On Wednesday, October 22, students at Royal Oak High School (ROHS) in suburban Detroit conducted a walkout/sit-in to oppose the establishment of a Turning Point USA club at their school.
Founded in 2012 by fascist operative Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last month, Turning Point USA is a billionaire-funded organization set up, in its own words, to “combat modern liberalism on college campuses.” In reality, it fights to spread anti-communism, antisemitism, racism and anti-gay bigotry to young people.
The walkout came just a few days after millions of people across the United States rallied in every major city and town for the second time this year against the fascistic Trump administration under the banner “No Kings.” These were the largest political protests in American history so far.
Seventeen-year-old senior Leilani Hamilton prepared the Royal Oak walkout by posting a call to action on Instagram and printing flyers. She explained to this reporter how it happened:
“The day before, about 6 p.m., I saw a post on Instagram saying there was a Turning Point club at our school now. In the comments they were saying this is a hate group. This was the first time I heard about Turning Point.”
Leilani quickly read more online about Turning Point and Charlie Kirk. “He says blacks have less brain power than white people, and abortion is as bad as the holocaust,” she explained. “Turning Point will put students and teachers in danger.”
She decided to call for a walkout. “I printed out 25 flyers and I made a post on Instagram. It got reposted on ROHS snap story [on Snapchat]. That’s hundreds of students who saw it there.”
When Leilani got to school in the morning, “students wanted to get stacks of flyers from me.” At the start, “it was a group of about 70 students, and by the end of the day it was 277 students. We had a sign-in sheet. Students walked out in the middle of class to come join us.”
Many teachers supported the walkout, she said. “They had a teacher meeting right before, and they decided they weren’t going to try to stop us. A lot of teachers agree with it. My math teacher thanked me.”
“It was going to be just a walkout, but it rained, so we did a sit-in. It started in the cafeteria, and the principal came in, and then the superintendent.” In the end, the school officials convinced the students to move their sit-in to the auditorium, where they remained until the end of the day.
Royal Oak Schools superintendent John Tafelski later confirmed in a statement that the Turning Point club would be allowed to go ahead at the school, claiming “under the federal Equal Access Act of 1984, the district cannot regulate student groups based on the content of their speech—whether religious, political, philosophical, or otherwise.”
What is Turning Point USA?
Turning Point USA is a billionaire-funded organization that plays a major and semi-official role in Trump’s unfolding fascist conspiracy. It is tasked with preparing the ideological groundwork for dictatorship. The group has been tapped by Trump’s Department of Education to curate “patriotic” curriculum at K-12 schools.
Its website boasts that Turning Point USA has over 800 student club chapters at colleges across the country and “over 1,000 student-led chapters engaged on high-school campuses.”
Among their major initiatives have been a “professor watchlist” and “school board watchlist,” which solicit and publish information about supposedly radical left teachers and school officials so they can be targeted for victimization and harassment.
Founder Charlie Kirk’s own racist and fascist views were well known, and there is no shortage of evidence for them. Yet after he was assassinated last month, he was turned into a political martyr by the Trump administration. Workers, including teachers, were fired from their jobs for correctly calling him a bigot and a fascist. The Democrats went along with this, voting with Republicans in Congress to honor Kirk on his birthday, October 14.
What perspective is needed to fight fascism?
The massive “No Kings” rallies that took place days before the student walkout showed beyond a doubt that not only in Royal Oak, Michigan, but all across the United States, and indeed around the world, people want to fight against Trump’s fascist conspiracy.
What is missing is not anti-fascist sentiment, but a socialist political perspective. The source of fascism is the crisis of capitalism and the determination of the financial oligarchy to defend its wealth by the most violent means against the threat of social revolution. The force that can oppose fascism is the international working class, backed by the youth.
The Royal Oak students have appealed to the school administration to ban the Turning Point club. But fascism won’t be stopped by banning this or that club at a single school. And any rule established by school or government authorities to ban a fascist political club would immediately be used, much more aggressively, to suppress left-wing organizations.
The Socialist Equality Party (US) wrote in its statement of October 20, “After the ‘No Kings’ protests: What Next?”:
Opposition to dictatorship can only go forward to the extent that it is rooted in the social and political struggles of the working class, based on an internationalist socialist strategy. The defense of democracy is impossible without the development of a socialist movement to end capitalism and place the wealth of society under the democratic control of the working class itself.
For young people who want to fight fascism and dictatorship, that means building the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), which is the youth movement of the Socialist Equality Party.
To fight fascism, build the IYSSE at your high school now! Fill out the form below to get started.