The white-supremacist influencer cast a shadow over Turning Point USA’s annual gathering.

By Ali Breland

December 22, 2025, 10:09 PM ET

When I rode the escalator into the lobby of the Phoenix Convention Center on Thursday, one of the first things I saw was a two-story-tall picture of Charlie Kirk with his arm reaching out to the sky. The late co-founder of Turning Point USA was an inescapable presence at AmericaFest, the organization’s annual gathering. In the VIP area, a large screen played clips of Kirk on repeat. I watched people line up to get their picture taken next to a portrait of Kirk underneath a tent that read Prove Me Wrong on the front. It was a replica of the structure that Kirk toured the country with—and that he was sitting under when he was assassinated, in September.

AmericaFest has long been one of the biggest events on the right, but this year, the conference saw a record turnout of roughly 30,000. When I asked attendees why they had decided to come, they invariably told me that they were there “because of Charlie.” Many of the most prominent influencers and politicians in MAGA world spoke at the event, including Vice President J. D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon. Almost all invoked his memory onstage. When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spoke of erecting a statue of Kirk in the United States Capitol, the crowd broke out into “Charlie” chants. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton compared Kirk to Jesus.

But during my four days at AmericaFest, I noticed that something else was also casting a shadow over the conference. Everyone had come to unite around Kirk, but they kept fighting about Nick Fuentes. In the opening hours on the first night, Ben Shapiro took the stage and ripped into the prominent white-supremacist influencer. Fuentes, who did not attend the conference, is a “Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse,” Shapiro said. The crowd erupted in boos. At one point, I ran into the longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, who insisted that the debates over Fuentes and his staunch criticism of Israel were being inflated by the mainstream media. “I still haven’t seen any polling showing that it’s spilled over to voters,” he told me. The early MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich told me something similar: “If you ask most people here, ‘Do you think the war in Gaza is a genocide?,’ I think most of us are like, ‘I don’t really care,’” he said.

Fuentes has tremendous sway over the young right, and his profile has risen to new heights since late October, when the former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson hosted him for a friendly podcast interview. Carlson “built Nick Fuentes up,” Shapiro said during his speech. “He ought to take responsibility for that.”

When Shapiro finished his speech, attendees lined up to ask him questions. Shapiro was immediately challenged by a student from Baylor University named Nicky Rudd. He asked about the USS Liberty, an American spy ship that the Israeli military accidentally sunk in 1967. Fuentes often talks about the incident on his nightly livestreams as part of his case against Israel and the Jewish people, peddling a conspiracy that the battleship was attacked on purpose. I tracked down Rudd after he finished questioning Shapiro. Rudd doesn’t agree with everything Fuentes says, he told me. But, he said, “to deny the influence of Nick Fuentes is to deny what millions of Americans are thinking.”

Kirk had perhaps no greater antagonist than Fuentes. While Kirk debated college students and set up TPUSA chapters at campuses across the country, Fuentes built an army of young fans, whom he calls Groypers, by making extremely bigoted jokes. In 2019, during the “Groyper War,” Fuentes rallied his fans to confront Kirk and other establishment conservatives and ask them critical questions about Israel and other subjects. For years, Fuentes would continue to antagonize Kirk, claiming that he was influencing TPUSA from afar. “I took your baby, Turning Points USA, and I fucked it,” Fuentes bragged on a stream in August. (Fuentes declined to comment for this story.)

At AmericaFest, I kept running into young Fuentes fans. “Honestly, it’s very controversial, but I love Nick Fuentes. I listen to him every day,” Vanessa Wright, a member of the TPUSA chapter at Utah Valley University, the college where Kirk was killed, told me. When I asked her about the demeaning things he’s said about women (including that they “need to shut the fuck up”), she said that she appreciates his sense of humor. People take him too literally; he says things for “shock value,” she insisted.

