A late-September voter registration drive at Arizona State University (ASU) was a resounding success last week, just five days after a tragic stabbing rocked the ASU West Campus in Glendale. At ASU’s Memorial Union the “Greeks for Trump” voter registration drive, which featured Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Republican Senate nominee Kari Lake, saw campaign staffers handing out ‘MAGA’ hats, t-shirts, and hot chicken from Raising Cane’s according to the State Press.
Posting to X on the day of the event, Kirk wrote, “Today we hosted a Voter Registration event at ASU with another MASSIVE turnout. Thousands of students showed up and HUNDREDS of new Gen Z voters got registered. The campus energy this year is unreal. This is how we win.”
Today we hosted a Voter Registration event at ASU with another MASSIVE turnout.
Thousands of students showed up and HUNDREDS of new Gen Z voters got registered.
Speaking with the outlet, Lake told reporters, “We’re going to get you registered to vote. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to Make America Great Again.”
Approximately 100 people were at the event at any given time with students coming and going throughout. College Republicans at ASU shared video of Lake tossing hats to the crowd of attendees.
Kirk later shared the reactions of detractors to the event in a post on X:
“Campus leftists at ASU were very confused when they saw the sea of students that came out to our voter registration event today wearing MAGA hats:
‘I was very disturbed seeing all the MAGA hats everywhere today…confused why there were so many…’
‘Made my stomach turn a lil tbh’
‘I’m scared’
We’re barnstorming the country visiting 22 campuses this fall, registering hundreds of Gen Z voters at every stop. I’d be scared if I was them too. And we’re only getting stronger.”
This is too good not to share. Campus leftists at ASU were very confused when they saw the sea of students that came out to our voter registration event today wearing MAGA hats:
However, according to Turning Point Action volunteer Ruby Halperinn, not everyone at the event was having fun. She reported via X, “As I was registering voters today at ASU, a radical leftist threw their whole beverage on me and ran away. THIS IS THE LEFT. They know we are winning this election and it scares them.”
As I was registering voters today at ASU, a radical leftist threw their whole beverage on me and ran away.
THIS IS THE LEFT.
They know we are winning this election and it scares them.
Lake responded to Halperinn with encouragement saying, “They know that thousands of kids at every university are registering Republican. They know that they are losing the young vote because young Americans know their future is on the line and it’s the America First Republican party that wants to make their future great again.”
Turning Point USA’s Morgonn McMichael described the crowd at the Memorial Union as being “HUNDREDS of students.”
Afonso Machado, a freshman volunteer and Political Science student, told the State Press, “We need you to register to vote, we need you to engage so we can show America that this conservative movement is growing.”
The effort continued well after the initial event last Wednesday with Nick Moore posting on Sunday that the Sigma Nu fraternity had dozens of members register at a Tempe event with Lake. He wrote, “Dozens more fraternity members registered to vote tonight in Tempe, Arizona. Thank you Sigma Nu for having @KariLake for a tour of the Greek Leadership Village at ASU and the opportunity cast her vision for your future. Vote Kari Lake for U.S. Senate on November 5th!”
Dozens more fraternity members registered to vote tonight in Tempe, Arizona.
Thank you Sigma Nu for having @KariLake for a tour of the Greek Leadership Village at ASU and the opportunity cast her vision for your future.
The most recent registered voter statistics from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office showed Republicans leading Democrats in registered voters by 259,270 and Independents by 59,668.
The nation’s largest university is balking its years-long trend of growth and expansion with the closure of one of its campuses.
Arizona State University (ASU) announced earlier this week that it will close its Lake Havasu campus in the summer 2025, affecting over 200 students and 20 faculty members. The Lake Havasu campus opened just over a decade ago in 2012.
The university will also be increasing tuition for those on campus: full-time students will pay another $350, with part-time students to pay a lower, “proportional” amount.
ASU blamed state budget cuts for the campus closure in its Monday announcement, citing an $11 million reduction in funding. ASU President Michael Crow said this latest reduction was part of a longtime refusal by the state legislature and governor to fund higher education adequately.
“These necessary actions reflect the continuing lack of public investment from state government for higher education in Arizona,’’ said Crow. “ASU simply cannot be asked to fund the expansion of higher education across the state without state investment as a part of the financial structure to do so. These budget cuts put the state of Arizona even further behind in ensuring that Arizona has the talent and workforce necessary to advance its economy.”
Governor Katie Hobbs — often at odds with the slim Republican majority of the state legislature — was supportive of this most recent budget, including the cuts to higher education and nearly all other agencies.
“[T]his bipartisan, balanced budget puts our state on solid financial ground,” said Hobbs at the time.
A spokesperson for Hobbs told outlets that the governor remains supportive of the budget, but didn’t elaborate whether the governor was supportive of ASU’s decision.
