(Katie Perschau / Fourth Estate)

The club offers a non-partisan alternative to other political clubs on campus

BY RENATA PERNEGROVA, STAFF WRITER

Tangle Club has officially become a registered student organization on campus as of the start of the spring semester after holding a number of informal meetings last fall. 

The club vows to create a venue where students from across the political spectrum can discuss current political issues, offering an alternative to existing political discussion clubs on campus such as Democrats at Mason, GMU Republicans and Turning Point USA. 

“Tangle is a space for everyone to hear different perspectives and engage in a productive debate with people they may not necessarily agree with,” said graduate student Sam Fournier, who brought the initiative to Mason. “The goal is to establish a common ground based on the facts, and to come together to hear other people’s ideas.” 

Mason’s Tangle Club is a part of a network of Tangle Clubs on college campuses nationwide. It is an enterprise of Tangle News, an independent, non-partisan newsletter publisher focused on American politics. 

“I was a fan of the Tangle Newsletter and their focus on fostering non-partisan discussion, so I thought starting this club would be one way to do the same on our campus,” Fournier said. 

The first Tangle Club meeting at Mason was in the middle of the fall semester. It was followed by bi-weekly meetings held until the end of the semester. In that period, Fournier was working on making the club an official entity on campus. 

“The format of the meetings stays largely the same; we are still going to be discussing what’s in the news,” he said. “Our goal is to evolve and get students from different majors involved, and also to grow big enough so it is worthwhile for the Tangle News Founder Isaac Saul, who started it from scratch, to come to speak to us in person.” 

The fall meetings discussed the mayoral election win of New York City’s Zohran Mamdani and the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history. The inaugural meeting of the spring semester on Feb. 5 focused on Venezuela, Greenland and Minneapolis. Fournier said the themes of the upcoming sessions will depend solely on what’s currently in the news. 

While Tangle Club joins a handful of already well-established political entities on campus, Fournier says he does not believe the club’s reach to students is going to be overshadowed by other political groups at Mason. 

“I thought there was a need for an organization that would kind of bridge those gaps and whose purpose was to bring people together,” he said.

According to Fournier, a wide spectrum of opinions during Tangle meetings makes the discussions more exciting. “We are actually trying to lean into the controversies. It is so boring when everybody is just agreeing with each other,” he said.

“During the discussion, we respect each other in the room as equals, and we want to hear what people honestly believe, regardless of controversy,” Fournier said. “We want to critique the ideas, but we don’t want to attack people.” 

Tangle Club meets every second Thursday from 4 to 5 p.m. in Horizon Hall, room 5200. The next meeting is planned for Feb. 19.