Brooklyn Young Dems president wants to counter Turning Point USA

Carlos Calzadilla-Palacio, a Gen-Z Brooklyn politico-turned-influencer, didn’t expect to find much common ground when he went to the annual Turning Point USA conference in December. A former staffer for Democratic state Sen. Andrew Gounardes and president of the Brooklyn Young Democrats, he’s a true blue Dem. 

But lately he said he has lost faith in the party’s ability to reach young voters. “The right really nurtures and mentors its young people. And the left and Democrats burn out their young people,” he said. 

After studying Turning Point USA in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election, Calzadilla-Palacio decided to try to counter it, launching a “post-partisan” political action committee called Disrupt. And just as Turning Point USA was led by a savvy influencer named Charlie, Disrupt would be led by a social media maven named Carlos.

Disrupt is targeting young people who care about their three core pillars: restoring freedom, making life affordable, and ending corporate control, regardless of their current political affiliation. He found many such people at the Turning Point USA conference last year. “I think that (Charlie Kirk) was a brilliant organizer,” Calzadilla-Palacio said, “who I viciously disagreed with everything he stood for.” 

The idea of Disrupt being the antithesis to Turning Point USA came to Calzadilla-Palacio after he started searching for answers to why Trump won in 2024. “(Kirk) really used content creation as a vehicle to get young people into Turning Point and then turn those young people into organizers and turn them into voters,” he said. Of Kirk’s assassination in September, Calzadilla-Palacio said: “It was obviously brutal to see that happen and how political violence has really permeated our politics.”

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Since launching Disrupt, Calzadilla-Palacio has quit his full-time job and gone full influencer-mode. The organization now has 85,000 followers on Instagram. Calzadilla-Palacio travels around the country, speaking to Turning Point supporters in Arizona and attending ICE protests in Los Angeles. He was one of the content creators who attended Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “first new media press conference” in January.

Young people’s participation dropped in the 2024 presidential election, the Tufts University civic engagement center found. Tufts CIRCLE post-election youth poll found that 3 in 4 young people felt that they did not align with a political party and were “politically homeless.”

“When we look at trust in institutions, it's really low across-the-board when it comes to democratic institutions,” said Ruby Belle Booth, a researcher at CIRCLE. “But it's slightly higher when you're asking about local politics or state politics, and so I think that speaks to the fact that there's this opportunity to engage people around local issues and local elections.”

Carolina Thomas, a junior at University at Albany starting a chapter of Disrupt on her campus, said the movement being non-partisan is a draw in the current political climate. “Coming from a more solution-based approach or identifying problems approach without a party label, you bring more people in and you can start to break down walls and barriers,” she said.

Since their launch in late December 2025, the organization has amassed over 2,400 chapter requests from across the country, organizers say. But it remains to be seen whether the momentum will last. Although Disrupt does not rival the near 800 college chapters of Turning Point USA, the team is optimistic it will blossom. 

“It's the best problem somebody can have, because we are growing so fast, it's been hard to keep up with,” said Alexa Matos, the digital organizing director on Disrupt’s team. “Personally I believe that the reason that people are so hungry for our movement like this is because they feel that change is coming. They feel disenfranchised by both parties.”