TPUSA AmericaFest Declares ‘Every American Is Welcome,’ Spends Four Days Debating Who Counts

PHOENIX — Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest kicked off this weekend with Erika Kirk taking the stage through a wall of pyrotechnics, transforming her husband’s assassination into what organizers called “a powerful celebration of faith, freedom, and legacy.”

The message was clear: this is a safe space for healing, as long as healing involves strobe lights, applause cues, and a sold-out crowd of teenagers who paid hundreds of dollars to be lectured by podcast hosts.

From there, the event descended into a kind of ideological funhouse, where speakers took turns delivering mutually exclusive visions of America while the audience clapped like trained seals.

At one point, the atmosphere noticeably shifted when Vivek Ramaswamy came out to speak. The crowd grew quiet as he explained that there is no such thing as a “heritage American,” and that “no citizen is more American than any other”—a statement that sounded like it had been accidentally booked into the wrong tent.

Order was restored when Steve Bannon took the stage to explain that the real solution was to “Christianize this country,” restoring the familiar sense that someone, somewhere, would be filtered out by design.

By the final night, Vice President JD Vance emerged to close the conference with a sermon-like monologue about unity, victory, and destiny, assuring the crowd that “every American is invited into MAGA” before urging them to stop canceling each other and get back to winning.

The crowd rose and applauded, reassured that they were part of something—even if no one could explain what that something was.