UW-Madison as the Birthplace of Turning Point USA

Showing 18 University of Wisconsin-Madison videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

University of Wisconsin-Madison held a specific origin-story significance for Charlie Kirk, the campus where he described setting up his first card table in 2012 as Turning Point USA's literal starting point, an image he returned to repeatedly, including in an extended conversation with Jordan Peterson, as evidence of how the organization grew from a single folding table into the country's largest conservative youth movement. Kirk's later campus debates at UW-Madison tested a range of his standard arguments directly, including an economics-focused confrontation over a local high school textbook by Paul Krugman that Kirk argued misrepresented the effects of the Reagan tax cuts, and an extended exchange with a computer engineering student over whether diversity initiatives in fields like medicine and the Secret Service improved outcomes or compromised standards of excellence. He returned to Madison specifically to press young voters on concrete political knowledge, confronting a freshman supporting Kamala Harris who could not name a single specific accomplishment of hers, using the exchange to argue that party registration, not policy evaluation, drove most young voters' choices. Kirk also debated animal rights and factory farming subsidies directly with a Wisconsin student, distinguishing his opposition to cruelty from broader vegan arguments by grounding his position in scripture's instruction toward humane treatment rather than a claim that animals held rights equivalent to humans.