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At AmericaFest, conservative leaders insulted one another, revealing serious rifts over conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and who belongs in America.
By Richard Fausset and Ken Bensinger, New York Times Service
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Since 2021, Turning Point USA’s annual gathering, AmericaFest, has featured a star-studded roster of conservative influencers and politicians who have been virtually unified in their focus on a common foe, one that Charlie Kirk, the group’s co-founder, called the “woke” left.
But over the weekend in Phoenix, speakers at AmericaFest scarcely mentioned Democrats and other liberal foils. Instead, some of the most prominent right-wing leaders in the country criticized members of their own movement, calling them “frauds,” “pompous” and a “cancer.”
Driving the enmity have been some of the most explosive and unresolved issues confronting the “Make America Great Again” movement: resurgent antisemitism, the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the rise of the concept of “heritage Americans” and what that notion — considered by some to be a thinly veiled racist dog-whistle — means for nonwhite conservatives.
Notably, in the wake of the revolt against left-wing “cancel culture,” there have also been questions about what kinds of ideas might be grounds for cancellation within conservatism itself.
It has been a snapshot of a powerful movement in an uncharacteristic state of discord just three months after the assassination of Kirk, a gifted communicator who had helped construct a big tent under which American conservatives of many stripes could coexist in the Trump age.
Without Kirk, the movement’s boldface names appeared to be jockeying over the weekend to influence the direction of the MAGA movement at a time when its most towering figure, President Donald Trump, is in his second term.
For some true believers, it was hard to watch.
On Saturday, Benny Johnson, a podcaster, pined for a time just a few months ago when conservatives were unified in grief and purpose after Kirk’s killing.
“I’m sick of the division. I am calling it out,” he said, as he flashed photos from the memorial service held for Kirk. “Don’t let them steal this from us. We have to recapture this!”
The first sparks came Thursday night, with a blistering speech from Ben Shapiro, a founder of the media company The Daily Wire, who bemoaned the “frauds” and “grifters” in the movement, and went on to savage by name a roster of powerful right-wing figures.
An Orthodox Jew, Shapiro argued that the movement was being harmed by commentators, especially podcaster Candace Owens, who has been accused of antisemitism and who has been floating wild conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing under the guise, Shapiro said, of “just asking questions.”
He wielded a particularly pointed arrow at Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, for engaging in what he said was “an act of moral imbecility,” by airing a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite. Shapiro hammered Megyn Kelly, a podcaster, for failing to condemn Owens and Carlson. And he called Steve Bannon, the onetime chief strategist for Trump, a former “PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein.”
Many of Shapiro’s targets also spoke at AmericaFest. One after another, they clapped back.
Carlson, speaking later Thursday evening, mocked Shapiro as “pompous.” The following day, Bannon called Shapiro a “cancer” on the movement, and Kelly said she resented Shapiro’s attacks.
“He thinks he’s in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when,” Kelly, a former Fox News host, said in an onstage conversation with Jack Posobiec, a far-right conspiracy theorist. “So I don’t think we are friends anymore.”
On Friday, Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian American who is running for governor of Ohio as a Republican, took on a faction on the right that is pushing the idea that so-called heritage Americans — people whose families have been in the country for multiple generations — have a greater claim to the nation than more recent arrivals.
Ramaswamy assailed the idea as a “blood and soil” conception of citizenship, one that is “un-American at its core” and “about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up.”
Although Ramaswamy did not mention Vice President JD Vance, his remarks appeared to put him at odds with the vice president, who in a controversial July speech spoke against “importing millions and millions of low-wage serfs” and extolled the country and its heritage as “a distinctive place with a distinctive people.”
Vance delivered his own speech Sunday, with a 2028 presidential endorsement from Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, bestowed last week.
Erika Kirk, who is now Turning Point’s CEO, lamented the internecine fighting that has accelerated since her husband was killed.
“It proved even more, once he was assassinated, how much of a peacemaker he was, and how much of a coalition builder he was,” she said.
But she said that her husband loved a good debate, and she promised attendees that they would hear ideas at the event that they might not agree with.
“AmFest is not about echo chambers,” she said.
Dana Steuben, of Peoria, Illinois, who has one daughter working for Turning Point and another serving as president of the Turning Point chapter at her high school, frowned when asked to compare this year’s conference with the 2024 version.
“The energy was so different,” Steuben said of the 2024 event. “Everyone was so excited because we’d just won the election. This year, it’s just a lot of infighting. It’s terrible. I think a lot of people are upset, and they’re acting childish.”
Tensions had been mounting among right-wing thought leaders leading up to this year’s event.
On Dec. 3, Blake Neff, the producer of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” publicly criticized Owens, a former Turning Point employee who boasts 5.7 million subscribers on YouTube. Neff accused Owens of leveling a flood of “absurd claims” and wild accusations against some Turning Point employees, suggesting their “complicity” in Kirk’s death.
“The attacks and allegations from Candace are either lies or they are innuendos thrown around with a total reckless disregard for the truth,” Neff said.
But Turning Point has long provided platforms for conspiracy theorists.
At a 2022 event, Kirk warmly introduced a featured speaker, Alex Jones, the Infowars host who falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax, and that relatives of the victims were in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation.
In June 2024, Owens was a speaker at a Turning Point Action conference, after she had begun claiming that the wife of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was a man. (The Macrons have sued Owens for “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions.”)
And Kirk himself promoted Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats.
Owens, who did not attend this year’s AmericaFest, responded to Shapiro on her podcast Friday. She called him a slithering “belly creature.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.