Many Fuentes supporters I spoke with mentioned that they were especially interested in his steadfast criticism of Israel. After all, a majority of young Republicans now oppose aiding Israel. Although Fuentes’s criticism of Israel is driven by gross anti-Semitism, he is one of the few prominent voices on the right who unequivocally criticizes the country. On Saturday, I ran into two college students from Florida who told me that they were Fuentes fans. (They wouldn’t give me their names, citing the potential repercussions of being known as Fuentes supporters.) I had found them badgering people who were standing next to the booth for Generation Zion, an outreach and advocacy group for Jews and Christians who support Israel. The more talkative one, a man with blond hair nearly to his shoulders, said that he had been “watching Nick for a couple of years now.” The other said that he didn’t like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but credited him as “one of the greatest leaders of our time.” He told me, “He’s raping everybody. He’s swinging his nuts everywhere.”

The conflict at AmericaFest over Fuentes and Israel, the blond-haired student said, is like a “Black funeral.” I asked him what he meant. “You know, like when a family member dies and all the family members go to the funeral, they just fight each other,” he said. I decided that it was time to go when one of their friends came up, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat and a lapel pin with an American and a Confederate flag on it. “I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on it here!” he told me. He also wouldn’t give me his name but said that he was a leader in Middle Tennessee State University’s College Republicans chapter.

As I’ve previously written, the GOP’s old guard has been late to recognize just how much influence Fuentes has over young swaths of the party. Even at AmericaFest, some denial still lingered. On a certain level, that instinct was correct. Many people seemed unconcerned with fights over right-wing policy and ideology. “I had no idea there was friction,” Daniel Fisher, an attendee in his 30s from Pennsylvania, told me about the fight over Fuentes. “I’m not too well aware of what’s actually going on currently in the Republican political realm.” Many people seemed content to watch live versions of The Daily Wire and other conservative shows that were being taped in the main hall. When I spoke with the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet this afternoon, he conceded that “there was family business being handled onstage.” He refused to talk directly about Fuentes and pointed me instead to a straw poll conducted by TPUSA. He emphasized that the results—AmericaFest attendees agree that Israel is the U.S.’s top ally—are evidence of unity within TPUSA.

But even the young people I spoke with who were opposed to Fuentes told me that he and his supporters are a serious problem for the future of the right. The Groypers have “taken over all of the TPUSA chapters in central California,” Adrian Ayub, a 28-year-old running for a spot in California’s state assembly, told me. I tracked down leaders of several TPUSA chapters in California who were at AmericaFest, and they agreed that Fuentes is a problem. Dylan Frazin, the vice president of the Cal State Fullerton TPUSA, told me that he was a “free-market capitalist” and that he was sick of ascendant “National Socialists” on the right. “I know people that have direct ties to Nick Fuentes that have been showing up to Turning Point meetings at other chapters in the California area,” Frazin said.

Young anti-Fuentes attendees I spoke with also repeated the same sentiment about him to me: The Boomers don’t get how much of a problem he is for the future of the right. “It’s true the Groypers are here,” Dimas Guaico, a 29-year-old advocate with Generation Zion, told me. “I feel like a lot of the leadership here, including TPUSA leadership, haven’t done enough to call Groypers out. Now I feel like it’s too late.”

Even with its hundreds of chapters and get-out-the-vote efforts, TPUSA has always fundamentally been an online organization. Kirk was so successful in building TPUSA into a conservative juggernaut in part because he was better at marshaling the internet than other establishment groups were. His famous “Prove Me Wrong” events at colleges, for example, were perhaps more about producing viral clips for the internet than they were about showing up at any specific college. But the same dynamic now also helps illustrate why TPUSA is beset by infighting. To generate relevancy and influence, social-media algorithms demand spectacle, conflict, and edginess. Fuentes is a master of all three. He doesn’t have the money or resources TPUSA does, but you don’t need those things to go viral or to win hearts and minds online. And he didn’t need to physically be at AmericaFest 2025 to be inside everyone’s heads.

