The past three months since Charlie's death have seen a fracturing of the conservative movement, a rise in ire, vitriol and speculation, a jockeying for position and power. In many ways this AmFest is a culmination of that bloody fall that saw murders of Minnesota school children, a conservative thought leader, US troops in Syria, university students, an MIT professor, women burned by strangers with acid and flame. AmFest had to be a time to come together, but the true thing is that this coming together was never going to be with total agreement on everything.
I checked into my oddly hipster Phoenix hotel, the kind with buffed cement floors and windows from the bathroom into the bedroom around 3 am in my native eastern time, and would remain exhausted straight through to the morning of my departure.
Security was tight outside the Phoenix Convention Center, tighter than usual, and my black tote bag with all my press gear was heavily scrutinized. Security clocked my liberal looking black clad east coast elite looking self and their hackles were raised. They wanted proof I was supposed to be there and they didn't let me in until they got it. My son, 15, got in just fine. He's a young man who looks like he's supposed to be here.
Walking into the convention center everything felt different. There was the feeling in my chest of a loss. Charlie Kirk loomed larger than life while he was alive and now he was even bigger. My breath caught in my throat and I felt a familiar sting behind my eyes.
We wandered through Media Row, where all the conservative press was set up, cameras, lights, the works, until we found our little booth, out of the way. We don't need anything but keyboards and wifi to do our jobs at The Post Millennial and Human Events, although the latter was in short supply due to the crush of attendees and press. As I sat at the booth with Hannah Nightingale, Thomas Stevenson, and Roberto Wakerell-Cruz, turning out content, tracking the day's news, attendees strolled by and stopped to talk.
The media booth for The Post Millennial and Human Events was right near James O'Keefe, The Blaze, and OAN and hundreds of people stopped by to say "hi." I wasn't entirely prepared for how many. They missed Charlie even though they never met him. They appreciated our work even though we are small. They wanted to feel connected—so did we. It matters to reach out to each other. Most of them knew me from Timcast IRL and wished host Tim Pool was at the four-day event. I did too.
One of the funnest moments I've had in this career was last year at America Fest. Tim, Charlie and Matt Gaetz were on stage while some other of us regular contributors traded in and out. As I took my seat Charlie was talking and I responded to his point. He took a moment in the midst of everything to say hi, to say he was glad to see me, and we were off to the races again. At least that's how I remember it. A small moment like that looms large in memory when you know it will never happen again.
This year's AmFest stage—with exceptions—had less communion among the pundit classes than disagreement, and it all began on the first night. I knew I wanted to be in the general session for the opener. To be frank I like the spectacle, I like the fireworks, I like the deep bass that ripples through your chest. And I wanted to hear Erika Kirk, a window under fire, set the tone for the weekend.
Conservatives disagree on how to move forward after Charlie and there's basically two factions: "the publicly blame and shame and call out people you disagree with" faction, and "the more speech is good speech and stop trying to cancel people you disagree" with faction. Israel, foreign policy, who is to blame for Charlie's killing, the MAGA future, and that ever present question of everybody demanding everyone else behave in some specific way.
You know what I mean, people who claim they wouldn't behave a certain way in a given tragic situation, questioning loyalties, refuse to believe that anyone other than you and your crew are acting in good faith. I kind of have the reverse thing: I want to believe that everyone is acting in good faith, that people are speaking from their own hearts and beliefs. I don't typically sit around questioning someone's motives, even when it may, perhaps, be prudent.
There's reasons for this. You can tie yourself in knots trying to figure out the "real reason" a person does or says things. You can say that you would have reacted differently under a given set of circumstances. No, you can't always take a person at their word. But deciding they are an untrustworthy source and deciding that you know all the background reasons that make them that way are two different things.
I ran into my friend Jayne Zirkle in the VIP room and we were just in time to walk through the red and blue lit hallway for Erika Kirk's speech. The energy in the room was so big as to be enveloping. Tens of thousands of people packed the room going to the back wall in every direction. When the National Anthem began, all stood, put their hands over their hearts, and sang it like they meant it. We all did.
A moment of silence for Charlie brought me to tears. The loss is palpable as much as the movement, his friends and family, keep going.
When Erika Kirk addressed the 31,000 strong crowd on Thursday night, she told attendees that they may not agree with everything that would be said on stage over the next few days. "That's okay," she said. "Welcome to America."
We are not moving beyond our grief, that is real, but we are taking it with us. 80% of those at America Fest had never been to a Turning Point event before. That's picking up your grief and running with it into the fray. The men who stood up for Charlie on the first night of the event that was his Super Bowl are legends of their own. Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Russell Brand and Tucker Carlson spoke on the future of this conservative movement and our nation.
They didn't all agree with each other—far from it—and there's nothing wrong with that, but I did wonder why they had to take their grievances public on the first night of this conference. Shapiro took aim at his former colleague Candace Owens in giving his assessment, a rulebook of how conservative pundits should comport themselves. He spoke about the need to not "cover up evil" in the name of friendship, and he called out Tucker Carlson, who was set to speak just an hour or so later. We're not used to hearing pundits and podcasters blast each other live on stage, when they're actually all sharing the same backstage.
