PHOENIX, Arizona – Thousands showed up for the first night of Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA) annual AmericaFest Thursday evening in downtown Phoenix, in a festive mood celebrating Donald Trump’s presidential election win. The annual weekend event every December at the Phoenix Convention Center features talks by the top names in the conservative movement, with the biggest ones participating the first evening: TPUSA CEO and founder Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon.
Kirk opened the event discussing how the MAGA movement has grown, especially on college campuses, which his youthful organization focuses on. He said people were afraid to wear MAGA hats in 2016, but now he visits campuses where everyone wants them. He said they handed out 5,000 hats at the University of Georgia recently.
“All of you guys went from a symbol of ‘these people are terrible Nazis’ to the coolest, most desirable thing that one can wear in American politics,” he said. “It became a symbol of American masculinity coming back into our culture.”
He joked about how Trump made a deal over the summer, “the greatest deal maker that politics has ever seen,” trading Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to the Democrats in exchange for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kirk relished in the victory. “We were outspent, but we outworked them. … We hired well over 1,000 full time people here on the ground in Arizona at Turning Point Action. And I can say now Arizona was the best performing swing state.”
He warned Republicans who stand in the way of Trump’s mandate, “If you are a Republican from a deep red state and you voted for Joe Biden’s nominees, and you’re giving Donald Trump a hard time about his nominees, we will primary you and remove you from office immediately.”
The crowd erupted in thunderous applause. “And for all of those red state senators out there, let this be a warning to you that the 20,000 people here at AmericaFest and the 1 million people here that are watching online, and the millions of people that will see these clips, we are not going to take a Republican Party that gets in the way of the will of the people.”
Kirk denounced Congress’s recent attempt to pass a Continuing Resolution at the last minute, ostensibly to continue spending on unnecessary government services, but was full of extra items like huge raises for Congress.
“No, we’re not going to give Congress a 74 percent pay raise while Americans are being crushed by inflation,” he said. “We’re not going to send more money to Ukraine. We’re not going to have this boondoggle of biolabs being spent overseas. We’re not going to have immunity for the January 6 committee.”
The bill was defeated after a massive outcry on X, with thousands of Americans calling their members of Congress to object. “Look at the power that you have,” Kirk said. “In just the last 24 hours, we did something that we never would have been able to do before they were trying to do; this ridiculous, sick and twisted and concocted 1,500-page Democratic giveaway Continuing Resolution. Under old circumstances, that thing just would have passed.”
Kirk noted that young men are the most conservative they’ve been in over 50 years — but humbly did not credit himself for any of that, despite the fact his organization’s focus is young people. He went on, “We’re sick and tired of hearing about toxic masculinity when we are drowning in toxic femininity, when we become a feelings-based culture.”
“Who is the most overtly masculine political figure of the last 100 years?” he asked. “No, it’s not Tim Walz.” The crowd started roaring with laughter. Referring to Trump, Kirk said, “It’s the man who would never apologize for America, that stands proudly for our tradition and our history, that doesn’t care about what sensibilities he offends, that calls Justin Trudeau ‘governor.’”
Kirk laid out what conservatives believe. “I know it’s so radical for them to understand that when you appropriate money, American citizens are first, not Ukrainians. … We want our kids to have to learn, reading, writing, arithmetic, and not graphic pornography. At the age of 11, we want our founding documents to matter much more than federal registry and bureaucracies. We believe the Constitution is the law of the land.”
He laid into the mainstream media. “We are the media, now that their power is fading and waning. No one reads their stuff. Their subscriptions are going down. Like CNN has less views than Hallmark movie reruns. … When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I believe it was the most important singular purchase since the Louisiana Purchase we’ve seen in a purchase for this country. … I do not think that we would have been able to expose the American people to how Joe Biden was brain damaged if it wasn’t for Twitter or X, because the media wasn’t doing their job. ”
AmericaFest held breakout sessions during the general session for its dues-paying membership and VIP attendees. One of the sessions featured a podcast with Kirk and Carlson. Kirk asked Carlson about his new nicotine pouch brand ALP. Carlson smoked cigarettes for years but finally quit a few years ago. He launched the product after discovering that the parent company of the major brand in that industry contributed heavily to Kamala Harris and Democrats.
Although he advocates against smoking, he said the government lies. “I thought if we got everyone off cigarettes, you know, the country would be thin and fit. It’s fat and chronically ill.” Additionally, “They have no problem pushing actual narcotics on the population; smoke some more weed, here’s your Netflix, don’t pay attention to what we’re doing.”