Ali Breland is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534422)

Is this true? Do Blacks fight each other at funerals?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534454)

https://x.com/tommysotogeist/status/1952106921776812383?s=20

https://x.com/JimmyFalk_55/status/1990252943703224582?s=20

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534489)

many radicals would rather see 0% happen if they can't get 100% of what they want. it's a very childish mentality, which is why groypers and woketards tends to be literally children or very child-like adults. if this continues, and it probably will, we'll likely see moderates veer toward the democrats who now seem reasonable by comparison.

this dynamic has happened for decades now. globalists must be loling at the prole rabble tearing themselves apart. it's *all* one big black funeral.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534545)

Ask yourself this, is America wealthier, safer, stronger, and whiter than it was a year ago? Is it easier for two white people without a college degree to own a home and raise 4 kids? Is it easier for people to live in major metros or is it harder? Have things gotten better overseas or have they gotten worse?

That's the point. Trump demolished the old guard GOP, replaced it with MAGA loyalists. Then he sold out to Israel and big businesses. Nick says he's remained spiritually true to the 2016 Trump movement. Where are the jobs in the rust belt? Where's mass deportations? If you're not getting anything you want what's the point of voting for these people. Sure you're allowed to disagree but that's the premise.

You can say wah America Firsters are being babies. But they seem to be growing, not shrinking. The movement is just getting started so if you have some better line of attack than the woke right are spoiled brats who are cutting off their nose to spite their face the time to push back was yesterday. Because it's just gonna keep going nuclear.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534571)

it's hard to imagine a POTUS that would have done more anti-immigration policy than trump. you literally have libs fighting with ICE in the streets. that was inconceivable in recent memory.

the reason the groypers are brats isn't because they don't just tow the trump line, it's that they're seeking to torch everything because they're not getting 100% of what they wanted. which is an unreasonable expectation. if they were serious, they would be looking to advance their interests as much as possible under a favorable political climate to lay the ground to push it further going forward. instead they want to burn it all down because they didn't get everything they wanted *IN LESS THAN A YEAR.*

you're fooling yourself if you think they're going to amass 50%+ of the US. even on xo, a place where most are further right than trump and have been JQpilled for decades, most think they're retarded. i already predicted what will happen: we'll see swings back to the dems as moderates begin to see them as more reasonable than the new right. after that the same thing will probably happen again: radical woke retards or whatever the flavor is in the 2030s will gain influence and people will shift back.

who wins in that dynamic? the elites that all the prole rabble is ostensibly against. so now it's one giant black funeral where darnell and tyrone fight and tip the coffin into the grave and funeral owner moishe rubs his hands as the fattened nigger cattle fight amongst themselves and he waits to collect another check when the next one croaks prematurely.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534608)

It's no surprise Nick blew up in the immediate aftermath of Trump's big win, the least consequential year in a 4 year cycle where the President enjoys his highest support. Kamala Trump is not on the ballot in 2025, nor 2026. The seeds of change are here. We're standing up for principles, not expediency. Now is the time to push back. Trump barely delivered on anything so we march on.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534724)

and i didn't say anything about nick himself or his beliefs, i'm talking about the groypers. nick is only one person. you seem to be agreeing with me that they'd rather torch everything with the third party musing. we'll see if that works out, but considering this shit can't get a bare majority on a place like xo i have my doubts it'll have much traction irl. which groypers are campaigning for the midterms?

you are expected expediency -- you were one of the most vocal trumpmos here and in january were celebrating the end of libs forever. less than a year later you're willing to bet the farm because you're so disappointed. even though you can hardly point to a trump policy that diverges from his campaign rhetoric.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534762)

i thought he'd win eventually, but not this soon

and for all the legitimate complaints about him, he has done serious, permanent damage to jews that they are not going to ever be able to recover from

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534757)

maybe she just knows that women should, in fact, shut the fuck up, and appreciates that some man, even if the man is a 5'4" 28 year old virgin, is willing to say it out loud?

just a thought idk

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5813502&forum_id=2Firm#49534769)