Tennessee State Students Running MAGA Off Their Campus Matters

US-POLITICS-TURNING POINT — Source: ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Getty

HBCU students are built different.

When the slain white supremacist Charlie Kirk set up his folding tables on white college campuses and baited liberal white students with signs to “Prove Me Wrong,” they lined up thinking they were about to step into honest debate. They believed in the promise their institutions had always sold them. If you argue well enough, you’ll be heard.

So, they wandered up between classes, expecting fairness, only to find themselves trapped by a political operative with rehearsed lines polished by years of right-wing training. He’d interrupt, circle back, twist words, and raise his voice while the cameras zoomed in, waiting for the exact moment confusion flickered across a student’s face. By the time they realized what was happening, Kirk’s cameras had already captured their stumbles and edited them into viral “LIBERAL DESTROYED” videos.

But Black students at HBCUs don’t carry those illusions of having their voices taken seriously. They live in a world that has never treated them as equals, where their very right to higher education has been contested for generations. They know how easily Black voices get twisted, how quickly Black humanity gets reduced to spectacle, and how every form of resistance gets rebranded as “aggression.” They don’t walk into a setup with racist white folks thinking it’s gonna be a fair fight. They see it instantly for what it is: a hustle, a trap, a stage play where Black students get demeaned.

That’s why Tennessee State University students didn’t waste a second debating the MAGA clowns who showed up uninvited on their campus in their red MAGA hats with cameras and poster boards scrawled with “DEI should be illegal” and “Deport all illegals now.” Where white kids might have thought, If I just reason with him, maybe I’ll win, TSU students already knew: There’s nothing to win here. They refused to dignify the setup with carefully measured words, because they understood that words were the weapon Kirk’s imitators came to steal.

Videos from the scene captured TSU students shouting at the intruders, recording on their phones, holding up Black Lives Matter signs, calling them thieves and deviants, and trailing them as campus police escorted the intruders away. That’s how you deal with racists.

The agitators called themselves Fearless Debates and framed their stunt as part of the so-called “Fearless Tour,” a knockoff roadshow modeled after Kirk. On their site, they boasted that their mission is to “restore honest dialogue” and “revive debate” on America’s campuses, though their tactics made clear the goal was provocation, not conversation.

And that’s the dishonesty baked into the whole act: they hide behind the language of free speech while staging encounters designed to humiliate, edit, and weaponize students for content. It’s not dialogue, it’s a con dressed up as “conversation.”

I can’t find a single instance of Kirk trying that nonsense at an HBCU. He knew better. Even Kirk, with all his arrogance, wasn’t foolish enough to march uninvited onto a Black campus to play culture-war ringleader. But these knock-offs thought they could. They thought TSU students would fold, or explode, or at least hand them a soundbite. Instead, they got humiliated and escorted off campus.

And that humiliation matters.

Because this wasn’t just about clowns with poster boards. This was about the psychology of white intrusion and terror. For decades, white America made it clear they didn’t want Black students in their schools. They fought integration with mobs at schoolhouse doors. They dismantled affirmative action with Supreme Court rulings.

They’ve waged war on DEI programs, slashed funding for Black Studies departments and diverse student centers, and tolerated a steady drip of racial harassment, from nooses hung in dorm stairwells to slurs scrawled on walls, meant to remind Black students they don’t belong. They’ve shouted, time and again: we don’t want you Blacks here.

So, we built our own. We built HBCUs, brick by brick, prayer by prayer, tuition check by tuition check. These institutions are sanctuaries of intellect and survival. We are in our spaces minding our business, learning, healing, and loving on our students. And now here come these wannabe Kirk disciples barging in and boldly declaring: We can invade even your space. We can disrupt your sanctuary. We can make you explain yourself to us. It’s the same colonial impulse recycled. If they can’t exclude us, they’ll intrude.

