How every major nonprofit collapse in modern American history followed the same five stages and how Turning Point USA is running the same playbook
LEAH
Via An Old Piece Of Leather
I’ve been doing the TPUSA investigation for months now. I’ve pulled the 990s, mapped the money, baselined the social media patterns, tracked the silences, traced the contractors. I’ve examined Andrew Kolvet, Blake Neff, and Erika Kirk individually, their timelines, their behavior, their financial footprints or complete lack thereof.
This piece is different.
I looked at the histories of other non profits, including Livestrong, Wounded Warrior Project, NRA, Susan G. Komen, Boy Scouts, Heritage Foundation, NAACP, and United Way. I studied how each one rose, how each one cracked, and how each one fell, or didn’t. And I found a pattern.
I found five stages that each non profit went through before hitting their rock bottom, and they happen in a specific order.
TPUSA is in four of them right now. The fifth is starting, in my opinion.
Stage One: The Leadership Crisis
Every collapse starts here. The person who built the thing leaves, or in TPUSA’s case publicly assassinated. And the person who replaces them cannot carry the weight, because the institution was the founder. Without the founder, the institution has to justify its existence for the first time. And most of them can’t.
Livestrong
Lance Armstrong was the Livestrong Foundation. When he lost his doping case in 2012, they tried to separate the man from the mission. Changed the name. Distanced from the founder. Revenue went from $46.8 million to $2.5 million. Ninety-four point seven percent. Gone. Seven years to lose almost everything. Because it turns out people weren’t donating to cancer research. They were donating to Lance Armstrong.
Wounded Warrior Project
Steve Nardizzi built Wounded Warrior into a $398 million machine—the largest veterans charity in the country. Then CBS News showed the world what he was spending it on, to include three million dollars for a single staff conference in Colorado $26M/year on meetings, up from $1.7 million four years earlier. Turns out, only ~50 cents of every dollar actually reaching veterans.
They fired him and brought in a retired three-star general. But it didn’t matter. Donations dropped from $373 million to $211 million in two years. Forty-three percent. They cut 15% of the workforce, over 600 jobs.
United Way
William Aramony ran United Way for 22 years. Convicted on 25 counts of fraud and money laundering. Embezzled $600,000. Took Concorde flights on the expense account. Seven years in federal prison. The damage wasn’t just to United Way, scholars who studied it said it shattered public trust in charitable organizations across the board.
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Now Look at TPUSA
Charlie Kirk was Turning Point USA. His face, his voice, his donor relationships—500,000 people who gave to Charlie, not to a tax ID number. Then, at age 31 he was assassinated and eight days later, the board made his wife the CEO.
Erika Kirk had never worked at TPUSA. Not as an employee, a consultant, or a contractor. Her background: Miss Arizona USA, a real estate license, a small faith-based clothing line, and a bible study program. She came with no executive experience or political operations background.
The board said Charlie told people verbally that he wanted this, conveniently there was no documentation of any kind. When Candace Owens demanded they produce a video of Charlie saying it, they didn’t produce evidence. They produced a cease-and-desist letter.
The witnesses to the selection are the people who benefit from the selection. They now work for the woman they installed, so verification is just, “trust me bro”. And for an $85 million transfer of power, that is not good enough.
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Stage Two: The Mission Drift
This is the one that catches donors off guard because it happens quietly. The new leader doesn’t announce they’re changing the mission. They just start doing something different. And by the time the donors notice, they’re funding an organization they didn’t sign up for, or did they?
Susan G. Komen Foundation
February 2012, CEO Nancy Brinker cut funding to Planned Parenthood. This had nothing to do with breast cancer, it was pure politics. The backlash was instant with 6,000 donors sending over $400,000 to Planned Parenthood within 24 hours in protest. Bloomberg offered a $250,000 match. Komen reversed the decision in four days.
That didn’t matter because the damage was done.
Race participation dropped 37% over four years. Three-day walks cut from 14 cities to 7. Fort Worth registration: 13,780 down to 8,558. San Francisco enrollment cut nearly in half in a single year. Nine affiliates closed.
