In early July, John Amanchukwu published a YouTube video calling out Debi Stears by name.
Stears is collection development manager with the Washoe County Library System. But Amanchukwu wasn’t attacking her in her official capacity – he was upset that she had spoken against book bans during a Washoe County School District Board of Trustees meeting two weeks prior.
“Debi. Debi Stears. Debi Stears! Debi, oh, Debi. Can you hear me?,” he said in a taunting voice.
Amanchukwu is the Youth Pastor for Upper Room Church of God in Christ, in Raleigh, North Carolina – more than 2,600 miles away from Reno.
But he was at the Washoe County school board meeting that day. His video was a kind of after-action report.
“God gonna get you, Debi,” he continued in the video.
Amanchukwu came to Nevada on behalf of Turning Point USA, a family of right-wing activist groups that includes a get-out-the-vote operation for former president Donald Trump’s reelection.
But he didn’t talk about any of that during the school board meeting.
Experts in Christian nationalism say Amanchukwu was in Reno to activate evangelical voters. And they say targeting a county employee is part and parcel with Turning Point’s tactics.
Matthew Boedy is an associate professor at the University of North Georgia, and the author of a forthcoming book on Turning Point USA and its founder, Charlie Kirk.
Boedy explained Turning Point USA has become a major player in the national right-wing activism scene, and likely controls $100 million in assets.
“Turning Point Action is a different bank account, if you will. And they have said they're spending $100 million alone on this campaign season,” he continued, referring to the organization’s political action branch, which is working directly with the Trump campaign.
Beginning in 2012, Kirk's original brief was to reach conservative college students. But Boedy said he adopted a new approach during the pandemic.
“Charlie jokes at times that the colleges were not open, but the churches were open. And so he went to churches,” he said.
The result was TPUSA Faith – the branch of Kirk’s empire which has been sending Amanchukwu to confront school boards across the country for the last two years.
Neither Turning Point USA nor Amanchukwu agreed to an interview for this story.
But his appearances follow a clear playbook: First, he accuses officials of abusing students by giving them access to books he disapproves of.
For example, he lambasted Washoe County’s board for their policy on obscene language during their meeting’s public comment period.
“For you to have a policy that says that in this meeting you're against vulgarity, then that means this board is a hypocrite if you endorse books like this to be in the school system,” he said.
Amanchukwu’s next step is to read aloud from a salacious passage. As a result, school boards will often have him kicked out, or, in the case of Washoe County, call the meeting into recess – all while a Turning Point film crew records the encounter.
In Northern Nevada, Amanchukwu read from the 1991 horror novel, American Psycho. But anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is his bread and butter.
“Parents are bringing their children to watch men in a dress with hairy legs and a beard thicker than mine and longer than mine, do nice things in front of kids – corrupt things,” he said in his video recapping the encounter in Northern Nevada.
Amanchukwu’s school board protests aren’t just about books, though. They’re also part of Turning Point’s voter engagement strategy, said religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor.
“They're trying to activate – especially in the swing states – these parents who are concerned about what's going on in schools, and say the only solution is Donald Trump,” he explained.
For Debi Stears, the librarian at the center of Amanchukwu’s attack, the whole incident was kind of funny at first. She said he’d already left the meeting by the time she got up to speak.
“Huh, boy, I guess I did something that really got under his skin,” she remembers thinking. “And then it just got creepier and creepier.”
According to Boedy, that kind of abuse is a tactic Turning Point has been honing for years.
Since at least 2017, the organization has kept a watchlist of college professors who it accuses of discriminating against conservative students. Boedy said his own work has landed him on that list. More recently, Turning Point created a school board watchlist – which includes Washoe County.
And in an era of growing political violence, Boedy is concerned that harassment could lead to dire consequences.
“We've seen very specific people do very specific actions that are terrible, like going to a pizzeria in [Washington] D.C. to find kids that are not there,” he said, referring to a 2016 shooting inspired by the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.
But Stears said even though Amanchukwu’s video rattled her at first, she believes the First Amendment is the most sacred American value – and Stears is determined not to let herself be silenced.
“That's what they want,” she said. “My family is concerned, but they also know this is important. This is what I need to do.”
