PHOENIX, Arizona – Turning Point USA’s third annual convention, AmericaFest, opened Friday night at the Phoenix Convention Center featuring headline speeches by founder Charlie Kirk, actress Roseanne Barr, and political commentator Glenn Beck. Kirk told the audience it was their largest conference yet, as well as the largest conservative grassroots multi-day conference ever in U.S. history, with 13,000 in attendance, completely filling the auditorium.
Kirk told attendees that the country is in the midst of a “top-down revolution” led by elites, a cultural revolution that is similar to Mao Tse Tung’s cultural revolution. Those at the conference are the “bottom-up resistance,” the grassroots response.
Kirk said it’s wrong to excuse the elites as meaning well. “The elites don’t mean well, when you have a wide open border and 12,000 people are coming across the border every single day,” he said. “The elites don’t mean well, when they go after our children and they castrate our children in the name of medicine. Our elites don’t mean well when they put the leader of an opposition political party and try to put them in jail for 700 years. These elites don’t mean well. In fact, they hate the United States Constitution. They hate the Declaration [of Independence].”
He lamented that “we’ve allowed them to do this,” because patriots were tending to their families, church, and their businesses instead of focusing on stopping the progressives.
Kirk had high praise for Elon Musk buying Twitter, now renamed to X. “God bless Elon Musk,” he said. “I hope he sues Media Matters into oblivion,” referring to the activist progressive organization that has turned advertisers away from X by claiming that Musk is antisemitic. Musk “liberating Twitter will go down as one of the greatest free speech victories in the history of Western civilization,” Kirk said.
Kirk listed off what is acceptable now on X; it is OK to “say that Dylan Mulvaney, he’s a man. Rachel Levine is a man… like a creepy pervert. Honestly, that January 6, probably an inside job… And that 99 percent of people on January 6 did nothing wrong. … George Floyd wasn’t a hero, and Derek Chauvin was targeted in a Soviet-style trial that was anti- American.”
He said he came up with TPUSA in a garage in Lamont, Illinois. “You know what’s great about being from Illinois,” he asked. “There’s term limits in Illinois; one from an office, one term in jail.”
He shared some good news, a recent poll which found that high school boys are the most conservative they’ve been in the last 50 years. He said men need to be masculine. “No country was ever saved by a male feminist. Countless countries are lost by weak beta males.” He played a couple of video clips of himself speaking with an angry “beta male” at the University of Arizona and feminists at Northern Arizona University. He asked the feminists, “What is a woman?” receiving angry responses from women assuming it was a “trick question.”
Kirk surprised the audience by declaring, “College is a scam” and discouraged people from attending. Kirk attended college himself but never obtained a degree. Instead, he touted his newly launched Turning Point Academy, which is aimed at helping homeschoolers.
He spoke about his faith, saying he became a Christian in fifth grade and believes we are now in a spiritual war. He lamented churches’ responses to the COVID-19 restrictions. They “cowered in fear” instead of being “defiant.” He pointed out how strip clubs, marijuana dispensaries, and convenience stores were labeled “essential,” while churches weren’t, but the churches didn’t fight back. He said now the progressives are attacking churches for being racist. He said the Marxists took over the FBI, the colleges, and now they’re trying to take over churches. He started Turning Point Faith in response, “to get wokism out of churches.”
Kirk listed off leading figures in the Bible who were counselors to kings: “Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Daniel.” He said, “It is Biblical to defy tyrants. … Disobedience to tyrants is obedience to God.” He added, “Liberty isn’t man’s idea, it’s God’s.” Kirk noted that the U.S. was founded by “Bible-believing, church-attending Christians.”
The second half of his speech discussed TPUSA’s political arm, Turning Point Action. He talked about the work Candace Owens is doing, starting BLEXIT and going into the inner cities to bring blacks away from the Democratic Party. He played a video clip showing Owens’ clever wit. During a speech at a university, a student asked her, “What do you have to say to the trans students on this campus who actively feel victimized by your presence here today?” She responded, revealing her bulging belly, “Life’s tough, get a helmet. Man, I’m too pregnant for this. Next question.”