He went on, “They have no right to lie to you. You own the government. If they make a mistake, they should be punished, not you. … You get to fire them. They don’t own the country. … It’s not an accident that the chemicals they approve of lower testosterone, and the ones they despise raise testosterone — because an alert, aware, self respecting country is more difficult to manage.”
He ridiculed the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. as “non-geniuses.” “The whole thing is set up to reward people who could not succeed in the true meritocracy,” he said. “That’s what DEI is, most obviously we’re not qualified for the job and doing the job, okay, right? And let’s penalize people who are qualified and score high enough on the test. We’re not letting you in.”
He admitted he has been wealthy his entire life, but spoke critically about the rich. “The richest people in our society are no longer the most impressive,” he said. “That’s just a fact. Like if I buy some family company, manufacturing company in Ohio, and sell off its parts and lever it up, load it up, a debt, and then cash out, leaving the country in ruin, the company in ruins, and its workers unemployed, and I go back to Martha’s Vineyard with an extra $100 million. That’s called private equity, and I’m celebrated for that.”
Carlson said a lot of wealthy people in the financial industry, who he grew up around, are “aggressive and predatory.” He discussed the problem of credit card debt. He said Joe Biden was awarded a house by the industry when he added a section to a bill that made credit card debt nondischargeable in bankruptcies.
He said it’s ridiculous to defend Payday loans as if they’re a conservative thing, when all three major religions denounce usury. He said banks need to be made as ashamed as pornographers.
Finally, Carlson discussed Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. He said it was very concerning what would happen to all of Russia’s nuclear weapons if Putin was removed from office, due to the type of person that might replace him. He said critics like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02) are “deluded by hubris” and noted that Crenshaw spends all his time on X “yelling at people.” Tucker said the Biden administration is committing crimes by funding the Ukraine war with Russia.
“The key misunderstanding of Putin is that he’s a dictator with absolute power,” he said. “It’s an authoritarian country. There’s no doubt about it. You know, less than some, more than others, that’s what it is. But the president does not have absolute power.”
As a result, Carlson said Putin takes actions to address this. “If there are continued attacks by the Biden administration on Russian soil, and enough Russians get killed … Putin has no choice but to act in some way that shows his rivals in the military, his population in Russia, that he’s not letting his country get taken over, that he’s fighting back. He can’t seem weak. No leader can seem weak without risking his job.”
Another exclusive breakout session during the evening featured a podcast with Kirk and Bannon. One of the members of the audience asked Bannon to reflect on the months he recently spent in prison for refusing to testify before the Democrats’ J6 committee. Bannon said incarcerating him empowered him. Referring to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-11), who was House speaker when the prosecution began, he said, “I came out empowered and she’s broken.”
Bannon said many of the inmates he encountered in prison didn’t support the Democrats. “The politics of joy was a lie. The prisoners in there — the Hispanics and African-Americans hate the Democratic Party, and they hated Kamala Harris and they hated Joe Biden. And about 60 percent voted, or their families voted for Trump.”
An audience member asked him about the J6 prisoners. Bannon said he was not in a relaxed prison “camp,” but in a regular prison, and called for prosecution of those who put the J6 protesters behind bars. “I was in a federal prison, okay? And we had a lot of J6 folks there, that what they did to those people in D.C., and this way the investigations have to take place — the people that tormented and tortured them in prison. War crimes. They have, they have to be tried to never let it happen again.”
He denounced “the illegitimacy of the committee, and [Rep. Jim] Jordan [was] let go, and so for the first time, the … the Select Committee did not have a ranking member and … minority counsel. Remember, you didn’t get the evidence and you couldn’t cross-examine the witnesses that Cassie Hutchison — and all of it, it was a total sham.” Kirk responded, “We have to have a real investigation of the 2020 election.”
Bannon said Trump needs to declassify about “5 million pages” of documents. He said when he was at the Pentagon with a high security clearance, he learned that “they don’t want the people to actually be part of the decision-making process.”
An audience member asked the pair about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has become very unpopular in his country. Kirk responded, “He shows you what Hillary Clinton would have done to this country.”
State Senator Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) asked what would be done about Arizona’s Governor Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes after Trump takes office.
Bannon suggested a transparent commission look into it. He added, “Kari Lake is the legitimate governor!”
The convention continues through Sunday, with Trump speaking Sunday morning. The agenda is here and the conference is livestreamed.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