Kirk’s viral videos did a lot more than rack up clicks. They functioned as propaganda tools. On the surface, they looked like campus free-speech moments, but what they really did was create a steady stream of visual evidence that “universities are full of fragile, clueless leftists who can’t handle facts.” Every stumble was cut into a meme that reinforced the right’s favorite narrative that higher ed is broken, liberal, elitist, and undeserving of public trust and economic investment.

That narrative has teeth. Lawmakers and pundits used those clips to argue that taxpayer money was being wasted on “indoctrination factories.” They helped justify legislative divestment from public universities, attacks on DEI programs, and broader assaults on the idea of college as a place for critical thinking. By humiliating students on camera, Kirk gave conservatives the perfect reel to demonize higher education and build support for starving it of funds.

Kirk himself was a college dropout. That mattered because his whole grift was about making higher education look unnecessary, corrupt, and hostile to “common sense.” The fact that a dropout could tour campuses humiliating enrolled students fed directly into the narrative: why even bother with college when it turns you into this? His very persona as a young, white, pugnacious, uncredentialed male was weaponized as proof that “real” knowledge and power weren’t found in classrooms but in conservative performance.

So, every clip served two purposes: it shamed students for trying, and it delegitimized the institutions that nurtured them. That’s why Kirk’s imitators thought walking onto an HBCU would work. They wanted to reproduce that spectacle and feed it into the same pipeline of right-wing contempt for higher ed. The difference was that TSU students refused to play their part.

And look at the timing.

After Kirk’s assassination, HBCU campuses across the country went on lockdown because of bomb threats. Right-wing commentators have blamed Obama for the escalation in violence and called sitting congresswomen “ghetto Black bitches.”

The president of the United States stood at Kirk’s funeral and essentially called for a culture war revival. Funding is being slashed, resources stripped, access to education tightened. The broader climate is authoritarian: people fired, censored, punished for speaking truth. And in the middle of it, these MAGA clowns stroll onto a Black campus to stage their little spectacle.

What they wanted was simple: bait students into a fight, clip the footage, upload it, feed their followers the lie that Black kids can’t handle ideas, can’t debate, can’t stand up to “facts and logic.” They wanted to turn TSU into a stage for their white grievance theater. They weren’t there to debate or learn. They were there to dominate. To signal to their audience: look, even in Black spaces, we can provoke and control. But they failed.

Because the students at Tennessee State weren’t having it. They didn’t give them the clips they wanted. They didn’t play the clown. They called campus police, they documented, they stood firm, and they ran the intruders off their campus. That resistance wasn’t just about keeping order on one campus. It was a statement that said: We will not be props in your racist circus. We will not be bait for your content. We will not be humiliated for your clicks.

That kind of defiance is no small thing in 2025. Authoritarianism is tightening its grip, dissent is benign punished, protests are criminalized, funding is being pulled, people are getting fired from their jobs, and fear is the point. Fear makes people small. Fear silences. And yet, there were students on a Black campus refusing to shrink.

That’s why this story matters. It’s not just about Tennessee State. It’s about every Black space ever invaded, surveilled, underfunded, or undermined. It’s about centuries of exclusion followed by intrusion, the arrogance of white supremacy that says: If we can’t keep you out, we’ll disrupt you from within. Resistance, even small and local, becomes survival in an era where power is consolidating, and civil protections are shrinking.

So yes, the students ran them off. It was symbolic. Historical. Prophetic. It said: Not here. Not today. It reminded us that Black institutions have survived slavery, segregation, disinvestment, and attack and so they’re not about to roll over for some MAGA with livestream cameras and an inferiority complex.

That’s not just a win for one school. That’s a blueprint for how we need to move collectively. Because if every Black community meets intrusion with that kind of assertiveness and clarity, if every attempt to turn us into props gets shut down at the door, the culture war loses one of its favorite weapons.

And in this moment when white supremacy is letting out its last shrill cry, there is nothing more radical than to say: You will not make us afraid. You will not make us small. You will not make us your content. And you sure as hell will not colonize our campuses. Get the hell out of our spaces!

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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Why It Matters That Tennessee State Students Ran Those MAGA Clowns Off Their Campus was originally published on newsone.com