Kirk said one of the goals of Turning Point Action is to “remake the Republican Party as a grassroots party from the bottom up, and kick out the Romneys, the Paul Ryans, from the Republican Party once and for all.” A second goal is “holding our leaders accountable” once they get to Washington D.C. He referenced the scorecard the group puts out rating elected officials, and how upset some of them were that they received a bad score for voting for the National Defense Authorization Act. He called for Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel to resign.
He explained that TPUSA is not an establishment group. “It’s about time we deploy the MAGA movement to take over state central committee meetings,” he said. “We’re not here to make friends. We don’t have a Washington D.C. office. I don’t care about cotton.” He said Senate Republicans are worried about moderate Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s poor performance, blaming it on “sexism” when it’s really her “bad ideas.”
He said their upcoming plans include a ballot chasing effort in three key states for the 2024 election; Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. He ended his speech telling the young people at the conference to get married young and have lots of babies.
Barr, who is Jewish, warmed up the audience by thanking them for “caring about God.” She said, “I’m in all for President Trump.” If he loses, she said “they’re going to put my a** in a gulag.” She referred to the opposition as “horrible communists” and “Stalin communists with a huge helping of Nazi fascism thrown in.” She warned that progressives are forming “one caliphate to replace every Christian democracy on earth now.”
Barr stressed the importance of using “paper ballots” and photo ID to prove voters are American citizens. She said she was the only one in her family of “libtards” that did not get the COVID-19 vaccine. “I’m the only one in my family that’s healthy,” she said. “I’m going to miss them.” She said a lot of her family is also gay, under “LBGTQ mind control.” She discussed how she prayed for Trump in person once; “They do need a whole Jewish woman to pray for him.”
Beck ended the main session for the evening with a talk about how much the country has gone downhill. He said combatting it will take more than just “being against the communists … we need to be for an idea.” He said it’s important to understand what freedom means, and pointed out that he’d been in England recently where they believe they have freedom but they don’t know the meaning of it.
He brought out his trademark chalkboard, and drew a line from the far left to the far right. He said fascists and theocracies like Iran are on the far left. Anarchists are on the far right, he said, pointing out how the country’s early Articles of Confederation were a form of that. He said “progressivism is just the idea of moving slowly, progressing, towards” the far left side of the chart.
Beck explained that the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy. In a republic, people have one vote each for their representative. After that, the representative handles deciding other issues for the people, since the people don’t have time to decide all of them. He said this is analogous to the police force; people lend the police their rights in exchange for them enforcing safety.
He said it’s not a battle between Republicans and Democrats; “they’re playing the same game, just one a lot faster.” It’s “aristocrats that believe they know better … you’re just the little people.” He called it “tyranny of the minority” against the Christian white majority. He warned, “We’re taking our liberties to an Apple store.”
Another theme Beck hit was shaming. He said “there’s no such thing as shame anymore.” The only kind of shame is “brand shame,” such as not being part of the right team or supporting the right candidate. He advocated for a return of “actual shame,” such as for “doing coke off the belly of a hooker.”
Beck said the U.S. hasn’t become a godless nation, because “we have plenty of gods,” listing off “fortune, power, drugs, sex; we’re now worshiping the planet, the planet above all things; gender, race, political power, political parties, even political politicians.”
He got into the spiritual aspects facing society, stating that we are “fighting evil itself,” not just “flesh and blood.” He said, “It always starts the same way, we say we’ll stand up. It starts with the Jews,” alluding to the recent Hamas war against Israel. Beck warned, “Sometimes they come disguised as good guys … messengers of Christ but it’s just a little askew, and those who are paying attention understand ‘Get behind me Satan, I understand the concept of false prophets.’”
He ended with a video clip from the movie Braveheart, as William Wallace tells his army, “I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are.”
Speakers Sunday evening include Vivek Ramaswamy, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL-01), Kari Lake, and Steve Bannon. Speakers Monday evening include former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. The agenda is located here.
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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].