The lesson: when you politicize a mission, the people who came for the mission leave and they don’t come back.
Heritage Foundation
Kevin Roberts pivoted Heritage away from its founding principles—free markets, rule of law, strong defense—toward populist ideology. National Review said Heritage had abandoned or downgraded the things that made it Heritage. A dozen-plus staff walked out in one wave. Princeton professor Robert P. George resigned publicly. The organization that defined conservative policy for forty years became, in the words of its own people, unrecognizable.
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Now Look at TPUSA
Charlie Kirk built this thing as a secular conservative youth organization. Campus chapters to discuss free markets, limited government, host policy debates. That’s what 500,000 donors funded. That’s what thousands of chapters signed up for.
Under Erika Kirk, the organization has launched something called the Make Heaven Crowded tour. Thirty cities with a Christian revival circuit under the Turning Point Faith banner. Her stated decision-making framework, her words, is whether each choice brings her closer to or further from Heaven. She not only changed the mission, but made it about her.
At AmericaFest 2025, she endorsed JD Vance for the 2028 presidency from the main stage. Charlie Kirk never used the TPUSA platform for presidential primary endorsements. An endorsement from an organizational stage commits the institution and its donors to a position they didn’t individually consent to.
One episode of the Make Heaven Crowded tour featured an alleged pastor with accusations of pedophilia and child trafficking. That’s not a vetting failure. At this scale, that’s a systemic problem.
The donors who wrote checks for a political education organization are now funding revival meetings. Nobody asked them if that’s what they wanted their money to do.
That’s the Komen pattern. And the Komen participation dropped 37%.
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Stage Three: The Financial Opacity
This is the stage where I live. Follow the money.
Every nonprofit collapse I studied had a moment where the money stopped making sense. Contractor spending would spike, compensation would raise questions, and the filings would tell you less and less about where the dollars actually went. In addition, the people asking questions would get silence or silenced, instead of answers.
The NRA
Wayne LaPierre approved $135 million in NRA contracts in exchange for yacht trips, Bahamas vacations, Greece, over $11 million in private flights. A New York jury found the NRA liable in February 2024. Ordered LaPierre to repay $4.35 million. Membership dues dropped nearly 80% from their 2018 peak. The organization went from 5.5 million members to 3.9 million. They tried to file for bankruptcy but a judge dismissed it as not made in good faith.
The Red Cross
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross raised $500 million. Congressional investigation found 25% went to internal expenses. The Red Cross claimed they built 130,000 homes. ProPublica and NPR found that the actual number of permanent homes built was six.
Not six thousand. Six homes total.
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Now Look at TPUSA’s 990s
Let’s just look at the latest three years of filings.
Look at the contractor line. In a single year, the number of independent contractors receiving over $100,000 more than doubled. From 31 to 67. In that same period, total expenses dropped by $10 million.
More contractors, less spending.
Only the top five contractors are named on the 990. The other 62 are anonymous. We don’t know who they are, what they did, or how they’re connected to the organization. The top five alone took $15.6 million—Resource One ($6.1M, printing), Mosaic Event Productions ($3.6M, video), Active Engagement ($2.7M, digital), American Solutions for Business ($2M, printing), Conrad Direct ($1.1M, mailing lists).
Blake Neff and Andrew Kolvet co-host the Charlie Kirk Show. It is the organization’s most visible media product. They do not appear on any TPUSA 990. They are not anywhere as officers, employees, named contractors. Kolvet co-owns Resolute Media Group with the Kirk estate. Neither Resolute nor ATK Media, Kolvet’s known LLC, appears anywhere. Salem Media, which syndicates the show across 500 affiliates, is absent. The entire media operation is invisible in the financial disclosures.
Meanwhile, the people who do show up raise their own questions. John McGovern, listed as a manager, earned $456,669, more than Charlie Kirk’s $390,493 as CEO. Daniel Flood, the security director, earned $331,050. Tyler Bowyer, the COO who appeared on the 2022 filing at $210,627, vanished from the 2023 filing entirely.
