Turning Point USA And The Rush Of The Red Wave By Joshua Cohen

Turning Point's mission is defined in its website as follows:  The organization’s mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government. 

In my view, I believe that Turning Point is an organization dedicated, quite simply, to the promulgation of Conservatism on campus and elsewhere.

In reviewing Turning Point, I've decided that given the proliferation of the leftist influence on campus (to say nothing of the media) it is a "necessary evil".

I say evil because if we were to observe through the lens of the ideal (or perhaps, Utopian) perspective, it would be that there would be no bias practiced from any college professor to any given student. This is because of the "Professor Watchlist" (https://www.professorwatchlist.org/) which is one of Turning Points's more salient and controversial projects. 

The Professor Watchlist monitors and calls attention to professors that it deems have been unfair, not to say discriminatory to students who observe a conservative bent. This month's professor of special concern is University of Illinois Professor Tariq Khan who earned a position on the list after he started pushing one of his students.  As you can probably imagine with little effort, there is margin for Orwellian abuse of this practice. In fact, Christopher Mele at the New York Times, went so far as to call the project a "threat to international freedom" 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-academic-freedom.html).  He says, and I agree with him on this point, that the ultimate goal of the endeavor is to "advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”

Some have noted the surveillance type propaganda and have likened it to "McCarthyism". My own view is that this is a case of throwing a stone from a glass house because it seems to me that the primary evil of Senator McCarthy's campaign was the suppression of ideals (communism, in that instance). I think, if that is the case, than it is simply, mutatis mutandis, the same as what we see on campus.  If we convict Turning Point of this crime then we cannot acquit the leftist mentality on campus of that charge either, given its stance towards conservative speakers, but more on that later. If you accept it for one, it seems to me, one is absolutely obliged to consider and condemn the second.

This brings me to why I believe the Watchlist and Turning Point to be necessary.

The Left has, to a disturbing degree, ensconced its ideology firmly into the college campuses of the country. In a previous piece I wrote, I give the example of Leftist student Sean Taylor saying that he "doesn't care" what the constitution says about free speech regarding Ben Shapiro's right to speak and voice anything like a contrasting viewpoint. I would tell anyone who would listen to consider the frightening implications of that statement for a free society. Particularly on a college campus which seems to me should be (to retreat once again to the Utopian ideal) a landscape of differentiating opinions, perspective and debate. I say that having one's opinions challenged (including and especially my own) to be sacrosanct and any efforts to suppress that discourse is an effort I would, to put it mildly, repudiate.

It seems to me that Turning Point's existence is to organize something like a push-back to this ever-growing sentiment that we're seeing on campus. My hope is that the endemic necessity of this in terms of attempting to preserve the marketplace of ideals, is self-evident.