However, lawmakers have refuted this claim. House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci, who resides in Lake Havasu City, issued a joint statement with Republican State Rep. John Gillette expressing disappointment with ASU’s decision and concern for the lack of public discussion or stakeholder involvement.
“ASU’s strong financial health simply does not justify its action. The State Legislature has made significant investments in ASU over the past few years,” said the lawmakers. “ASU’s budget has increased by 22 percent since FY20, and by 40 percent since 2015, with $408 million allocated to the university this year, reflecting our commitment to higher education, even while difficult decisions were made to balance the budget.”
Gillette also added the speculation in a separate post of his own that ASU’s decision was politically motivated.
“When times are good, it will receive new funds; when times are tough, it should tighten its belt — just like every other agency that serves the public,” said Gillette. “We call on ASU to immediately reconsider this closure and urge the Arizona Board of Regents to take a much closer look at this decision as it looks very politically motivated this close to the election.”
We are deeply troubled by ASU’s surprise decision to close the Lake Havasu campus,even more frustrating is that ASU’s financial standing clearly doesn’t justify such drastic action. The legislature prioritized higher education with significant investments in ASU over the past…
According to Lake Havasu City leadership, ASU kept the city out of their decision to close the campus. It was members of the community and city leadership that served on the committee that brought ASU to the city over a decade ago.
Mayor Cal Sheehy toldHavasu News the city wasn’t given the opportunity to seek an alternative to closing the campus.
“It’s really sad that ASU has made the decision to close the college at Lake Havasu City, but the real challenge is that we haven’t had a chance to discuss any alternatives,” said Sheehy. “They believe the legislature put them here, but Lake Havasu has shown we are innovative, starting with the $2 million it took to get it here in the first place, and a conversation about what solutions could be there and what the opportunities are.”
One of the committee members, business owner Steve Greeley, also didn’t buy ASU’s claim that financial woes had forced their hand.
“I saw the quote by President Crow in regards to the Legislature cutting back on funding. I understand that, but you would think they would have a workaround before making a decision so burdensome,” said Greeley. “It was a huge effort by the community all those years ago, that took a lot of time, resources and money. I’m hoping something can be resolved.”
Havasu News editorial staff reported that their community raised $2 million in an effort to assist ASU in coming to their city.
“Our community deserved a seat at the table,” said the outlet. “We should be angry about this. The closure will affect students, families, and local jobs. And ASU’s promise to relocate students doesn’t make up for the loss of a school that became a part of our town. ASU has broken its promise to Lake Havasu City, and they owe us more than a simple goodbye.”
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Arizona State University (ASU) hosted a forum Sunday alongside left-wing groups to mobilize young voters in both high school and college for the upcoming presidential election.
ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication held the “New Generation Voter Forum,” specifically targeting Gen Z and Millennial voters (those born between 1997 and 2012, and between 1981 and 1996). Organizers billed the forum as a nonpartisan event offered to represent the facts and prepare new young voters for November.
Key organizers of the event were the Tempe Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority alongside the historically black sorority’s ASU chapter, Iota Kappa.
Group participants within the forum included the Greater Phoenix Urban League of Young Professionals, League of Women Voters of Arizona, Black Student Union (BSU) DPC, and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) at ASU.
These groups have long been advocates for left-wing causes and movements, namely Black Lives Matter.
At one table to register the young voters in attendance, a woman representing the League of Women Voters of Arizona wore a “Vote” shirt depicting the black fist to represent BLM, a uterus to represent abortion rights, and the pride flag to represent gender and gay ideologies. On the table were pamphlets on different ballot issues, including Ranked-Choice Voting.
Kara Pelletier, at-large board member for League of Women Voters of Arizona and president-elect of the Metro Phoenix Board, toldCronkite News it was “critical” to get more of the youth registered to vote. Pelletier was formerly the Arizona chapter leader for the prominent national gun control group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
“It’s critical that our youth get engaged and remain engaged. They’re actually a larger voting bloc than the next-largest voting bloc, which is boomers,” said Kara Pelletier of the League of Women Voters of Arizona. “That particular age group, 18 to 29, really is a huge section of the electorate, and they could really have a lot of influence and say in what goes on in our country, our politicians, what our budgets are focused on, who’s elected.”
Others also offered voter registration to the young participants: ASU through TurboVote, and Vote Everywhere. Both TurboVote and Vote Everywhere are programs of left-leaning organizations: Democracy Works and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, respectively.
The panel discussion centered around misinformation and disinformation in the media, such as deepfakes produced by artificial intelligence.
Featured panelists discussing media literacy and democracy included ASU professors Retha Hill and Pauline Arrillaga. Both professors have been vocal in their support of left-wing causes and Democrats, and critical of right-wing causes and Republicans including former President Donald Trump.
