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'More Perfect University': A Progressive Alternative to Turning Point USA on College Campuses
"Only by coming together and flexing our collective power as students, workers, tenants, and community members will we build a world for the 99%."
Apr 15, 2026
Gen Z's rightward shift in the 2024 election and the influence of Turning Point USA, the right-wing college organization co-founded by assassinated activist Charlie Kirk, have garnered considerable attention in the press—but a new project launched Wednesday by the labor-focused media group More Perfect Union makes the case that young voters across the country want an opportunity to strengthen "our collective power as the 99%."
While Turning Point USA has cast itself as an antidote to liberal viewpoints and "wokeness" on college campuses, Elise Joshi, who is leading the More Perfect University initiative, emphasized in The New York Times that Turning Point has demonstrated a steadfast “refusal to champion working-class issues.”
More Perfect University aims to mobilize young people in a movement centered on economic populism—turning their attention to the outsized power of corporations and ultrarich political donors while Turning Point USA is holding conventions where CEO Erika Kirk implores 20-something women to focus on finding a husband and condemns pro-immigration protesters as "demonic."
“The same corporations that are rigging the economy against young people are bankrolling the right’s campus operation,” Joshi told the Times.
In More Perfect University's launch video, released on Wednesday, Joshi said today's college students are "being robbed by Big... Everything."
From oil companies to private equity firms buying up housing, said Joshi, "elites have rigged the entire game. While they get billions in handouts, they squeeze us for profit, track our every move, and keep us too divided and exhausted to fight back."
NEW: More Perfect Union is opening up our newsroom, connecting with students everywhere, and equipping them with the tools needed to unrig our broken economic system. pic.twitter.com/oQT6sRqKC8
— MPUniversity (@MPUniversityUS) April 15, 2026
According to the group's website, More Perfect University will hold campus events that bring "all corners of campus life together" to build community and organize around efforts to fight for working people, offer virtual trainings where students can "connect with organizers already building power and winning," and open up More Perfect Union's newsroom to students, training them "to tell local stories that take on unchecked power."
"Mainstream media and establishment politicians are captured by corporate interests," said Joshi. "It's up to us to cover the issues our communities are facing and how everyday people are coming together to combat them.
The "student storytellers" with whom More Perfect University works, Joshi told the Times, will “understand our economy is not broken by accident.”
On April 20, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is set to co-host a virtual launch party for More Perfect University with journalist John Russell. The group is also planning an online event with former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, an outspoken critic of corporate monopolies and corruption.
The initiative comes as young voters express growing dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump's administration, less than a year and a half after voters ages 18-29 voted for former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by only four percentage points, signifying a major shift to the right following the 2020 election. Former President Joe Biden won the demographic by a 25-point margin in 2020.
The Yale Youth Poll, released on Wednesday, found that the views of voters ages 18-34 are heavily impacting Trump's overall sinking approval ratings. Sixty-eight percent of voters ages 18-22 disapprove of the president, according to the poll, as well as 72% of 23- to 29-year-olds.
More Perfect University is also launching as the Trump administration wages attacks on academic freedom on college campuses. Last month the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging the school has "allowed antisemitism to flourish on campus."
Universities including Columbia and Northwestern have been criticized by students and faculty for capitulating to Trump, striking deals and agreeing to policy changes in order to restore federal funding that was cut.
"Mainstream media, politicians, and universities are capitulating to the 1%," reads More Perfect University's website. "The responsibility to tackle authoritarianism and corporate greed falls on us. We cannot do that scattered and isolated. Only by coming together and flexing our collective power as students, workers, tenants, and community members will we build a world for the 99%."
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Iran Confirms at Least 60 University Students and 10 Professors Killed by US-Israel Bombings
"The enemy does not want us to succeed or have development and progress, but all our universities are united now by these attacks," said the president of Tehran's prestigious Sharif University of Technology.
Apr 15, 2026
At least 60 students and 10 professors have been killed in US-Israeli attacks on universities, according to an Iranian government official, while other university officials report even higher death tolls.
Standing outside the bombed-out ruins of Iran's Aerospace Research Institute, which was targeted twice earlier this month, Minister of Science, Research, and Technology, Hossein Simaei, said on Wednesday that attacks on the facility and other universities were “scientific crimes."
“This was a center where researchers worked on civilian sectors, including biology, agriculture, and surveying,” Simaei said. “Unfortunately, it has fallen victim to the enemy’s brutal attacks.”
The institute was one of at least 32 universities and 857 schools that have been attacked by US and Israeli forces since the US and Israel launched the war at the end of February, according to a report by the Iranian Red Crescent on April 10.
Bijan Ranjbar, the president of the Islamic Azad University system—one of the largest in the world—has confirmed that at least 110 students at his institution have been killed and 21 university branches have been damaged.
On April 6, the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, which has been described as the "MIT of Iran," was also bombed, severely damaging its High-Performance Computing Center, which serves more than 3,000 artificial intelligence and computer science researchers.
The Pasteur Institute, one of the oldest research and health institutes in Iran, was also hit earlier this month, rendering it "unable to continue delivering health services," according to the World Health Organization.