I wondered if the same people that were giving a standing ovation up for Shapiro, cheering and applauding, would do the same for Carlson, Knowles, or Brand. I wondered if the audience was as factionalized as the pundits who lectured us. I don't think we were at all.
"This is the last event that Charlie will have left us... this is the team. This is the army," Michael Knowles said when he took the stage. Brand joked that Shapiro and Carlson were locked in a "nerd fight." When Carlson took the stage to respond to the attacks, which I don't think he knew were coming, he laughed at Shapiro and the notion of canceling people.
There is one thing on which they were all agreed, upon which all of us here at the Phoenix Convention were agreed: America is the greatest country on earth. But they didn't have the same view on how to preserve it, how to further it, and who should get to be involved. The Democrats sometimes have that problem too, but they don't typically air their dirty laundry in public.
There's a positive framing for the night of vitriol. This collection of speakers, their disagreement with each other, each of whom had a deep and lasting respect for Charlie, shows where the conservative movement really is: Love America. That's the ticket to entry. Believe in this country, believe in Americans, believe in our founding. It's cool if you disagree with each other. You should, and you should say so.
But there's a whole faction who wants to narrow the coalition. They want to decide who's in and who's out of the conservative movement, they don't think we Americans are smart enough to make up our own minds as to who to listen to and who to ignore and so they want to make it easy for us by silencing the people they don't want us to hear.
The factionalism risks allowing the ideologues who want to continue the genocide of the American unborn, the gender transition of children, the euthanasia of the infirm and elderly, the importation of immigrants who do not share our values or ideals, to win the day. That seems like it would be worse.
After all that I ended up at a rooftop Christmas party for Michael Knowles' Mayflower cigars. I don't smoke cigars but I like a city view and free cocktails, even if they did make it harder to get up bright and early for media row on Friday. I spent most of the day talking to people. I got to meet so many cute babies and their thoughtful parents. People wanted to talk, and not usually about what was happening on stage, but what was happening on a national scale and in their own lives, they wanted to share experiences and ideas, and I was here for it. The funnest part about what I do is that I get to connect with people. That's what I always loved in theater, and that's what I love now.
James O'Keefe was back with a classic party and live performances where he wore a bullet proof PRESS vest. O'Keefe is perpetually a venn diagram between worlds. Is he an entertainer or a journalist? Can you be both? There's really only one, and it's James O'Keefe. He goes on undercover dates with gay government officials to expose them. He holds dance rehearsals.
The party was in the same place where a couple years ago I saw Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert in a backless sequinned mini dress chopping it up with Matt Gaetz, both wearing sunglasses inside at midnight. That was when O'Keefe was under the Project Veritas banner, and in a self mythologizing DJ set and series of videos and set pieces, he reminded us of his past journalistic exploits.
What the pundits don't understand is that we don't care about their feuds, not really. We have our own lives. Sure, we follow along, we monitor the beef on our socials, we choose up sides, but we don't really care. We in the audience look to the main stage for thought leadership. It's not supposed to be reality show TV "hold my earrings" style lowest-of-the-low entertainment. We don't want to watch our pundits like the proverbial train wreck we can't look away from.
Over and over people came by The Post Millennial booth and told me how they listened to Charlie for perspective, to hear him make sense of senseless confusing conflicting things. Now his friends—not all, but a bunch— righteously snipe at one another instead of giving perspective, instead of organizing the events of the day into something understandable. All of us out here just want things to go right, for our families, our friends, our cities and our country. There's always going to be crazy people trying to turn the spotlight on themselves so they can revel in their own egos. The rest of us don't actually want that.
No matter how much Elon Musk says "you are the media now" the audience doesnt feel like they are, and they dont want to be. They have jobs, they don't want to do the media's job too. They want to hear ideas and use those ideas to inform their own opinions, not to have them dictated to them. This may surprise the pundit warriors, but the truth is the people, the attendees, the viewers, they are the main characters in their own lives, they have their own life or death decisions to make that don't involve who gets to speak online.
We dealt with that pre-during-and-post Covid, and now we're hearing it from the side many of us fled to just so we could stop being told who we could listen to, what we could say, or what to think.
When the conservative pundits display chaos, they deliver that chaos to an audience looking for leadership. What weakness it is to stand on stage and take aim at everyone else on stage? "Don't you know what time it is? Don't you know what America is facing?" I wanted to say to those who couldn't stop themselves
Uncertainty as to our place in the global pecking order, housing shortages, population decline, despair. Give us all some guidance, you leaders of conservatism, instead of performatively hating each other. Hate each other if you want, but what do we care? Talk about what matters.
Everyone invokes Charlie's name as a way to emphasize the legitimacy of their points. And the audience didn't know Charlie personally, they knew him from his work, his actions, his words.
The argument we kept seeing play out again and again was over what America is and what an America is. From The first night crowd and the nights after. A welcome respite was when Jack Posobiec welcomed the Target grandma, Jeanie Beeman, on stage. She'd been yelled at by an insane leftist at a Target in Chico, California over her Charlie Kirk t-shirt, and now she was on the America Fest stage. If we are Charlie, Jeanie Beeman is all of us.