New ASU Art Museum exhibit shows protest art left where police killed George Floyd https://t.co/zyzUXNWJIV
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The forum also included roundtable discussions on the importance of voting, handling double residencies when voting, getting involved in elections as international or out-of-state students, understanding nonpartisan races, running for office, and understanding the issues on the ballot.
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Multiple sources have confirmed that two professors at Arizona State University, Dr. Angela Lober and Jenny Irish, spent an hour discussing with students “dismantling capitalism and electing a female president to restore reproductive rights.” They also asserted that, as Lober claimed, “the United States hates women and everything the female body does.”
The program in question: “Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights,” was offered by the university through ASU Events on the website. The event was described as a workshop where, “Professor Irish will give a reading from Hatch, after which she’ll be joined in conversation by Dr. Angela Lober, Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation. Come ready with your own questions and comments about the future of reproductive health in the face of climate change, misinformation, and other problems facing our present and our future.”
Hatch is a collection of prose poems from English Professor Jenny Irish. ASU described Hatch as, “This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.”
The event, co-hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, took a decidedly apocalyptic turn according to College Fix, with Irish warning of a dystopian future for the United States complete with “cannibalism,” and “forced breeding camps.”
“So much of our reality points toward those futures,” she told attendees. Lober added, “The balance between hope and despair is an everyday experience for me.” She explained, “A couple years ago I never thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. How could we possibly do that?”
Irish also made an ardent defense of transgenderism and claimed an “all-out assault on the trans community and people’s ability to self-identify,” exists in the U.S. She added, “It is disgusting, immoral, and wrong.” Per the Arizona Sun Times, the professors took about 15 questions via Zoom and when asked about the well-published decline in global birth rates, Lober said it doesn’t “bother” her, claiming “we are overpopulated.”
Coordinator of the ASU event, Karina Fitzgerald, told College Fix, the goal of the event was to “encourage students that are following creative pursuits or other types of worldbuilding to simply explore other elements that they haven’t thought of before in their writing, or other ways to challenge themselves in creative processes.” She described the “element of worldbuilding” for creating “fictional stories” as “a good exercise for students to get in the practice of.”
However, ASU Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theology Dr. Owen Anderson offered a different perspective in a comment to AZ Free News. He starkly criticized his colleagues’ openly political statements that move beyond the “fictional stories.”
Dr. Anderson wrote, “ASU professors are not to use university resources to tell students how to vote in an election. Not only that, professors are to be examples of clear thinking. Instead, these professors are using cheap scare tactics and logical fallacies to try and influence students. It is a misuse of their position and creates an unfair power dynamic for students. When will ASU hold such professors accountable?”
The Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, Dr. Jonathan Turley, while noting the professors “have every right to espouse these views and it is good for students to have a wide variety of viewpoints on campus,” took note of the “hyperbolic rhetoric,” renewing his objection that conservative, moderate, and libertarian faculty have been purged from academia.
Specifically, Turley pointed to the staunchly one-sided, anti-capitalist nature of the event’s rhetoric writing, “The ASU event captures a rising call for dismantling an economic system that helped drive industrial innovation and massive wealth creation. It has also left great wealth disparities. We have sought to address poverty with social programs that offer greater opportunity for those who have not been able to escape cycles of poverty. We have much work to be done. However, the anti-capitalist movement often offers few specifics on the alternatives, as at the ASU event.”
He concluded, “This is a debate that should be welcomed but not in this type of one-sided, jingoistic presentation. Imagine how much more substantive this panel would have been with an alternative viewpoint. Let’s have a discussion on the merits of capitalism and the record of alternative systems. That would offer educational and not merely emotive benefits to our academic community.”
Over the last few years, I observed how ignorant and dangerous college students have become. What’s worse is how older generations are playing along and encouraging the demoralization of society. And maybe it’s just me, but I sense this diabolical agenda, hellbent on shackling black folks to a race-based, trauma narrative, that incites outrage among some of the most privileged people in the world.
George Floyd is depicted wearing a crown of thorns at an ASU exhibit.
Yes, I said it. Twenty-first-century, black Americans are privileged, protected, and honored citizens. Those who discern this truth have seized every opportunity to innovate themselves. But those overcome by a victim mentality—the ones who see themselves as hopeless casualties of “systemic oppression”—are wasting away in a mental prison of personal failures and moral decay. The appropriate mascot for the latter could be none other than a black man who chose a life of substance and crime. If this is what it means to identify as a member of the black community, then we are to be pitied above all ethnic groups.
George Floyd was not a saint. He was an eight-time convicted criminal who didn’t think twice about robbing a pregnant woman while holding a gun to her belly. Floyd wasn’t targeted and murdered by Derek Chauvin. Floyd was high on drugs and resisting arrest after attempting to pass counterfeit bills in a corner store. An autopsy—that was strategically withheld from the public in 2020—revealed that he died from acute complications related to substance abuse while under the restraint of a trained police officer. Chauvin’s negligence in regard to seeking medical attention for Floyd’s condition is debatable, but this doesn’t change the facts.