I am not alleging anything. I’m pointing at their own public filings and asking the same question any forensic analyst would ask: where is the money going? The NRA got away with it for years until a state attorney general decided to look. The question for TPUSA isn’t whether the books are clean. It’s whether anyone with subpoena power is asking.
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Stage Four: The Institutional Fracture
This is when the ground troops revolt, where the Chapters dissolve, the staff leave or get pushed out, and the leaks multiply. The organization that looked unified from the outside starts cracking at every seam.
Boy Scouts of America
Peak membership: over four million. By 2020: under two million. The LDS Church pulled out 400,000 scouts. When 92,700 sexual abuse claims were filed by the bankruptcy deadline, it was over. The organization that defined American boyhood for a century filed Chapter 11.
The NAACP
After CEO Ben Chavis was removed for using organizational funds to settle a sexual harassment suit, staff was cut from 250 to 50. State and local affiliates lost their tax-exempt status. The organization that defined civil rights for decades was eclipsed by its own internal rot.
Now Look at TPUSA
The University of Arkansas TPUSA chapter met Erika Kirk and dissolved within a week. Unanimous vote. They rebranded as Young American Revival. The chapter president wrote that the organization had lost its way, was chasing viral moments and metrics, and was using Charlie Kirk’s memory in ways that felt “manipulative”.
This is a huge red flag. A campus chapter met the new CEO and immediately voted to leave the organization, unanimously.
Former PR manager Aubrey Laitsch says she was fired because someone told management that an Uber driver said she didn’t like the new CEO. An Uber driver. Either that’s a cover story for a purge or the organization is so consumed by paranoia that taxi cab gossip triggers terminations. Either way, neither is healthy.
Staff were reportedly working 20-hour days without extra pay after Charlie’s death. The organization was described internally as fracturing from leaks and ideological clashes.
When Erika Kirk appeared at an event with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, violence broke out between supporters and protesters. Videos showed TPUSA supporters shoving and hitting demonstrators. The organization Charlie Kirk built to win young people through debate is generating fistfights at its leader’s appearances.
And there’s a data integrity problem. TPUSA claims 3,200 Club America chapters. A Pennsylvania audit found seven of the listed clubs didn’t actually exist. If you’re inflating your chapter count to your donors, what else are you inflating?
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Stage Five: The Public Trust Collapse
This is the final stage of failure.
The first four stages are survivable. Organizations have come back from leadership crises, mission drift, financial opacity, even internal fractures. But Stage 5 is terminal. Once the donors lose trust, the revenue follows. And no amount of rebranding fixes it.
TPUSA is not there yet. AmericaFest 2025 drew 30,000 people. more than double 2023. The halftime show in February 2026 pulled 6.1 million concurrent YouTube viewers (not sure I believe this one). The Charlie Kirk memorial drew 5.2 million on Fox News. Club America chapters reportedly grew from 1,700 to 3,200 since the assassination.
But here’s what two decades of pattern analysis taught me: Stage 5 never looks like collapse when it starts, it looks like a rally.
Every single organization in that table had a sympathy bump after their crisis. Wounded Warrior’s donations didn’t crater until a full year after the CEO was fired. The NRA’s membership bled quietly for two years before anyone noticed. Livestrong held steady for an entire year before the floor dropped. The Boy Scouts maintained institutional prestige for decades while the rot grew underneath.
The 30,000 who came to AmericaFest came for Charlie Kirk’s memory. The 6.1 million who watched the halftime show were drawn by spectacle and nostalgia. Sympathy numbers are real, but sympathy is not loyalty and loyalty is the only thing that keeps a nonprofit alive past its founder.
The early indicators are already there. Small-dollar donors have reportedly been requesting refunds. The Treasury Department, and this is unusual, proactively sent a letter saying TPUSA is not under investigation. When the government goes out of its way to tell you they’re not looking? In my experience, it’s because someone asked them to look. Internal videos have alleged payroll anomalies, missing tax forms, and canceled audits. The FIU chapter president stepped down after controversy. The Arkansas chapter dissolved entirely.
