Last weekend, the highest echelons of conservative thought and influence gathered in Arizona for America Fest, Turning Point USA’s largest annual gathering. The massive conference, in which figures such as JD Vance, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson – took place only a few months later the murder of the founder of the organization, charlie kirk.
What should have been, well, a turning point for the activist group: a punctuation mark on the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s assassination and the public presentation of his next chapter – instead descended into a mess of smears, conspiratorial warfare and public disputes that no inflated pyrotechnic budget could mask. TPUSA I wanted to project that it is still a force to be reckoned with, even if it is the center or the conservative youth organization. Instead, the various right-wing factions Attendees were fighting each other – the inevitable result of years spent building a movement around reactionary politics, a movement that encouraged followers to replace cognitive reasoning with conspiracy hunting, where both rising and established stars rely on virality and engagement to fund their operations.
Visually, America Fest was designed for social media clip cultivation. Virtually every major speaker was greeted by a shower of sparks and fireworks; Nicky Minaj made an appearance next to 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 made little impact amid the verbal sparring that gripped the conference.
If there was a central figure in the tumult it was Candace Owensone of the alt-right’s most prominent commentators and a true case study in how to achieve conservative stardom. Owens, once a staple at TPUSA events, the organization that helped launch her career, was not invited to this year’s America Fest, but she was present in spirit.
Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, Owens has dedicated himself almost daily broadcasts on youtuberacking up millions of views, to airing a series of unintelligible conspiracies, alleging that his deceased friend and former employer was killed not in a lone wolf attack by alleged shooter Tyler Robinson, but as part of a broader plot covered up by Israel, Egypt, TPUSA, or even Erika Kirk herself. (It goes without saying, but there is no evidence for any of these claims.)
On stage the first night of the conference, Ms. Kirk, dressed in a gold sequin pantsuit, made a joke about Owens’s Egyptian conspiracy theories, kicking off a parade of denunciations that would derail any narrative control plans. Shortly after, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro followed up with a accusation that Owens was “spewing all kinds of appalling, conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years” and warned that the conservative movement is “in danger of charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but in reality traffic in conspiracies and dishonesty.”
But Shapiro didn’t draw the line with Owens, and before his keynote speech he brought into the fray former Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly (accused of “cowardice”) and Tucker Carlson (accused of acts “of moral imbecility”), who were present.
Kelly, for her part, took advantage of her time on the TPUSA stage to applaud to Shapiro, stating in an interview with Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec that he “found it a little funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who is excommunicated from the conservative movement, which demonstrates a willful blindness about his position in it.” Kelly then went on to attack Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, accusing her of trying to profit from Kirk’s murder by organizing a selfish town hall with his widow. (Kelly would later receive help from a third party, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who called Shapiro called the conservative movement a “cancer” in his remarks at the conference.)
Failed presidential candidate and current Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy has made a decision thinly veiled excavation to other speakers who defend the notion that America is for “heritage Americans”: a new and amorphous anti-immigration nickname adopted by some right-wing commentators to describe Americans with generational or ancestral ties to the country. It is still unclear how far into history those links must be established to qualify, or whether Native Americans and blacks are included. “The idea of an ‘American heritage’ is as far-fetched as anything the woke left has ever put forward,” he said.
It was a disaster and it just got more and more complicated. 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 Cam Higby, TPUSA employee. Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes of the Fresh and fit podcast (a manosphere show in the vein of the Tate brothers) were both expelled of the conference with little explanation.
Seemingly everyone who appeared onstage at America Fest — and those like Owens and Fuentes who, though not actually invited, seemed to dominate the conversation — took to their social media, blogs, YouTube streams, or independent streams to weigh in on the drama.
“Seriously, Ben Shapiro, screw you and the midget horse you rode on,” Owens declared on his Sunday livestream. answer to Shapiro, before launching into an antisemitic rule. Carlson, for his part, . Owens to Galileo being persecuted for being right about the relative positions of the Earth and the Sun.
While it’s not worth analyzing every detail of this endless loop of content, what is It is worth exploring how the debacle represents an inevitable crisis point in the right’s current political project, born directly from the way they identify and build talent.
Groups like TPUSA and The Daily Wire helped produce and grow the public profiles of many people who weaponized their complaints to gain notoriety. Speakers at this year’s conference included Riley Gaines, famous for tying for fifth place in a swimming meet but who focused on trans issues; Savannah Chrisley, a conservative reality TV star who helped secure Trump’s pardon for her parents’ tax fraud convictions; Russell Brand, actor and comedian who turned to anti-woke conservative politics after being charged in civil and criminal court with multiple sexual assaults (although it has denied the charges against him); and comedian Rob Schneider, formerly Saturday night live star who took the opportunity to say r word on camera.
The MAGA movement built the right-wing cultural ecosystem by shining a spotlight on the loud, the controversial, the guys who proudly declare that they don’t give a shit if the establishment doesn’t like them. The problem is that now they have become the establishment.
TPUSA now has chapters in more than 800 universities and universities. Texas and Florida have announced plans to encourage the creation of TPUSA-affiliated clubs in 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 long-standing conservative Bulwark 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 from (or been forced from) the organizations that first brought them to the public, compete with each other for attention. The more hoarders they can be, the more incendiary their content is on social media, the more conspiracy theories they can invent or doubts they can throw at their peers, the more engagement they can get. The same content model that built figures like Owens, Kelly, Carlson, Shapiro and many other right-wing talking heads is now shaking the foundations of their movement.
