Bill Nye, the climate-change activist and science educator, appeared on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” recently. “The planet’s on fucking fire!” Nye shouted. “This is an actual crisis!” Kyle Kashuv, a high-school senior who has more than three hundred thousand Twitter followers, claimed to be outraged, but not about the climate-change message. “Dear Bill Nye,” he tweeted. “Cursing like a middle-schooler on XBOX Live doesn’t make me respect you—it makes you look like a joke.”

Kashuv would know. Just a few years ago, he was a middle schooler himself. He then attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. In early 2018, he survived the mass shooting at the school; after that, he became a student activist. Unlike the other well-known activists from Parkland, Kashuv is a fierce right-winger and an opponent of gun control. In the months after the shooting, he appeared on Fox News, took a photo with Clarence Thomas, and met with the President and the First Lady in the Oval Office. “This young man is truly extraordinary,” Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA and a close friend of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s, said last year, bringing Kashuv onstage at Utah Valley University. Turning Point, a nonprofit with an annual budget that exceeds eight million dollars, promotes conservatism at high schools and colleges across the country. Kirk named Kashuv the organization’s high-school outreach director.

“The more prominent he got, the more I was bothered by his hypocrisy,” Ariana Ali, one of Kashuv’s classmates, said about him recently. “He pretends to be this God-fearing, squeaky-clean type, but everyone who knows him knows that’s not who he really is.” Who he really is, according to Ali, is a bigot. According to another classmate, Kashuv “used the N-word frequently,” both in text messages and in person. A different classmate said, “He was obsessed with ranking which women were most attractive, by race. Out of nowhere, he’d go, ‘Wanna hear my racial ranking system?’ ” Political disagreements are one thing, Ali said, “but Kyle’s behavior was way, way over the line.” Ali had several more anecdotes attesting to this. She also, as they say, had the receipts.

On Twitter, Ali posted a video of Kashuv and some of his classmates chatting on a Google Doc in December, 2017. They were supposedly studying for their A.P. American-history midterm, but, around midnight, the review session went off the rails. At first, the attempts at humor were innocent enough. (On one page, the names of the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party were changed to “Fed boyos” and “Demdem Reppy swag.”) But Kashuv’s contributions were more unhinged. He referred, in capital letters, to “MY Jewish Slaves.” Elsewhere, he wrote the N-word eleven times in a row. “I’m really good at typing” the word, he explained. “Practice uhhhhhh makes perfect.” The same day that Ali put the video out on Twitter, Kashuv posted a statement announcing his resignation from Turning Point. A few days later, he tweeted another statement. He acknowledged having used “callous and inflammatory language,” but he didn’t apologize. A Turning Point spokesperson called Kashuv’s comments “unacceptable” and “un-American.” (Kashuv declined to comment.)

The Kashuv scandal was not Turning Point’s first association with white supremacy. Earlier this month, a video surfaced in which Riley Grisar, the president-elect of a Turning Point chapter in Nevada, utters the phrase “white power” while a woman shouts, “We’re gonna rule the country!” Earlier, it was revealed that Crystal Clanton, another Turning Point leader, had texted a Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all.”

R. C. Maxwell, a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point who goes by Black Hannity on Twitter, defended the organization. He wrote, “To say those random incidents are indicative of a larger problem of racism would be unfair.” Diante Johnson, the president of the Black Conservative Federation, disagreed: “If you’re comfortable making racist comments, that means someone has made you think it’s acceptable.”

Kashuv, who will graduate this month, has been accepted to Harvard. He wrote on Twitter that, before enrolling, he plans to spend a gap year in Washington, D.C., “working to build a brighter tomorrow.” ♦