And every time someone asks a hard question, the answer isn’t evidence, it’s a cease-and-desist letter or public display of a meltdown with deflection.
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The One That Survived
I think it’s important to show you what it looks like when an organization pulls out of this arc.
The American Enterprise Institute nearly collapsed in the early 1980s. Bad management in near-ruins. The board faced a choice: declare bankruptcy or find $1.8 million and hire someone who could gut the place and rebuild it. They chose the second option and brought in Christopher DeMuth.
DeMuth did three things. He shut down programs that weren’t working, cut staff that couldn’t be justified, and he opened the books. Full transparency. It was ugly and unglamorous and it worked. AEI is now one of the premier conservative policy institutions in America.
Wounded Warrior did something similar. After firing Nardizzi, the board brought in a retired three-star general with no ties to the old regime, unimpeachable credentials. He cut overhead, redirected spending to programs, and submitted to external review. Donations partially recovered.
In both cases, the formula was the same: qualified outside leadership, ruthless cuts, open books.
TPUSA is doing the opposite of all three.
They installed a family member with no organizational experience. They expanded the mission instead of consolidating. And they closed the books tighter at exactly the moment they should have been opening them.
The organizations that survive do hard things. The organizations that die do easy things. Installing a loyalist is easy. Launching a revival tour is easy. Sending a lawyer letter is easy. Hiring an independent auditor, submitting to external governance review, and opening the 990s to real scrutiny, that’s hard. And it’s the only thing that’s ever worked.
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The Side-by-Side
When you put TPUSA next to the organizations that fell, the parallels aren’t subtle.
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What I See
I’m not accusing anyone at TPUSA of criminal conduct.
What I’m doing is placing TPUSA’s observable, publicly documented behavior alongside the documented behavior of organizations that collapsed. And the overlap is pretty clear.
In seven months, this organization has:
- Transferred $85 million in authority to someone with zero organizational history, based on unverified verbal claims, eight days after a murder
- Pivoted from secular conservative youth activism to a 30-city faith revival tour
- Made its first-ever presidential primary endorsement from the organizational platform
- Doubled its anonymous contractor count from 31 to 67 while cutting total expenses by $10 million
- Kept the people running its biggest media product completely invisible on every tax filing
- Lost an established campus chapter whose president called the use of the founder’s memory “manipulative”
- Fired staff on Uber driver hearsay and generated physical violence at public events
- Run shadow media operations through third-party YouTubers to defend the CEO’s personal narrative
- Answered every substantive question—from donors, from the press, from its own chapters—with lawyer letters instead of evidence
Every organization in this analysis thought it was different. The NRA thought its membership was unshakable, then they lost 1.6 million. Wounded Warrior thought wounded veterans was an untouchable cause, they lost 43% of donations. Livestrong thought cancer research was bulletproof, they lost 94.7% of revenue. The Boy Scouts thought a hundred years of institutional history made them invincible, they filed bankruptcy.
They all followed the same five stages. Every single one had a sympathy rally before the floor gave way. Every single one responded to early warnings with defensiveness instead of transparency.
The people who came to AmericaFest came for Charlie Kirk’s memory. The donors who gave after September 10th gave out of grief. The chapters that grew did so in tribute.
The question that will determine whether Turning Point USA survives or joins the list is not whether those people came. It’s whether they come back when the grief fades, when the mission looks different, when the person at the top is someone they never chose, and when the lawyer letters keep coming and the evidence doesn’t.
Because historically, in every single case I’ve examined, the answer to that question is the same.
They don’t.
This article reflects the author’s opinion and professional assessment based on publicly available IRS Form 990 filings, court records, congressional reports, and news coverage. The author is not alleging criminal conduct by any individual or organization. All financial figures are drawn from public filings available through ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer or contemporaneous reporting. Comparative analysis of nonprofit organizational patterns constitutes protected commentary and opinion.
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God will punish our enemies. We will arrange the meetings.
Nothing Can Stop What Is Happening
anoldpieceofleather
