The open conflict between MAGA movement stalwarts at the TPUSA AmericaFest has gotten quite a bit of coverage from the MSM, but very little of the underlying conflict has been reported.
Let’s set the scene with POTUS Trump’s current abysmal poll numbers:
📊 GALLUP POLL – Trump Approval
🟢 Approve: 36% (-23)🟤 Disapprove: 59%——• Dem: 3-93 (-90)• GOP: 89-8 (+81)• Indie: 25-68 (-43)—• Ages 18-34: 25-68 (-43)• Ages 35-54: 36-59 (-23)• Ages 55+: 43-53 (-10)—• No College: 37-55 (-18)• College grad: 37-59 (-22)… pic.twitter.com/HfE3GOeZSW
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) December 22, 2025
The Ghost Haunting the Conference
Before I borrow Lambert’s waders and discuss the TPUSA speakers, we have to discuss the absent figure whose spirit dominated the conference.
And I don’t mean Charlie Kirk.
I’m talking about Candace Owens, the self-proclaimed most popular podcaster in the world (Spotify has her at #8 in the US, FWIW), whose absence haunted TPUSA and whose name filled the mouths of many speakers.
The second paragraph of this the Washington Post op-ed on TPUSA, or as the headline read “A Conference of Clowns” confirms Owens’ importance to the proceedings:
No, the group did not book podcaster Candace Owens, who has spun a seemingly endless variety of conspiracy theories around Kirk’s murder, insisting that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was merely a pawn of larger, more sinister forces. (In early October, Owens claimed that Kirk appeared to her in a dream and told her “that he was betrayed.” It is very difficult to corroborate her sources.)
This Michelle Goldberg piece on the NYT op-ed page titled “Candace Owens Is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster” gives more context, if through a glass darkly:
Owens’s musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate. On her podcast on Tuesday, Kelly said that she buys the official story that Charlie Kirk was murdered by Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the crime. But, she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our F.B.I., that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”
Owens held a multi-hour private one-on-one with Erika Kirk, the sainted widow of TPUSA but came out unrepentant thereby earning this Vanity Fair hit piece:
For the last month, Owens has used her YouTube channel—on which she has nearly 5.7 million subscribers—to spin fanciful theories about Charlie’s killing. She has claimed that Israel and France had something to gain from his death and has suggested that other employees of his right-wing organization might have played a role in it too. At first, Owens and Kirk’s Monday summit in Nashville looked like a sign that Owens might ease off the conspiracies, just in time for AmericaFest—TPUSA’s annual summit, which started Thursday and runs through December 21.
But let’s get into the muck of the conference itself.
Name Calling on the Sainted Widow’s TPUSA Stage
Despite the best efforts of the right-wing and Ezra Klein, the murder of Charlie Kirk did not begin a new political era.
Instead we got a few weeks’ of political witchhunts, months of backlash, and a right-wing that is more divided than ever.
In a contrast to the Bush-era GOP which handled its conflicts behind closed doors (except when Pat Buchanan got out of the basement), the Trump-era GOP lets it all hang out, on stage, in public, live on TV and streamed on the web from Phoenix, Arizona at what Politico called “a weekend-long festival for 30,000 of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters.”
TPUSA hostess, Erika Kirk, the sainted widow of the martyred Charlie, summed it up as “like a Thanksgiving dinner where your family’s hashing out the family business.”
She also warned that (since Charlie Kirk’s death) “we’ve seen fractures, we’ve seen bridges being burned that shouldn’t be burnt.”
No word on whether the grieving widow handed out incendiary devices to the speakers but she might as well have.
Ben Shapiro Kicked It Off
Ben Shapiro opened the TPUSA festivities by glazing Mrs. Martyr saying, “It’s even more of an honor to follow Erika Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot. I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children. And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed.”