On Sunday, Nicki Minaj showed up at Turning Point USA's America Fest and the students in the crowd went wild. The rapper and pop star was a special guest of Erika Kirk and the two women sat on stage and talked together about Minaj's views on Trump and JD Vance (she loves them), what she thinks of the haters (she doesn't), and why she believes we've got to stand up against the persecution of Christians (because God is great).
I was in the VIP room adjacent to the general session. I would have been in the room but I'd had an interview at 10:30 am on Media Row and by the time I got back to the main stage they weren't letting anyone else in. It was packed. There were like 31,000 people attending AmFest this year, and even a few hours before the big names took the stage on Sunday the room was packed wall-to-wall.
I watched from the big screens in the room next door and talked to some college students from Utah who were in there too. We'd been taking guesses on who the special guest would be but none of us guessed Nicki. One guess was Elon Musk, but we didn't really think it was him. I guessed maybe Charlie's mom. One of the kids said maybe Trump, but the security wasn't tight enough for Trump.
My son quipped that maybe the special guest was Jesus and everyone cracked up. When Nicki walked on stage I was super surprised, though of course it made sense. Minaj has been outspoken in the past several months with support for the administration. The White House has used her tunes in TikToks and—unlike some of the other pop tarts—she hasn't freaked out. She even spoke at the UN along with the administration against the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.
What does it mean that Nicki Minaj was on stage at AmFest? It means a lot. It means this movement isn't as sidelined as Big Entertainment wants it to me. It isn't just an afterthought in culture now. We have a pop star too. So suck it Taylor, or whoever else is out there gatekeeping entertainment, music, and Hollywood. You want to go toe-to-toe with Nicki Minaj? She will take you.
When JD Vance stepped out on stage, accompanied by fireworks and bass, he was greeted with cheers of USA that morphed into JD. Erika had already said TPUSA is backing him for 2028. "Charlie invited all of us here for a reason because he believed that each of us, all of us had something worth saying," Vance said.
Then he drifted into policy: immigration, negative net migration, restoring sanity at the border, rental prices dropping, job creation, gas prices. "We believe in hard work and merit," he said. The Trump administration has "relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it belongs." He said that "in the United States of America you don't have to apologize for being white anymore."
The boys in the VIP room cheered for this.
Military readiness, no more left wing violence, "we want to know who bought the brick and we ar going to prosecute them too." Cheers. Making America healthy again, fixing the food supply, and onto the future!
"Trust me, I hear you," Vance said.
"Greatenes awaits every one of you in the America first movement." He urged the kids to "mobilize with us, don't vote for the people who tanked the economy in the first place"
Vance said Christianity is America's creed, and he leaned into the "they" of the left, saying the left offers no grace or forgiveness in their woke religion. They don't, we know this, we have witnessed it.
"The void of God begot a vacuum, and the ideas that fill that void prey on the very worst of human nature, rather than uplifting," Vance said. "They told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity."
"Scripture tells us, by your fruits, you shall know them," Vance said. And I wondered about the fruits of the vitriol of the punditry. It causes division, chaos, sows seeds of malevolence.
Every generation asks themselves: who am I in this nation? What is this nation to me? To what do I owe my countrymen? And while the conservatives try to hash that out, everyone with their own opinion, the left coalesces around the most evil ideas and plans: baby killing, children transing, border obliterating, socialism, and all the rest.
There was lots of yelling that America wasn't founded on ideals, or that it was. The truth is We are a nation founded on that amorphous concept of shared values, civility, and individual freedom and we are a country that must preserve more than a people or a scrap of land but an ethos. We are a people who have staked a claim to this land and no other. To be American is to have cast off any foreign ties. To be American is to have no other country to go home to. The values on which we are founded are Christian, as JD Vance pointed out in his closing keynote. Christian values are not only for Christians. Christians share them, implement them, create peaceful societies with those values at their core. The reason people say America has no culture of its own is because they don't realize that they are swimming in a Christian culture, like the proverbial goldfish who asks "what's water?"
I didn't mean to yell about the pundits, the pundits did enough yelling for all of us. I meant to tell you about the wonderful kind people I met, the beautiful babies, the communion I saw between people, the smiles, the sharing of ideas. But it was overshadowed at times by those media leaders who were too obsessed with their own selves and disagreements to lead. Let's look to the leaders who don't have time to slam the others on stage with them. Let's look to the pundits who are more concerned with the audience and America than their colleagues' latest YouTube rant.
Let's remember that it's we Americans who lead. We are the ones who live and die here, who fight for her future, and we don't do it on stage, we do it every day—at our jobs, in our schools, at our dinner tables, in our homes. This is our country, we have no other, and we won't be told by anyone what to think of ourselves or each other.
As I head back east on one of the last flights out of Phoenix, I realize that what I love most about this country are her people, all our flaws, all our beauty. When I pledge to the flag, when I sing the anthem, it is for my countrymen and the home, not the stage, that we share.
