David Peters showed up to defend a group of college TPUSA supporters and paid for it.
Nearly a year later, Fort Lewis College still can’t explain why nobody wants to join them.
Colorado students witnessed a professor scream Nazi at them – and then watched the college let him walk.
The Cup Heard Round Durango
Peters is 66 years old.
He’s a retired Chevron executive.
He used to chair the La Plata County Republican Party.
Last fall, he showed up to support students trying to start a Turning Point USA chapter at Fort Lewis College.
The student government had already rejected the group once.
Then it reversed course and approved it during an emergency session.
That’s when things turned ugly.
About 70 people packed into the meeting.
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A crowd of anti TPUSA protesters waited outside.
Peters walked up to a student who was jeering at the proceedings, phone raised to catch it on video.
That student, who goes by Nova and uses they/them pronouns, swung an empty Taco Bell cup and struck Peters’ phone and hand.
Campus police detained the student on the spot.
Peters declined to press charges.
He just asked the university to handle it internally.
A former anthropology professor, David Kozak, stood nearby flipping off TPUSA supporters and screaming “Go on, fascists” and “Go on, Nazi lovers.”
Fort Lewis confirmed to Fox News Digital that Kozak has since retired.
The Fear Outlasted the Headlines
Almost a year later, the intimidation is still working.
“It’s definitely been flat, I would say,” chapter vice president Rachel Cook told Fox News Digital.
Peters says he knows why.
“A lot of students are reluctant to join the chapter for fear of retaliation,” he said. “And their fears are well founded.”
“There have been some members who have received anonymous death threats,” he said.
Cook backs that up from the inside.
“A lot of our officers have been getting threats and being harassed,” she said.
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Students aren’t afraid of losing an argument on campus.
They’re afraid of what happens after they leave the room.
This Is the Whole Playbook Since Charlie Kirk Was Murdered
Fort Lewis isn’t an isolated Colorado story.
It’s the national pattern that started the moment Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025.
More than 120,000 students rushed to start or join TPUSA chapters after his assassination.
The response from campus activists has been identical everywhere: intimidate the students before they can build anything.
At Northern Arizona University, TPUSA members have faced what event coordinator Amy Rose Lombardo called an escalating string of harassment, including a note depicting Charlie Kirk’s murder left at their table.
At St. John’s University in New York, a sophomore trying to launch a chapter says he and his friends were torn apart anonymously online the moment word got out.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 166 out of 257 colleges it ranked in 2026 earned failing grades for open campus discourse.
Erika Kirk saw this exact fight coming.
Weeks before the Fort Lewis story broke, she posted a warning to students heading back to campus for the first school year since her husband’s assassination.
“Your table might get flipped,” she wrote. “Someone might call you every name imaginable because you have a Turning Point USA sign sitting in front of you.”
She told them not to retreat anyway.
The Math Doesn’t Lie
Fort Lewis College insists nothing is wrong.
A spokesperson told Fox News Digital the school “has not received any reports this academic year involving harassment of members of the college’s TPUSA chapter.”
That statement means nothing if the students who’d normally file those reports are too scared to sign up in the first place.
You can’t harass a member of a club nobody joined.
A year after student senators voted to let conservative kids organize, a retired oil executive still remembers getting hit with fast food trash for holding up his phone, a professor who called students Nazis got to retire instead of getting fired, and the chapter he stood up for still can’t grow past where it started.
Erika Kirk told these kids their tables might get flipped and they should show up anyway.
At Fort Lewis, the ones who showed up got a cup thrown at them.
The ones who stayed home are the reason enrollment never moved.
Sources:
- Joshua Q. Nelson, “Colorado TPUSA chapter enrollment ‘flat’ after elderly supporter was stricken by student with Taco Bell cup,” Fox News, September 8, 2026.
- Peter D’Abrosca, “Defiant TPUSA leader won’t quit despite chapter facing harassment, hostility after Kirk assassination,” Fox News, December 27, 2025.
- Fox News, “Erika Kirk urges conservative students not to back down in first school year since Charlie’s assassination,” Fox News, August 2026.
- National Review, “NYC College Student Government Blocked TPUSA Chapter After Kirk Assassination,” National Review, November 19, 2025.