DEI Integrity: Regarding "Club America"

High school students are not wrong to seek belonging, meaning, recognition, and a sense of moral clarity. Adolescence is a developmental period marked by identity formation, heightened sensitivity to social reward, and vulnerability to opportunities that promise certainty, purpose, and status. When young people are invited into a cause that frames itself as virtuous, patriotic, and embattled, especially one that flatters them as brave truth-tellers resisting imagined oppression, it can be deeply compelling.

That’s why the rapid spread of Club America chapters into high schools across the country deserves sober, clear-eyed scrutiny rather than reflexive, misguided deference under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.”

Club America, as documented in reporting on its origins, funding, governance, messaging, and political sponsorship, functions not as a student-led forum for pluralistic inquiry, but as an adult-promoted and fueled ideological project aimed at recruiting minors into a worldview that relies on exclusion, hierarchy, and the normalization of social domination into organized bigotry.

Some might blanch at the use of the word, “bigotry,” thinking it’s inherently offensive and/or anachronistic.  It’s crucial in this period of rampant and brutal social bias to call things by their name. Bigotry is not merely personal animus or private prejudices. It’s a pattern of belief and behavior that asserts the moral, civic, or natural superiority of some groups over others and seeks to justify unequal dignity, unequal rights, or unequal protection under law. It’s not a single ism but a multi-pronged rejection of anyone and everyone who is not part of “us”.  It’s often cloaked in respectable language such as “tradition,” “values,” “freedom,” “constitutional ideals” and inherent entitlement.

When examined closely, the ideology promoted by Turning Point-affiliated efforts repeatedly targets multiple social identity groups for restriction, erasure, or delegitimation, particularly those who are not powerful, privileged, white-racialized males and those selectively admitted into that orbit of power. LGBTQ+ people, women, religious minorities, immigrants, racialized groups, and political dissenters are not simply disagreed with; they are routinely framed as threats to the nation, to morality, or to social order itself. They are looked down upon, left out, intimidated, and openly vilified. That’s not viewpoint diversity. That’s organized social bias. That’s bigotry.

Many students are, no doubt, acting in good faith, and responding to developmental needs for belonging and recognition in accepting the alluring Trojan Horse of Club America. Some may genuinely believe they are participating in civic engagement. Others may be drawn in by peer dynamics, adult praise, or the thrill of being positioned as courageous dissenters.

Club America presents itself as patriotic, apolitical, and benign. But reporting shows a different reality: adult-controlled messaging, pre-approved speakers, ideological training materials, centralized oversight, and explicit growth mandates. Students are discouraged from independent engagement with media. Guest speakers advance religious and political claims that cross constitutional and ethical boundaries. Meanwhile, parallel efforts to restrict or eliminate LGBTQ+ student groups proceed in the same political environments where Club America is aggressively promoted.

Public schools are obligated to avoid unlawful viewpoint discrimination but that means that viewpoints that preach and practice discrimination cannot be allowed. Inclusivity and organized bigotry aren’t equivalent positions on a spectrum of opinion. When “viewpoint diversity” is invoked to force schools to host clubs that materially increase risk to socially disadvantaged students, the concept has been distorted beyond recognition. Inclusivity cannot be inclusive of exclusivity. Tolerance cannot be tolerant of intolerance

 

School leaders, boards, educators, parents, and community members must refuse to be intimidated by political pressure campaigns that distort and weaponize legal language in order to ignore legal anti-discrimination laws. Young people deserve spaces that invite curiosity without coercion, belonging without exclusion, and civic learning without indoctrination. Schools exist to expand students’ capacities for critical thought, empathy, and democratic participation—not to serve as recruitment grounds for movements built on social hierarchy and exclusion. DEI integrity requires that we not flinch, flounder or founder when the bigotry club is wielded.