Turning Point USA, one of the newest interest groups at Manhattan High, has started meetings to further their mission of fostering conversations about America and the U.S. Constitution.
TPUSA is an American nonprofit organization that advocates for conservative politics on high school, college and university campuses. It was founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery. TPUSA’s affiliate groups include Turning Point Endowment, Turning Point Action and TPUSA Faith. The MHS chapter started as an interest group last year.
“Our educational mission at each club meeting is to educate about the financial responsibilities of free markets and whatnot, the free use of speech. We’re mainly a constitutional club that talks mainly about the Constitution and constitutional rights with that,” sophomore Keegin Hampton said. “We have meetings that range from quizzes on presidents. We had our last meeting where we … played Constitutional Jeopardy, where we talked about amendments, the core democratic values, historical figures that were at the Constitutional Convention.”
Interest in starting the group came from students who noticed the previous conservative organizations at MHS were losing members.
“There were only two kids in the Republican club and those two had graduated, so that club wasn’t really there any more and that’s when Turning Point stepped in,” sophomore Olivia Moon said.
Moon was one of the members in the group’s first efforts to be recognized by the Student Council. According to Moon and Hampton, getting through StuCo’s hoops to be accepted officially took a while.
“It did take a couple of times to get it fully in and approved by StuCo,” Moon said.
“Last year, it was a lot of StuCo stuff, as with putting our application in us getting denied access to be an interest group the first meeting. So then it was a lot of work to get back and have a review vote on the subject where we are officially now recognized as an interest group at the school,” Hampton said. “So our club is now taking full force this year in everything that we do. Last year, we were able to have a few meetings outside of school before we were an interest group, and then now we can have meetings inside the school. So that has been a blessing to us.”
TPUSA is widely recognized because of the co-founder Charlie Kirk, a conservative political activist. Kirk was known for going to college campuses and hosting debates against the students who attended. He has been a major topic in the news lately after his assassination on Sept. 10 at Utah Valley University.
“Around the same time when we were trying to start our club, Charlie Kirk came to our K-State campus…So us trying to start this chapter here at the same time as that happened was going on, it kind of created this field where they weren’t sure if this would be an okay thing because it might create division on campus, if that makes sense,” Hampton said. “It’s been incredibly hard. I know there’s people that have called me, and others that I know, not nice things because of the organization that we’re trying to build here.”
The main goal of TPUS at MHS is to educate students in a nonpartisan way without leaning a certain political direction, leaving that to be reserved for the club at college level.
“We need to educate more now than ever to try to get those ideas that the Founding Fathers had,” Hampton said. “I feel like as a nation, we kind of led away from those, and that we could go back and reform those and then grow on them and go back to what was originally indoctrinated in this country.”