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Six weeks after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September, University of Mississippi junior Lesley Lachman was standing in a campus parking lot near her sorority, Pi Beta Phi, scanning the calendar on her phone. She had interviews coming up with PBS, a local radio station, and Fox & Friends,before which she needed to redo her nails. I asked her why, and she looked at me like I was insane. “This is red. I’m doing Funny Bunny,” she said. The red wouldn’t look right on TV. Other members of her team had been getting interviewed too, and she worried they were being banal. “I’m like, ‘This is a brand, guys. Stop saying sentences like ‘We’re a conservative organization on campus.’ Say, ‘We are a true America-loving college!’”
Lachman, 20, is the president of Ole Miss’s TPUSA chapter. This was the most eventful week of her adult life, when she was set to introduce Kirk’s widow, Erika, and Vice-President J. D. Vance onstage at the Sandy and John Black Pavilion in front of roughly 10,000 students. After Kirk was killed, TPUSA’s leadership decided to keep alive the group’s ongoing campus tour, which was to pass through Oxford in late October. It was rechristened the “This Is the Turning Point” tour and populated with conservative A-listers who would debate students in the take-all-comers manner that made the 31-year-old Kirk an icon on the right and MAGA’s youth leader.
Lachman had lobbied for Kirk to come to campus after she heard him name-check her university during TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit near Dallas last June. “He said, ‘If you have the intent to find a husband at Ole Miss, it’s just going to happen,’’’ she recited. Lachman had just begun her fall term when Kirk was killed, a before-and-after moment for young conservatives across the country. At Kirk’s September memorial, which was held at an NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona, I had met a 20-year-old Cal State, Chico, student named Aaron Berman. He said he had been in his apartment when he saw the video of a bullet tearing through Kirk’s neck as he was debating students at...