turning-point-usa-fake-chapters

Editorial featured image for the investigative report Turning Point USA’s Fake Chapters: How an $85 Million Nonprofit Built a Ghost Movement on Gift Cards and Lies. The image depicts a deserted American university campus at dusk — grand, institutional, and completely empty — populated only by dissolving, semi-transparent student silhouettes fading into the evening air. In the foreground, a lone folding table bears a hand-lettered Turning Point USA recruitment sign and a fanned stack of gift cards, the visual embodiment of the gift-card recruitment economy documented by former field representatives. The composition draws on the visual language of classic investigative news-magazine cover art to illustrate the central finding of the report: that TPUSA’s claimed presence on more than 3,500 American campuses is, in significant part, a database of ghosts — unverified chapters, inactive clubs, and recruited students who signed a form, collected a card, and never met again.