By Russ Bellant
Erica Kirk’s coming to Hillsdale for a graduation commencement speech is noteworthy as the school is the foremost enemy of public education in the U.S. So much so that Ron DeSantis chose them to rewrite the education curriculum for the state of Florida, rather than use his own department of education. Hillsdale promotes massive privatization or abolition of the public sector.
While many may see TPUSA CEO Erica Kirk as a grieving widow and withhold judgment about how she now leads Turning Point USA, there are links that need to be challenged. These relationships are not episodic and they certainly are not activated due to naivety. The first case is the TPUSA engagement of Jack Posobiec, who began his work with Turning Point in 2021 and has been a featured panelist and speaker with the group to this day. This is so despite Posobiec’s ties to white supremacist groups, which led the Southern Poverty Law Center to describe him as a Nazi. His erratic political history is outlined on Wikipedia.
But the most direct story of what Posobiec believes is told in a 2024 book he was the lead author of, titled UNHUMAN. This book asserts that anyone who believes in fairness and equality is an unhuman (not a subhuman) that must be crushed! The book seeks to change the reader’s way of seeing the world, so that they join Posobiec’s praise of 20th century dictators that used mass murder to crush “unhumans.”
To emphasize their importance, Posobiec writes a chapter on each one of these killers, beginning with Francesco Franco in Spain. He was an ally of Hitler in WWII. The next chapter is Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s coupmaster in 1973. Posobiec praises Pinochet for throwing “unhumans” out of helicopters.
The next chapter’s hero is Ian Smith of apartheid Rhodesia of the 1970s. Smith refused to allow Black citizenship when Rhodesia became independent of the British Empire. Posobiec praises the high kill ratios of the Rhodesian army against Black insurgents.
The last hero was Chiang Kai-shek, who fled with his army to Taiwan when he lost the civil war to the Red Army. He killed thousands of Formosans who resisted the takeover of their island, which Kai-shek renamed The Republic of China.
In praising these mass murderers, each of whom killed tens of thousands of opponents, Posobiec suggests that these are models that could be used to crush “unhumans” in the U.S. If he wants such an outcome against Americans, is his work with TPUSA to build a force that can build a crushing machine?
The other TPUSA relationship is with a group that could do just that. They have linked up with Concordis, a group with an office in Moscow, Idaho. They are affiliated with, if not a direct front for, the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), also based in Moscow.
The ACCS has over 500 K-12 schools across the country, claiming to create a Christian worldview in the minds of their charges. But on November 18, 2024, before he was preoccupied with firing generals and admirals in the Pentagon, Peter Hegseth bragged about his secret plans to form an “underground army.’ The Christian Reconstructionist podcast hosts noted that the army was being built from the ACCS schools. In fact, the ACCS director, David Goodwin, discussed this with Hegseth on his own podcast. They agreed that they together were building an underground army for “insurrection.”
The ACCS schools teach through every subject that everything is centered on heavenly forces. Secularism, democracy, social and religious tolerance are all evil and must be combated. The ACCS was set up by Doug Wilson, a Christian Reconstructionist who wrote a book in 1996 praising slavery as “good for everyone.” He was active with neo-confederacy groups trying to restore the Confederate South.
Wilson said recently that the U.S. civil war was just a battle that we lost, but the war is not over! Hegseth is one of the leading voices of ACCS and still promotes Wilson in the Pentagon and across the District of Columbia.
Wilson also promotes deep gender inequality, saying that women exist only for household duties”and to be penetrated.”
It should be noted that ACCS has been promoting the divineness of medievalism for several years. This is consistent with their opposition to centuries of the Enlightenment, when one church ruled in concert with the landed elites. This is also consistent with those forces in Big Tech in Silicon Valley that want to recreate the same neo-feudalism while promoting their theocratic agenda. This needs more attention.
So with Turning Point and its thousands of chapters working in partnership with ACCS through Concordis to set up more K-12 schools, what do we get? A segment of future generations taught to demonize freedom and diversity of thought, justice and social relations. The base for militant theocracy. And working with Posobiec, who has networked with Hegseth, their solution could be a deadly one. Massively so.
(Russ Bellant is a freelance writer who has studied extreme right forces for decades. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Texas Observer, Toronto Star and The National Catholic Reporter. He is retired and lives in Detroit. He served in the Army as a Sergeant in Airborne Artillery. All of his work is self-funded.)
