California colleges see rise in conservative voices

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Despite being a political junkie and longtime fan of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, Shasta College senior Raymond Randolph is hesitant to talk about campus politics. But Kirk’s assassination at a Turning Point USA event at a Utah university in September 2025 changed that.

“God was calling me to stand up,” Randolph said.

The day after Kirk’s death, Randolph reached out to Turning Point, which Kirk had founded, to start a chapter at his college in Reading. As branch president, he said he’s not alone in feeling mobilized after Kirk’s murder.

“It made a lot of people like me stand up and do something,” he said.

While conservative students say they were hesitant to speak out in the past, they now say the emerging Turning Point chapters have helped them come out of their shells in California, with one student even describing them as a “safe place.”

As of March of this year, Turning Point USA told CalMatters it had 1,462 active college branches nationally. Over 70% of them were founded after the murder of Charlie Kirk. Turning Point’s presence had nearly tripled on California campuses as of March, with 78 of the state’s 119 active colleges founded since Kirk’s death.

But conservative views continue to be overshadowed by more liberal voices on California campuses as tensions continue both inside and outside the classroom, students and faculty say.

“Most of (liberal students) think we’re racist, most of them think we’re fascist … especially in California,” Randolph said.

Cameron Tessier, president of the state organization of California College Democrats, said Turning Point’s rhetoric was “disgusting and very bigoted” and should be investigated at the universities.
“I’m a staunch supporter of the First Amendment, but the First Amendment has consequences,” said Tessier, a senior at UC Santa Cruz. “If they’re actively pushing dangerous rhetoric on campuses, then I think it’s worth the administrations looking at that.”

Turning Point founder Kirk was a highly controversial political figure. His organization is known for its Professor Watch List, an online database identifying “radical” professors. The watch list has been called inaccurateand has led to threats and bullying against teachers across the country. This was also the reason Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego denied third attempt from students to create a school affiliate Turning Point USA chapter last November.

Some of Kirk’s most controversial comments include a call Civil Rights Act ‘huge mistake’ spreading COVID-19 misinformation and saying that some gun deaths each year are worth it protect the second amendment.

In California, Gen Z, or those under the age of 29, are 1.5 times more likely to identify as liberal than their grandparents’ generation, according to a 2022 survey. study conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California.

This lack of conservatism among young people carries over to universities. Only three California institutions were included in a list published last fall by the Niche College Ranking Website of the 100 most conservative colleges in the country. The list is based on student reviews of the political leanings of their campus communities. All three California institutions are private universities: Biola, California Baptist, and National.

Creating red spaces in blue places

The students founded a Turning Point chapter at Claremont McKenna last spring. After Kirk’s death in the fall, college security monitored every event in the department. Several students mocked the vigil they held after Kirk was killed in September. And at February’s Turning Point campus table event, dozens of partially naked bikers passed in protest against the views of the national organization.

Bike protest organizer Luca Davis called Turning Point’s values ​​”un-American” and said the national organization’s harmful rhetoric should not be tolerated on college campuses. A student at Pitzer College, which is part of the Claremont Consortium, Davis said he hopes having dozens of students laughing and blasting music as they bike past the event will act as a visible “foil” to Turning Point’s values.

“We live by our beliefs and values ​​while they work to destroy them,” he said. “It’s an active expression of everything they’re trying to destroy.”

Despite the pushback, a Turning Point student leader said membership has grown significantly since Kirk’s death, and most members are underclassmen.

A staunch Florida resident, Gabriel Cooley, 19, said he became disillusioned with Democratic politics after moving to California to attend college at Claremont McKenna.

“You really don’t see how stupid and bad the Democrats’ policies are until you (really) see them,” he said, citing Skid Row’s high concentration of homeless people and high food prices.

The self-described “turner” and well-known conservative on campus said he’s noticed that his right-leaning peers often don’t feel entirely comfortable sharing their views both in and out of the classroom.

“There is still some desire … to at least partially mask those views,” he said.

Khuly received a lot of criticism for expressing his conservative political views on campus, especially on the anonymous, campus-based social app Fizz. At the end of September last year, Hooley was wearing his MAGA hat and he and his friends were debating with students about abortion and climate change at a table outside the university dining hall. A post on the campus app later called him “the most obnoxious, weird, insufferable person on the planet,” receiving over 1,500 upvotes.

Khuly said he “couldn’t care less” about revenge.

“These types of people don’t exist in the real world,” he said. “They exist online, they exist on college campuses, they exist in boogie millennial coffee shops … they’ll block streets to traffic for some protest or whatever, but beyond that they don’t exist.”

To the north in Shasta Countyvoters aged 18 to 20 are more likely to register as Republican than those aged 21 to 29. But Shasta College itself, according to Randolph, is still a liberal hotbed where speaking out against liberal viewpoints wasn’t really allowed — until his Turning Point chapter came along.

“People have said they’re very relieved now that they know we’re on campus.”

In some cases, the tension boiled over, as in The last stop on the Turning Point tour at UC Berkeley in November. Brawls broke out, with one man hospitalized after being punched in the head. Police in riot gear arrested several people. in march heated exchange took place at Cerritos College between Democratic congressional candidate Shawnick Williams and Republican students and activists.

Political conflict in the classroom

Scott Waller is chair of the political science department at Biola University in La Mirada, which Niche calls the most conservative college in California — and the 24th most conservative in the nation.

And during both Trump administrations, Waller said he’s seen increased “anxiety” in the classroom.

“If a student expresses their displeasure with the current Trump administration, they will understand that there are students who are animated in a very vehement way to defend the Trump administration,” he said. “It creates some tension in the class.”

Yet some educators relish classroom conflict. Stephanie Muravchik and other scholars from the Claremont Colleges analyzes millions of college syllabi last year to see faculty teach about some of the most controversial topics in academia, including the ethics of abortion and the Israel-Hamas war. They argued that only a minority of professors teach the full range of controversies in the classroom.

Professors must build “more controversy” into the classroom to encourage healthy intellectual debate, Claremont professors wrote in October op-ed online magazine.

So, in sections of her Intro to American Politics class, Muravchik runs simulations with students pitted against characters from the political trail on topics like social media regulation and ratification of the Constitution.

She builds the simulations to include prominent conservative characters like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and FBI Director Kash Patel. While all of her students have fun taking on these roles, she noted that her “quietly conservative students” can choose them and feel like they have “equal play in the political conversation.”

“They have fun fighting,” she said. “They can argue civilly.”

Freshman Ava Kansari was in Muravchik’s American politics class last fall. She said she likes the simulations and finds them eye-opening. In one simulation, while taking on the role of TikTok CEO Shou Chew in a debate about social media deregulation, Khansari said she realized her real views were “going in the opposite direction” of her character’s.

“The games were a lot of fun,” Khansari said. “It really changed my perspective on certain topics.”

In a separate course on “American Jews and Liberal Democracy,” Muravchik allows for several tense class sessions where, in class discussions, students discuss more right-wing perspectives as well as other views.

“A number of students have undergone a kind of revolution in their political thinking in all sorts of directions,” Muravchik said. After some particularly exciting debates, one student even “came out as a conservative.”

Claremont McKenna student Khuly was part of a course titled “Liberalism and Conservatism” at the college last fall, which explored political opinions over several centuries and was co-taught by a left- and right-wing professor for the first time.

“I think it gives space for real, real study of politics,” he said. “You don’t get many seats for that.”

Despite these advantages, there is one thing Khuly would change.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, (but) I wish we read more (works by) liberals.”

Kahani Malhotra is a Fellow at the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters Higher Education Coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.