When Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012, I was also in the youth activism game. A few years out of college, I was running communications at Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), which had grown out of Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign and launched chapters at colleges around the country.
YAL expanded quickly in those early years, outpacing older conservative and libertarian groups on campus in numbers and enthusiasm alike. And so my colleagues and I were peeved to find this upstart rival, Kirk’s TPUSA, hoovering up student attention—and headlines—sometimes by copying the very activism ideas we’d already tried.
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