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 this weekend in Phoenix, speakers at AmericaFest have scarcely mentioned Democrats and other liberal foils. Instead, some of the most prominent right-wing leaders in the country have been criticizing members of their own movement, accusing them of being “frauds,” “pompous” and a “cancer.”
Driving the enmity have been some of the most explosive and unresolved issues confronting the MAGA movement: resurgent antisemitism, the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the rise of the concept of “heritage Americans” and what that concept — 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Kirk, the movement’s boldface names have appeared to be jockeying this weekend to influence the direction of the MAGA movement at a time when its most towering figure, President Trump, is in his second term.
For some true believers, it has been 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Kirk. “Don’t let them steal this from us. We have to recapture this!”
The first sparks came on 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, Mr. Shapiro argued that the movement was being harmed by commentators, especially the podcaster Candace Owens, who has been accused of antisemitism and who has been floating wild conspiracy theories about Mr. Kirk’s murder under the guise, Mr. 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 recently airing a softball interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite. Mr. Shapiro hammered Megyn Kelly, the podcaster, for failing to condemn Ms. Owens and Mr. Carlson. And he called Stephen K. Bannon, the onetime chief strategist for Mr. Trump, a former “P.R. flack for Jeffrey Epstein.”
Many of Mr. Shapiro’s targets also spoke at AmericaFest. One after another, they took the stage to clap back.
Mr. Carlson, speaking later on Thursday evening, mocked Mr. Shapiro as “pompous.” The following day, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Shapiro a “cancer” on the movement, and Ms. Kelly said she resented Mr. Shapiro’s attacks.
“He thinks he’s in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when,” Ms. Kelly, the former Fox News host, said in an onstage conversation with Jack Posobiec, the 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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.”
Mr. Vance will deliver his own speech on Sunday, with a 2028 presidential endorsement from Erika Kirk, Mr. Kirk’s widow, newly bestowed this week.
Ms. Kirk, who is now Turning Point’s chief executive, 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, Ill., 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, which she also attended.
“The energy was so different,” Ms. 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 in the weeks leading up to this week’s event.
On Dec. 3, Blake Neff, the producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, publicly criticized Ms. Owens, a former Turning Point employee who boasts 5.7 million subscribers on YouTube. Mr. Neff accused Ms. Owens of leveling a flood of “absurd claims” and wild accusations against some Turning Point employees, suggesting their “complicity” in Mr. 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,” Mr. Neff said.
But Turning Point has long provided platforms for conspiracy theorists.
At a 2022 event, Mr. 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 family members of the victims were actors in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation.
In June 2024, Ms. 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 Ms. Owens for “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions.”)
And Mr. Kirk himself promoted Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats.
Ms. Owens, who did not attend this year’s AmericaFest, responded to Mr. Shapiro on her podcast on Friday. She called him a slithering “belly creature.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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