"The enemy does not want us to succeed or have development and progress, but all our universities are united now by these attacks," said Sharif University president Masoud Tajrishi.
Israel has justified attacking these institutions on the grounds that they are closely linked to the Iranian military, similar to its claim that universities in Gaza are used by Hamas.
But following promises by US President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to bomb Iran "back to the Stone Ages," attacks on civilian infrastructure have gone far beyond those with any discernible military purpose.
The WHO reported on April 8 that since the beginning of the war, at least 23 healthcare institutions were attacked by US and Israeli forces. Attacks have also been reported on several oil and energy facilities.
Though the US and Israel often frame these attacks as inseparable from their objective of weakening Iran militarily, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, an assistant professor of the international relations of the Middle East at the University of St. Andrews, argues that they function as attacks on the whole of Iranian society.
"Whatever role the state played in constructing refineries, pharmaceutical plants, and research institutions, it is Iranian workers, engineers, scientists, and patients who depend on them, who built their careers inside them, and who will suffer most from their destruction," he wrote in Jacobin earlier this week. "Bombing a country’s industrial and scientific base is an act of violence against its people, regardless of what one thinks of its government."
He said: “The systematic killing of scientists and engineers, the destruction of centrifuges and computer networks, the bombing of research universities and pharmaceutical facilities: All of it reflects a coherent strategic objective, which is to erase the embodied knowledge, the accumulated expertise, and the institutional memory that make Iranian technological development possible.”
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Meet Mary Miller: The New Face of GOP Censorship
Do you want this bigoted Republican telling you what books you and your children can read?
Apr 15, 2026
When it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation, Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller is an odd choice for the job. The downstate Republican was first elected in 2020. During her 2022 reelection campaign, one of her employees was a man named Bradley Graven. The conservative Washington Examiner reported that Graven “was convicted of soliciting sex with a minor,” but this conviction did not stop him from fundraising for Miller, collecting signatures on her behalf, and chauffeuring the candidate around.
Shortly into her first term, Miller gave a shout out to Adolf Hitler in a speech before right-wing group Moms for America. Miller told the group “Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'” Miller later apologized for her compliment to der Fuhrer, saying she was referring to the efforts of “left wing radicals” to “re-educate young people.” Miller, unsurprisingly, does not see anything wrong with the efforts of right wing radicals like herself to re-educate young people.
And Miller is, to be clear, a right-wing radical. Often described as a “Christian nationalist,” she proclaimed that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” when she opposed a Sikh leading a prayer at the capitol after misidentifying him as Muslim. She is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and in return that caucuses political action committee is her largest campaign donor.
These seeming handicaps aside, Miller introduced House Resolution 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” on February 24th of this year, a misleadingly titled bill that restricts federal funding for schools unless they take action to ban “sexually oriented” books from classrooms and school libraries. For the purposes of the legislation, “gender dysphoria” as well as "transgenderism" [sic] considered sexually oriented. Schools could lose federal funding merely for having a title that features a trans person or fictional transgender character. On March 17th, the bill advanced from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to the House floor.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it.
Congressional supporters of HR 7661 are notable for their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Miller claimed the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act “attacks the traditional family.” Committee Chair Tim Walberg, who released a statement saying the bill will “safeguard children from inappropriate content in the classroom” went on a jaunt to Uganda in 2023 to urge their government to “stand firm” on maintaining their “Kill the Gays” law. Randy Fine, one of the most notorious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the House, has also made statements calling for the eradication of the LGBTQ+ community. One could continue down the list but the point is made.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it. Children, though, are complex beings with a variety of influences acting on them, social, biological, and familial. If educators were capable of influencing children to such a degree that Miller believes, they would focus on ensuring students complete schoolwork on time, study for tests, and bring classroom materials, not on changing their gender identity or sexual orientation. As gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk said during the campaign to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative: “If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you’d sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”
One is reminded of the US Senate testimony of comic book publisher William Gaines (Tales from the Crypt, Mad Magazine).In the 1950s, a moral panic asserted that crime and horror comics were making criminals out of helpless children, who, like automatons, followed the examples of comic book characters.“What are we afraid of?” Gaines asked. “Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?” The anti-comics crusade was popularized by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who worried about the “homosexual” influence Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman were having on their young readers in his sloppily researched tract Seduction of the Innocent. The current censorship efforts are an unfortunate repetition of Wertham’s pseudoscientific arguments.
As expected, HR 7661 has been opposed by the American Library Association, the National Education Association, Authors Against Book Bans, PEN America, among many others. The advocacy group 5 Calls has created a simple script for contacting Members of Congress and Senators to ask them to oppose this bill.
This horrific bill, HR 7661, represents the first attack on children’s freedom to read at the federal level seen in the United States. It creates a national censor deciding what every child in the United States can read. Under the guise of protecting children, Mary Miller—a woman who hired a convicted sexual predator and who once praised the Nazi dictator—has set herself up as the face of censorship and thought control in the United States. Would you let this woman decide for you what to read?
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