Last weekend, the highest echelons of conservative thought and influence came together in Arizona for America Fest, Turning Point USA’s biggest annual gathering. The massive conference — featuring figures like J.D. Vance, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson — took place only a few months after the assassination of the organization’s founder, Charlie Kirk.
What should have been, well, a turning point for the activist group — a punctuation mark on the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder and the public presentation of its next chapter — instead descended into a mess of mudslinging, conspiratorial warfare, and public spats that no bloated pyrotechnic budget could mask. TPUSA wanted to project that it is still a force to be reckoned with, still the center or conservative youth organizing. Instead, the various right-wing factions in attendance were at each other’s throats — the inevitable outcome of years spent building a movement around reactionary politics, one that encouraged followers to replace cognitive reasoning with a hunt for conspiracies, where both rising and established stars rely on virality and engagement to fund their operations.
Visually, America Fest was designed for social-media clip farming. Virtually every major speaker was greeted by a shower of sparks and fireworks; Nicki Minaj made an appearance alongside Erika Kirk and said flattering things about President Trump while referring to California Governor Gavin Newsom as “Newscum.” Kirk endorsed Vice President Vance for the 2028 Republican nomination — an announcement that would normally dominate headlines but barely made a ripple amidst the verbal sparring that took over the conference.
If there was a central figure to the melee it was Candace Owens, one of the far right’s most prominent commentators and a veritable case study on how to achieve conservative stardom. Once a staple at TPUSA events — the organization that helped kick off her career — Owens was not invited to this year’s America Fest, but was very much there in spirit.
Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, Owens has dedicated her near daily broadcasts on YouTube, which rack up millions of views, to airing a series of unintelligible conspiracies, alleging that her deceased friend and onetime employer was not killed in a lone-wolf attack by alleged shooter Tyler Robinson, but as part of a larger plot being covered up by Israel, or Egypt, or TPUSA, or even Erika Kirk herself. (It should go without saying, but there is zero evidence for any of these claims.)
Onstage the very first night of the conference, Mrs. Kirk — decked out in a gold sequin pants suit — cracked a joke about Owens’ Egyptian conspiracy theories, kicking off a parade of callouts that would derail any plans for narrative control. Soon after, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro followed up with an accusation that Owens was “vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years,” and warned that the conservative movement is “in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”
But Shapiro did not draw the line at Owens, and before his headline speech was over pulled former Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly (charged with “cowardice”) and Tucker Carlson (charged with acts “of moral imbecility”), both of whom were in attendance, into the fray.
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Kelly, for her part, used her time on the TPUSA stage to clap back at Shapiro, stating in an interview with Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec that she “found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a willful blindness about his position in it.” Kelly then pivoted to attacking Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, accusing her of attempting to capitalize on Kirk’s murder by hosting a self-serving town hall with his widow. (Kelly would later receive a third-party assist from former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who called Shapiro a “cancer” on the conservative movement in his remarks to the conference.)
Failed presidential candidate and current Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a thinly veiled dig at other speakers espousing the notion that America is for “heritage Americans” — a newish, amorphous anti-immigration moniker adopted by some right-wing commentators to describe Americans with generational or ancestral ties to the country. How far back into history those ties must be established in order to qualify — or whether Native Americans and Black people are included — remains unclear. “The idea of a ‘Heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the Woke Left has put up,” he said.
It was a mess, and only got messier. An influencer associated with the “Groyper” movement — a loose collection of far-right reactionaries associated with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes (a longtime critic and cultural nemesis of Charlie Kirk) — allegedly assaulted TPUSA employee Cam Higby. Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes of the Fresh and Fit podcast (a manosphere show in the vein of the Tate brothers) were both ejected from the conference with little explanation.
Seemingly every person who appeared onstage at America Fest, and those like Owens and Fuentes who — while not actually invited — seemed to dominate the conversation, has taken to their social media, blog, YouTube broadcast, or independent stream to weigh in on the drama.
“Truly, Ben Shapiro, f*ck you and the midget horse you rode in on,” Owens declared in her Sunday livestream response to Shapiro, before launching into an antisemitic screed. Carlson, for his part, compared Owens to Galileo being persecuted for being right about the relative positions of the Earth and the sun.
While it’s not worth nitpicking every detail in this endless loop of content, what is worth exploring is how the debacle represents an inevitable crisis point in the right’s current political project, one born directly from the manner in which they identify and build talent.
Outfits like TPUSA and The Daily Wire helped produce and grow the public profiles of plenty of people who used weaponized grievances to gain notoriety. Speakers at this year’s conference included Riley Gaines, famous for tying for fifth place in a swim meet but making it all about trans issues; Savannah Chrisley, a conservative reality-TV star who helped secure pardons from Trump for her parents’ tax-fraud convictions; Russell Brand, an actor and comedian who pivoted to conservative anti-woke politics after being charged in civil and criminal court with multiple sexual assaults (though he has denied the charges against him); and comedian Rob Schneider, a former Saturday Night Live star who used the opportunity to say the r-word on camera.
The MAGA movement built up the right-wing cultural ecosystem by placing spotlights on the loud, the controversial, the types that proudly declare they don’t give a shit if the establishment doesn’t like them. The problem is that they have now become the establishment.
TPUSA now has chapters at more than 800 colleges and universities. Texas and Florida have announced plans to encourage the creation of TPUSA-affiliated clubs at all public high schools. Before his death, Charlie Kirk had a direct line to every prominent figure in Republican politics — including President Trump.
As Turning Point grew, it cannibalized the influence of longstanding bulwark conservative events like CPAC. Kirk built a conservative movement for the next generation of Republicans living in the digital age, and provided the faces to lead it. Those influencers, many of whom have graduated — or been forced — out of the organizations that first brought them into the public eye are competing with one another for attention. The grabbier they can be, the more inflammatory their social media content, the more conspiracy theories they can spin up or doubt they can cast on their peers, the more engagement they can get. The very content model that built up figures like Owens, Kelly, Carlson, Shapiro, and countless other right-wing talking heads is now shaking the foundations of their movement.
From Rolling Stone US
