HARTFORD, Conn. — A group of Central Connecticut Student University students and allies protested the screening of the documentary “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM,” to be hosted by the Turning Point USA student chapter, which ultimately canceled the public screening on Thursday night.
One of the student protesters, Malia Hunt, said the group protested the film because they felt showing the documentary would be at the expense of many students’ comfort, safety and well-being, especially students of color and other historically marginalized groups on campus.
Hunt said that, as a young Black woman, it was “extremely triggering” for her to have Candace Owens, the Black woman who was the producer and presenter of the documentary, try to discredit and invalidate the murder of George Floyd.
“To have them … try to debunk Black Lives Matter as an organization and thus a movement, it was very triggering and infuriating, especially as, you know, as Black students, and as the Black community. We really are trying to continue to grieve and heal from that death, plus all the other Black lives that are still being lost to police brutality and racism in general,” she said.
The description for the film says, “In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, the media concocted a narrative that justified a summer of worldwide riots and helped contribute to the rise of Black Lives Matter who used the chaos to raise $80 million dollars.” The film reportedly examines Floyd’s character and how BLM donations were used.
While some of the protesters claimed that the CCSU Turning Point USA student chapter is a “white supremacist group,” group Vice President Antonio Pensanti said that is not true.
“That’s just blatantly ridiculous. I mean, we accept everybody for who they are — that’s unchanging characteristics of somebody. We don’t agree with anybody that spouts those ideologies. You know, any real conservative or anybody from TP USA will completely denounce people like that, and we’re nothing like what they put us out to be,” he said.
Pensanti said that the Turning Point group is about asking for free market, free speech and limited government, which is their mission statement.
He said that they specifically chose to show this documentary to “spread the truth.”
“By showing the movie, that’s what we believe we were doing. There’s a lot of things from the movie that people maybe hadn’t heard of. And it was a spotlight on some other things from the BLM and George Floyd situation that people never heard of before, because it was suppressed, so we just want to spread the truth,” he said.
Turning Point USA says its mission is to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”
Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism Senior Research Fellow Mark Pitcavage is quoted by Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact as saying that the group “does have this checkered or spotted history with regard to individual members or local leaders in Turning Point USA making racist or otherwise problematic comments … but it’s not the ideology of the group itself.”
While she acknowledged that she is not sure about the organization at large, Hunt said she believes that the branch at CCSU has been less about conservative politics.
She said that she and some of the student protesters tried to speak with the CCSU Turning Point USA student chapter about why some of their initiatives, including attempting to screen this documentary and their November screening of “What is A Woman?” — which she describes as a “transphobic” film documentary, are hurtful to students of color and LGBTQ students.
That conversation, she said, did not go smoothly.
But Pensanti said his group spoke to a member of the CCSU Black Student Union who expressed interest in having another formal dialogue between the two groups.
“We talked with one of the students from the Black Student Union organization, after the movie got shut down. And he was very understanding with some of the things that we were trying to promote. He wanted to meet with us on a more formal level with his group and us to discuss it, sit down and talk about it, which we’re open to and looking to do in the future,” Pensanti said.
Ultimately, Hunt said that the group thought it was important to come out and protest, because nobody else was doing anything about it.
“The administration, you know, we saw with the last film that (Turning Point USA student chapter) screened, they claimed that they’re unable to do anything about it, due to freedom, I suppose. And so we have to take it into our own hands to at least try to make this a safe space amongst one another,” she said.
She said that she felt that if it is not a safe space for her to exist as a Black student on campus, then it should not be a peaceful, safe space for the Turning Point USA members either.
“That’s why we came out to support one another to stand up and fight back against this, because nobody else was doing anything about it. They didn’t do it the first time. They didn’t do it last night. And I don’t think that they will do it again, unfortunately,” she said.
Pensanti said that they have no plans to show that specific documentary again, because they think that protests would continue.
“That’s not really productive. That’s not what we want to see as students or as people from this organization. It’s very disruptive and not beneficial. But we were going to show, we’re probably going to show, other movies at different points. And we will probably show the movie on more of a personal level, just in our group,” he said.
He also said that he wants people to know that his group is not racist nor do they hate people.
“A lot of the people there were saying personal things towards us, (like that) we’re racist people and we hate people. That’s not at all what we are. We love everybody and we respect their decisions or their decisions to protest, but we also have the right to screen the movie. So, it was kind of sad to see how last night ended,” he said.
CCSU Associate Vice President of Communications and Media Jodi Latina confirmed that the protest did take place outside, and campus police on the scene made no arrests and no injuries were reported.
“One of the most critical functions of a public university is to protect the rights of all students. The suppression of speech is a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. The documentary, no matter how objectionable, is speech,” she said.
Latina also said that while the content in the film in no way reflects the opinions of the university, suppression of speech will not be tolerated.
She said that the university and the authorities are investigating the incident to determine whether there was a violation of their code of conduct, as it has come to their attention that some of the protesters were not CCSU students.
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