Of course, George Floyd was a human being. He has children, family, and friends. Whether those relationships were loving or dysfunctional, kind or cruel, the world may never truly know. Floyd has been reduced to a token for the Marxist “defund the police” movement. He’s forever enshrined as the cash cow that overflowed the coffers of corrupt Black Lives Matter leaders. And for all the blood money amassed in his name, there’s no record of predominantly black neighborhoods, schools, or businesses receiving a dime. If so, it’s the greatest story yet to be told.
Various displays from the George Floyd exhibit at ASU.
When I consider the venom spewed by loud-mouth activists like Al Sharpton, lowlife politicians like Maxine Waters, and progressive pundits like Joy Reid—all privileged, racist, black people, by the way—I’m appalled at how they use their platforms to shamelessly perpetuate a culture of death among black Americans. Another disgraced public figure who totes the systemic oppression narrative is The View co-host, Sunny Hostin.
During an episode featuring South Carolina Representative Tim Scott, Hostin revealed that she’s convinced all successful black people (herself included) are an exception to the rule. What’s the rule? A life of crime, violence, poverty, discrimination, and dejection. Hmm… Well, the black people I know who wear these labels and wallow in these circumstances typically identify as Democrats. But regardless of political ideology, the black community must face harsh realities:
Black men are not going extinct at the hands of white cops—the 2019 black-on-black homicide rate of 80% to 90% tells me they’re predominantly victims of other black men. When I saw the “Stop Killing Black People” cardboard display at ASU, I immediately thought: “We need to stop killing our own people!”
Systemic racism is not an existential threat to black people—abortion is an existential threat to black people. With 2019 estimations between 35% and 39%, black women have the highest abortion rates in the U.S. In no uncertain terms, I’d say this is the culprit in the case of black genocide.
Single-parent families are the highest among black Americans—one 2022 statistic showed that over 50% of black children were living without a father figure in the home.
Now, I’ve yet to hear sound justification for how white people or white supremacy are to blame for these overwhelming demographics. How is it a white person’s fault if a black man murders another black man, or a black woman dismembers her unborn child? Exactly how is white supremacy the root cause of having unprotected sex with (multiple) people you’re not married to? Am I missing something? Is it because my mind is free that I’m incapable of connecting these dots? I’m a lifetime learner, so feel free to enlighten me.
I wasn’t alone when I visited the George Floyd shrine. I invited a friend, an ASU student, who happens to be a young, Christian, white male (white supremacy incarnate, according to the left). After chatting with him about his family history, I discovered he grew up under dire circumstances that I (a black woman) never experienced. During the tour, the volume and rapidity of our discussions convinced me that we shared the same frustration and sense of urgency about the communist movements overtaking America’s youth. Multiple times my friend expressed regret for wasting so much time and money studying at ASU.
Another display at the George Floyd exhibit at ASU.
For the record, I love my community. Black people are vibrant (a.k.a. loud), talented, beautiful, funny, accomplished, highly intelligent and influential. Unfortunately, black culture, like any other, has a tendency to be toxic and backwards. Of course, I’m not blind to our nation’s sinful past. History is recorded for a reason; Confederate statues should remain in open squares for a reason. Future generations must continue to engage in candid, ethical discussions about such issues as American slavery, racism, and bigotry—all intrinsically traced back to the Democratic Party. Inevitably, some in society will stereotype and profile black people, especially if they’ve only viewed them at their worst in the public sphere.
When I see a black columnist dub Larry Elder the “black face of white supremacy”; when I hear a black, pseudo intellectual say Winsome Sears has a “black mouth moving with white ideas running on the runway of the tongue”; when a black Democrat calls a black Republican an “Uncle Tom” —I’m only more convinced that the greatest threats to the black community come from within, not without. Furthermore, if you’re someone who thinks black lives only matter when criminals encounter white police officers, and don’t live to tell their side of the story, then your mind is pretty far gone. I’ll be praying for you.
I could say more, but I’ll leave my community with these words of encouragement: Your destiny is not tied to what white people will or won’t do for you. Nobody owes you anything. You are not a victim. Your identity is not bound to black culture. It’s unnecessary to put the word “black” in front of “excellence” or “joy.” We are not a monolith. We need to respect the fact that being “black in America” means different things to different people. Regardless of where you came from or what you’ve come through, God has given this generation the liberty to break off cycles of trauma and leave this world better than we found it.
Be set free.
Tiffany is the Founder of Restore Parental Rights in Education, a grassroots advocate for families, educators, and school board members. For nearly two decades, Tiffany’s creative writing pursuits have surpassed most interests as she continues to contribute to her blogBigviewsmallwindow.com. She encourages everyday citizens to take an active role in defending and preserving American values for future generations.