The MSM coverage has focused on his name-calling attacks on Candace Owens (“has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years”), Steve Bannon (“a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein), Megyn Kelly (“guilty of cowardice” for not condemning Owens), Tucker Carlson (platforming Nick Fuentes was “an act of moral imbecility”) while stripping out the underlying context behind the conflicts.
Shapiro’s defense of the “good human beings like (FBI Director) Kash Patel and (Former FBI Deputy Director) Dan Bongino and (Attorney General) Pam Bondi and yes, the President of the United States” also got space in the MSM.
The WaPo quoted Shapiro’s attack on Owens at length:
“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”
But I found it much more notable that some of the biggest audience applause during Shapiro’s stage time came when an audience member asked him about Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.
Ben responded with “I’m wondering what your motivation is in bringing up a six decade old attack as though it is the number one issue in assessing the relationship between Israel and the United States today” before dismissing the questioner.
The next speaker wouldn’t be so easily dismissed.
Carlson Fires Back With First Principles
MSM reports have focused on Shapiro’s attacks at much greater length than the responses he got from Tucker Carlson and others.
But, Carlson’s first night closing slot and the crowd response put the lie to any thought of The Bowtied One being an after thought at TPUSA.
Tucker Carlson played with his food before he went for the kill to the pleasure of (some of) the TPUSA crowd.
Tucker Carlson: I just got here and I feel like I missed the first part of the program. Hope I didn’t miss anything meaningful.
I just want to say I don’t think I did.
No, I’m just kidding. I watched it. I laughed. I laughed. that kind of bitter sardonic laugh that emerges from you and like upside down world arrives when your dog starts doing your taxes and you’re like, ‘Wait, it’s not supposed to work this way.’
To hear calls for like deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, ‘What? This is hilarious.’
Carlson pulled the scab off of some of the behind the scenes drama, while invoking the Martyr’s name and his purported primary value — free speech:
Carlson: (Free speech) was the whole point of Charlie Kirk’s public life. And I think that I think that he died for it. I really believe that. I know a lot about it because the last several months of Charlie’s life were devoted in part to arguing about this event.
In fact, my speech here, which (Kirk) asked me to do earlier this year, this summer, and he was immediately put under just immense pressure from people who give money to Turning Point, I would assume good people, but who wanted him to take me off the roster.
And this has all become public and I the whole thing is so sad that I never talk about it except to say Charlie stood firm in his often stated and deeply held belief that people should be able to debate and that if you have something valid to say if you’re telling the truth, you ought to be able to explain it calmly and in detail to people who don’t agree with you and that you shouldn’t immediately resort to ‘Shut up racist.’
You shouldn’t immediately go to motive. By the way, ‘Shut up, racist’ is the number one reason I voted for Donald Trump.
Carlson went on to denounce anti-Semitism, anti-white racism (“That is precisely as bad as anti-Semitism, but it is much more widespread and has been so far much more damaging”), identity politics (ironically in light of the previous quote), “collective punishment” in the Middle East, but the part I want to share at length is his diagnosis of the dynamic driving the conflict at TPUSA:
Carlson: Let me just say something more broadly about where the conservative movement, whatever that is, the people who voted for Trump, the Trump coalition, the supposed civil war going on within that group.
I don’t think it’s real. I think it’s fake. I think it’s totally fake.
And I’ve had cause to think a lot about this because I’ve been unwittingly involved in the proxy war.
There are two things going on here and I’m not guessing.
One is jockeying for position post Trump. So Trump created this amazing coalition bringing in people who had never voted Republican before but were very enthusiastic about him.
And that coalition took over the most powerful government in the history of the world. So there’s a lot lot at stake here.
And so the question becomes who gets to run it after? Who gets the machinery when the president exits the scene?
There are a lot of people in Washington, maybe even in this room, who aren’t quite sure what they want, but they know they don’t want J.D. Vance. Okay?
And so the attack, and you heard it from the stage tonight, ‘There’s someone here who’s a very bad man, and he’s friends with J.D. Vance.’
Could be me.
