California colleges are seeing a rise of conservative voices. Some classes are tense

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

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

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

“It drove a lot of people like me to get up and do something,” he said.

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

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

But conservative views continue to be overshadowed by more liberal voices on California campuses as tensions persist both in and outside classrooms, students and professors say.

“Most of [the liberal students] think we’re racist, most of them think we’re fascists … especially in California,” Randolph said.

Kameron Tessier, president of the statewide California College Democrats organization, said Turning Point’s rhetoric is “disgusting and very bigoted” and must be investigated on campuses.

“I’m a firm believer in the First Amendment, but also the First Amendment has its consequences,” said Tessier, a senior at UC Santa Cruz. “If they are pushing actively dangerous rhetoric on campuses, then I think it’s worth it for administrations to look into that.”

Turning Point founder Kirk was a highly controversial political figure. His organization is notorious for its Professor Watchlist, an online database identifying “radical” professors. The watchlist has been called inaccurate, and has led to threats and harassment against faculty members across the country. It was also the reason why Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego denied a third attempt by students to establish a school-affiliated Turning Point USA chapter last November.

Some of Kirk’s most controversial comments include calling the Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake,” spreading COVID-19 misinformation and saying some gun deaths each year were worth it to protect the Second Amendment.

In California, Generation Z, or those under the age of 29, is 1.5 times as likely to identify as liberal compared to their grandparents’ generation, according to a 2022 statewide survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California.

This lack of conservatism among young people spills onto campuses. Only three California institutions are featured on a list published last fall by college-ranking website Niche 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

Students founded a Turning Point chapter at Claremont McKenna last spring. After Kirk’s death in the fall, college security supervised each of the chapter’s events. Several students heckled a vigil they held after Kirk’s assassination in September. And at a February campus Turning Point tabling event, dozens of partially nude bikers rode by in protest of the national organization’s viewpoints.

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 campuses. A junior at Pitzer College, which is part of the Claremont consortium, Davis said he hoped that having dozens of students laughing and blasting music as they biked by the tabling event would act as a visible “foil” to Turning Point’s values.

“We’re living our beliefs and values while they’re working to tear them down,” he said. “It’s an active expression of everything they’re trying to destroy.”

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

A die-hard Floridian, 19-year-old Gabriel Khuly said he became disillusioned by Democratic politics after he moved to California to attend Claremont McKenna for college.

“You really only get to see how stupid and bad Democrat policies are once you get to [really] see them,” he said, citing the high concentration of homelessness on Skid Row and high food prices.

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

“There is still a sort of desire… to at least partially conceal those views,” he said.

Khuly has received a lot of flack for voicing his conservative political opinions on campus, particularly on the anonymous, campus-based social app Fizz. In late September last year, Khuly wore his MAGA cap and, alongside his friends, debated students on abortion and climate change at a table outside the campus dining hall. Later, a post on the campus app called him “the most insufferable, weird, and unf*ckable guy on the planet,” receiving over 1,500 upvotes.

Khuly said “he could not care less” about the retaliation.

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

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

“People have said that they’ve gotten a lot of relief now that they know we’re on campus.”

In some instances, tensions have boiled over, like at Turning Point’s final tour stop at UC Berkeley in November. Fights broke out, with one man hospitalized after he was struck in the head. Police in riot gear arrested several people. In March, a heated exchange occurred at Cerritos College between Democrat congressional candidate Shonique Williams and Republican students and activists. 

Political conflict in the classroom

Scott Waller is the 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.

During both of Trump’s administrations, Waller said he has noticed an increased “anxiousness” in the classroom.

“If a student expresses his or her displeasure with the current Trump administration, they will know that there are students similarly animated in a very virulent way to defend the Trump administration,” he said. “That creates some tension in class.”

Yet, some educators relish in-classroom conflict. Stephanie Muravchik and other scholars across the Claremont Colleges analyzed millions of college syllabuses last year to see how professors teach about some of the most contentious subjects in academia, including the ethics of abortion and the Israel-Hamas war. They argued that only a small fraction of professors teach the full range of controversy in the classroom.  

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

So, in sections of her “Introduction to American Politics” class, Muravchik runs simulations with students taking on characters across the political aisle on topics such as social media regulation and constitutional ratification.

She builds the simulations to include prominent conservative characters such as 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 get to argue in a civil way.”

Freshman Ava Khansari was in Muravchik’s American Politics class last fall. She said she enjoyed the simulations, and found them eye-opening. In one simulation, as she took on the role of TikTok CEO Shou Chew in a debate on deregulating social media, Khansari said she realized her true viewpoints “went the opposite direction” to her character’s views. 

“The games were a lot of fun,” Khansari said. “I really did change my viewpoints on certain topics.”

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

“A number of students had some sort of revolution in their political thinking in all kinds of directions,” Muravchik said. After some particularly exciting debate, one student even “came out as conservative.”

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

“I think that it allows the space for genuine, real study of politics,” he said. “You don’t get many spaces for that.”

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

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, [but] I wish we read more [work by] liberals.”

Kahani Malhotra is a contributor with 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.