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The president of the Young Democrats at University of Texas at Tyler (UT-Tyler) initiated the idea to collaborate with Turning Point USA for an event with hopes of fostering bipartisanship in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
“I essentially suggested the idea that we do some sort of event or debate. And this was right after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, so I also thought it would breed some level of bipartisanship and maybe stop us from being so polarized,” Marcus Emmanuel, a first-year student political science major, told Fox News Digital.
“We’ve been talking with the Young Democrats on our campus, and they’ve been very open to having a debate, which is very exciting. They’ve been really looking forward to working with us,” Reese Cooper, president of UT-Tyler’s TPUSA chapter, told Fox News Digital.
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Kirk was killed while speaking on the campus of Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
Kirk built a following by touring the country to debate college students on culture-war issues such as gender ideology, racial divisions and the merits of Christian and American values in general.
He left a wife, Erika, and two young children. Ever since his death, Turning Point USA — the organization he founded — has been catapulted into prominence and received overwhelming support.
Emmanuel said TPUSA should not be legitimized and hopes to persuade people to join their side after the debate.
“I kind of just want to reference it by saying that the goal isn’t to legitimize what TPUSA stands for. But rather, it’s more of an acknowledgment that the faction in society that agrees with the ideology is too large to isolate or ignore,” he added.
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He continued, “The only way in which you can combat it is by engaging in dialogue with them. So my goal for the debate is to go about discrediting the message through facts and logic.”
Emmanuel said the vice president of the TPUSA chapter at UT-Tyler, Jonathan Roncancio, is in his general friend group. They had a conversation in the library about the TPUSA chapter recently being launched on campus.
“Our hope with Turning Point is to just educate and activate people, as well as create a community on the college campus,” Roncancio told Fox News Digital.
He added, “Our goal is to create a conservative community where people can come and discuss ideas. We really just want to make a free market of ideas that people can use and debate anything that they want to debate. We don’t want to just welcome one idea. Our goal was to create discussion and debate and just host good discussions.”
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Emmanuel said that the date of the event is tentative, though expected to occur some time in November.
“I thought that the temperature was way too high, so I wanted to kind of use it as an opportunity to also turn down the temperature and for both sides to realize that the other side is human, even if there’s disagreements between us,” Emmanuel said.
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“I don’t think the president of the United States is doing an effective job at kind of turning down the temperature or telling both sides to turn down the temperatures,” he said.
