled an auditorium (decidedly not an arena) in D.C. Coverage online and in legacy pubs leaned positive. Yeah, good, ok. Next up, Georgia — we know she’s a swinger. UGA’s no different, even if their Turning Point chapter did win a national award for their success in 2024. As everyone in politics knows, the distance from reliable voting bloc to the internet’s laughing stock is much shorter than you’d think.
The internet erupted when Erika Kirk announced she wouldn’t attend. It erupted again when visuals of a crowd thinner than my upper lip hit the feeds. It erupted a third time when word got out that tickets were free. Creators on the left went wall-to-wall on coverage — we’ll get to that below — so the explanations started rolling in.
My explanation: Can’t do a show with two Robins and no Batman. That’s entertainment science. Andrew Kolvet, the fill-in host of both The Charlie Kirk Show and the event, pointed the finger elsewhere. It’s what he said in a YouTube video the day after that sent me down the rabbit hole.
Who he blames, what protest leaders say, and whether that aligns with the diagnostic I ran on TPUSA channels … all below!
WHO HE BLAMES
Kolvet’s done the rounds online and on air since the event. Here’s the clear cut reality of the situation, which he shared on NewsNation: “It happens sometimes.” Anyone who’s thrown an event where people are not obligated by law or DNA to attend knows this to be the cold hard truth.
A potentially warmer, softer truth from a YouTube video with 29,000 views:
“We had about 10,000 tickets reserved for the event, and the venue holds about 4,000 when you consider the stage [...] but the left-wing groups swarm the ticketing, and they try and book up all the tickets, and then they don’t show, and that’s one of their forms of protest.”
So, I know the strategy he’s talking about. K-pop fans famously did it to a Trump rally in 2020. 50 Cent bought 200 front-row seats to a Ja Rule concert in 2018. This is peak petty. I wish all wars were fought this way. But my sus-o-meter went off, because historically, these types of moves are publicly threatened before the event — or at least claimed after.
I could find no evidence of any of the above, so it was time to consider the source. I reached out to the producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, who passed my info to Andrew. I’m eager to get a chance to chat about his view on this and will update you if we connect. In the meantime …
WHAT PROTEST LEADERS SAY
After surfing social for a bit, I reached out to the leaders of two student groups who clearly had a hand in staging the counterprotests. None of the six groups involved posted anything alluding to ticket sabotage (I guess that’s what we’ll call it). So, were these covert operations?
Caleb Lux, President of the Young Democrats of UGA:
“Yeah, I mean, it’s blatantly false. If they can’t prove it, that means they are just trying to save face for an event that was very clearly very embarrassing for them.”
When I probed a little deeper, he said:
“We, of course, didn’t promote that or tell our members to, ‘oh, go out, reserve all these tickets.’ I’m sure everyone who’s kind of in this space, they’ll weigh the costs and benefits to their own selves and whether that’s the tactic they want to use.”
Aspen David, Co-Chair of UGA’s Young Democratic Socialists of America:
“I mean, we encouraged people individually to go ahead and do that. There were many [later said ‘maybe about 5’] people that I personally know that I’d asked specifically to request a ticket so that way we could have information about the event.”
Aspen noted logistical demons TPUSA seemed to be fighting — not announcing the location “until a couple days prior” and changing “the time around multiple times.” I confirmed different times on different social media flyers. The ticket reservations seem to be more of a side effect than a prescription.
“So, while I do think that people reserving those tickets played a factor, that wasn’t a strategy on our part because, by the time that we started protest planning, that was already something that so many people were doing, where it was like, this is going to take care of itself, you know?
You don’t have to be fucking Einstein to know that you shouldn’t be changing around the event time right before the vice president comes to campus when you’ve already announced it’s going to be at a certain time, so people have planned for that time.”
Both leaders stood firm in their belief that TPUSA was more than capable of self-sabotaging without their left-wing interference. Completely independently, they each mentioned to me the chaos that followed a “coup d’etat,” as Caleb called it, resulting in a “messy” leadership change for TPUSA’s UGA chapter.
Aspen had a hot take on the relationship between UGA’s TPUSA and DSA groups:
“I know the people from Turning Point personally. ... [I] wouldn’t say they’re the most capable organizers. I’m actually very grateful for Turning Point’s existence. I am grateful that they’re on campus because [...] people see them and they’re like, ‘well, that’s pretty much the anathema of everything I believe in. So I’m going to go ahead and go in the opposite direction.’ That just turns people towards us. So, you know, I’m glad that they held the event. I’m glad that they continue to be a thorn in the side of any student’s conscience because that just makes us stronger.”
It helps when you win the social media war on campus, too. The collaborative Instagram post that left-wing orgs posted surpassed the amount of likes of the original Turning Point post in five hours, Aspen told me.
Caleb pointed out that that post had paid advertising behind it for weeks as well: “I couldn’t scroll through Instagram without seeing one of those ads. Like, every single time. They were spending so much on it. … They even had a petting zoo.”
