The blue TV-screen displays at the South Burlington DoubleTree conference center listed two events happening in the ballrooms Monday: One was a Covid-19 vaccination clinic, which was also advertised with several posters in the parking lot.
The other was labeled, “Campus Tour Event.”
That event was the “Exposing Critical Racism Tour,” led by conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kirk is the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, a chapter-based conservative organizing group that, according to its website, aims to “organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.” Kirk also became the chair of Students for Trump in 2019.
The location for Monday’s event was announced only that morning. The event’s website had first announced the Hilton Hotel as the location, before changing it to “TBA.” Kirk said Monday that the first location canceled on them after receiving an influx of calls from people in opposition to the event.
Pete Engard, general manager at Hilton Burlington Lake Champlain, previously told VTDigger that the hotel had never contracted with Turning Point USA, and had asked Turning Point USA to remove the hotel name from the ticketing website.
Both a UVM spokesperson and the president of the UVM College Republicans club also previously told VTDigger their organizations had no involvement with the Turning Point event.
The ballroom at the South Burlington DoubleTree was nearly full Monday night, seating well over a hundred people. While Turning Point describes itself as a student movement and includes chapters at high schools and colleges across the country, most of Monday’s crowd appeared to be middle-aged or older adults.
Although state officials — including Secretary of the Agency of Human Services Mike Smith and Gov. Phil Scott — suggested during the governor’s weekly Covid press conference on Tuesday that Kirk attendees may have protested the vaccination clinic being held outside the DoubleTree, South Burlington Police Chief Shawn Burke said that was a “misunderstanding regarding the small group of activists” outside the hotel.
Burke said the activists were protesting Kirk.
About a dozen or so student protesters turned out from the Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at UVM, which was founded there a few weeks ago. They marched over from the UVM campus with a couple of drummers, and several held homemade cardboard signs outside the entrance before doors opened for the event.
The student protesters sat in two rows at the front of the right side of the ballroom, many wearing red Young Democratic Socialists of America masks that read, “A better world is possible.” Some students heckled Kirk at a few points during the event — one yelled, “Praise trans God!” — but the event generally continued undisturbed.
Just before Kirk walked out onstage, jumbo screens played a high-energy video showing crowds of students, the narration over the pop music included, “It’s time for our generation to rise up and take back America.”
Kirk opened the event addressing the question, “Why am I here? Why am I in Burlington, Vermont, of all places?”
Kirk said that many of his beliefs fit in with the state’s overarching political culture: “I think there’s something special about Vermont that we shouldn’t forget, that we as conservatives should focus on, and that’s the idea of preserving the small against the big.”
The event, which Kirk is touring at college towns across the country, echoes recent conservative backlash around critical race theory, a legal framework that seeks to analyze how systemic racism is ingrained in U.S. society, including in its laws, education system, and housing, among other areas.
A report published in August by the Brookings Institution found that eight states had passed legislation to limit how teachers can discuss race or racism in the classroom, though Idaho was the only state to explicitly name critical race theory in statute.
Teachers and school administrators in Vermont have pushed back on these efforts, saying that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 settings.
Much of Kirk’s talk was not so much about critical race theory as about promoting moral values, faith and the two-parent nuclear family.
“Liberty can only be handled by people that are moral and virtuous,” Kirk said.
Signage in the conference center lobby encouraged “all guests (whether they are vaccinated or not) to wear a mask while in common areas of the hotel,” but the vast majority of attendees were unmasked.
Veronica Salber, 39, who attended Monday’s event, said she first encountered Kirk’s work on Facebook during last year’s lockdowns. She said she was raised in a mostly Democratic family, and had for a long time considered herself an independent.
She’s homeschooling three of her kids in Milton after pulling them out of public schools this year. She said “CRT and the sex education was the icing on the cake” in her decision to homeschool, but she was also concerned that one of her sons, who is disabled, was not getting the support he needed in public school.
Attendee John Amory, who works in child care in Bristol, described himself as politically left-leaning, but said he wanted to show up on Monday to hear different points of view.
“I’m a strong believer in free speech,” Amory said. “I don’t think this type of thing is going away, and in some way, you have to be able to engage with it and bring a voice to an opposing opinion.”
