Leon said Berkeley’s TPUSA club is taking additional security measures to ensure safety. Attendees will need a photo ID and won’t be allowed to bring bags or water bottles into the venue. Noisemakers, signs and banners are also prohibited, and other items could be deemed prohibited at the door, according to the event’s description online.
Campus spokesperson Dan Mogulof said the school would not share its security planning ahead of Monday’s tour stop, but he said it will follow campus policies for major events.
After Kirk’s killing, Leon said TPUSA has seen significant growth, even at the notoriously progressive campus in Berkeley. Last year’s weekly meetings averaged fewer than 30 students, he said, but their smallest crowd this fall has been about 60.
“It’s a national movement,” Leon said, adding that many Berkeley students who were previously afraid to join “have this deep, deep sense that they need to do something about what’s going on in the world,” blaming the left for a rise in political violence and polarizing rhetoric.
He said Kirk, who founded TPUSA at 18, advocated for free speech, limited government and values that “maintain the traditions and cultures of the West, not destroy them, not hate the West.”
Critics, however, have long considered Kirk’s positions and debate style to be divisive if not outright bigoted.
He called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former appeals court judge for the District of Columbia and member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a “diversity hire” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.”
He advocated against gay marriage and health care for transgender people, and in an interview with anti-trans activist and former college swimmer Riley Gaines, invoked violence against trans college athletes, saying that instead of allowing a trans person to compete in the NCAA championships, “someone should have just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or ’60s.”
He was often accused of antisemitism, and he called Islam “a danger” to America.
