Nearly 200 students gather in Jamrich Hall Monday night to protest Turning Point USA and its event speaker Olivia Krolczyk, who many students view as being transphobic. (Photo courtesy of Andrew Mathie)

MARQUETTE — This week, Northern Michigan University students protested the Turning Point USA event, “TPUSA@NMU hosts Olivia Krolczyk — Men and Women are Different.”

“We never got an exact amount, but if we had to guess, we estimate that it was nearly 200 people that showed up,” said Andrew Mathie, NMU student and a protestor of the event.

Krolczyk is a Riley Gaines Center ambassador, a project of the Leadership Institute. Krolczyk claims that while pursuing a major in chemistry at the University of Cincinnati, she was given a failing grade on a project proposal in one of her courses for using the term “biological woman.” The proposal was about how trans individuals should remain in their pretransition gender’s sports. Krolczyk posted this on TikTok and it reached more than 6 million views before it was deleted from the platform for community guideline violations. Later, Krolczyk was permanently banned from TikTok for continuous posts about trans individuals and how they are different and should be treated as such.

“We decided to protest because we wanted to make it clear that transphobic views are not welcome on our campus,” Mathie said. “This should be a safe space for everyone, and we wanted to make that very clear.”

The protest was a first for many students, and it even inspired students to get involved with future protests on campus.

“It felt good. This was my first protest, so I wasn’t sure what to expect but everyone remained civil and NMU even helped protesters get into the event,” Mathie said.

Turning Point USA speaker Krolczyk acknowledged the protest and explained support of free speech and students willing to oppose her views, though students at the event claim that Turning Point USA was trying to keep students out, with NMU making sure they attended.

“Upon entry, it seemed that Turning Point (USA) was doing everything they could to discourage protesters from entering,” said Mathie. “They made protesters show their student ID, they didn’t allow protesters to bring in personal belongings such as bags and water bottles. But NMU was there to enforce that everyone registered for the event, including protesters, were allowed inside.”

With a presence on over 3,500 high school and college campuses nationwide, over 250,000 student members, and over 450 full- and part-time staff all across the country, Turning Point USA is the largest conservative youth activist organization in the country. Its founder, Charlie Kirk, has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business News and CNBC over a thousand times. He’s also a columnist at Newsweek and his writings can be seen on Fox News, The Hill, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Times, Breitbart, American Greatness, Daily Caller and Human Events. Kirk was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” list, was the youngest speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention and was the opening speaker at the 2020 RNC. He’s the author of three books, including “The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas that Will Win the Future” from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

In 2020, Kirk chaired Students for Trump, which activated hundreds of thousands of new college voters through its more than 350 chapters present on campuses in battleground states. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and Axios has listed Kirk as one of the “top 10 most engaged” Twitter handles in the world. Kirk is the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast, which regularly ranks among the top 10 shows on Apple News podcast charts, and as of October 2020, Charlie took his podcast to broadcast and became the host of the nationally syndicated daily radio show broadcasting on the Salem Radio Network. This most recent Turning Point USA event is reminiscent of another of Krolczyk’s events from January at Washington State University, where Krolczyk also received a large amount of protest. At WSU student protesters became violent, broke windows and caused the event to be canceled. Unlike WSU, NMU protesters sought no violence.

“Our protest was entirely peaceful, and many people had brought signs,” Mathie said. “Many protesters including myself, had registered for the event so we would be allowed in and the protesters in the event itself held signs in the back of the classroom where the event was held. The majority of protesters were outside in the hallway holding signs as well. We made sure to give them as little content as possible, as Turning Point is known for making protesters look bad on camera.”