I am sad about being used in a proxy war over politics in which I’m not involved in any level. I’m not adviser to anybody. But I just think I should say that out loud.
Okay, there are people who are mad at J.D. Vance and they’re stirring up a lot of this in order to make sure he doesn’t get the nominations that this is true.
So this raises the obvious question which is why are they mad at J.D. Vance? Such a nice guy which he is. They’re mad at J.D. Vance because he is the one person…right now who really kind of buys the core idea of the Trump coalition.
Now, what is that idea, ladies and gentlemen? Anyone know? Anyone know? America first.
After a spirited defense of the America first concept Carlson launched into an elliptical defense of Nick Fuentes before going on the offense against their mutual enemies:
Carlson: I would also call your attention to the very obvious prohibitions in the New Testament against killing the innocent.
We are not as Christians allowed to kill the innocent. Period. We are not. And you see elaborate arguments on behalf of doing so or ignoring it.
‘Oh, that always happens in war.’
Well, you’re right. One of the reasons I’m not that into wars. But when it does happen unavoidably, we have to say that’s wrong. We have to say that. We have to acknowledge that was wrong and (say) I’m sorry for the extent to which I participated in it.
Forgive me because killing people who committed no crime is immoral. It will always be immoral.
And people who do it will be punished for it. And nations that endorse it will be punished for it. That’s a fact.
And you are seeing now, you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.
‘Oh, it’s fine. They deserved it.’
Really? Do their children deserve it? If a man commits a crime, do we kill his kids?
I don’t care if it’s in Minneapolis or Gaza City. No, we don’t.
And if we do accidentally, we say, ‘I am so sorry that we murdered someone who did nothing wrong.’
Because it is murder. And to see Christian pastors make excuses for that is one of the most and that’s not a partisan question. That is not a political question. That is the only question that matters.
Do we have the right to murder people? And the resounding answer that Christianity provides us is no.
The MSM had no interest in that portion of Carlson’s TPUSA speech.
Steve Bannon’s Uncomfortable Truths About the 12 Day War
Steve Bannon, the self-styled Thomas Cromwell/Vladimir Lenin of the MAGA movement, spoke the next day and was not intimidated by Shapiro.
Bannon wasted no time in reminding the TPUSA audience that Shapiro had been a “Never Trumper” in 2016, “barely supported” Trump in the general election and was “the very first individual that jumped on the Ron DeSantis train, the Israel first train.”
The MSM has covered Bannon’s name-calling of Ben “he’s a cancer” Shapiro at TPUSA but without context, as always.
Let’s get back to what Bannon actually said at TPUSA.
Bannon went on, invoking the Sacred Martyr’s name, to scattered applause and some gasps from the TPUSA crowd:
Steve Bannon: The Israel first crowd is Ben Shapiro, “Tel Aviv” Mark Levin, and many others that want to put (Israel) ahead of America’s interests. Charlie Kirk fought that. You know where Charlie Kirk fought it? In the White House. I know because I was there. Charlie Kirk was working with (US Ambassador to Indis) Sergio Gor, certain people around the vice president to make sure that that we didn’t get sucked into a land war, a decapitation of the Iranian elites that would lead to a massive civil war that American troops would get sucked into because that was Netanyahu’s plan from the beginning.
Bannon went on to describe the 12 Day War between Israel and Iran in terms that will be familiar to any listener of Judge Napolitano, but that remain verboten in the MSM:
We know that The Times of Israel has published that there was no urgency to go after (Iran’s) nuclear weapons.
We know the fact (Israel) couldn’t finish what they started. We know for a fact we know for a fact that they had they needed American Aegis missiles (and) Patriots to defend themselves.
On day 10 of the war they were losing and they didn’t have the offensive capability, And I don’t mean the B2s coming in and taking out the (Iranian) caves. (Israel) relied upon our 1970s technology of cruise missiles fired from submarines in the North Arabian Sea to take out the above ground (Iranian missles). We had to bring that war to conclusion.
And President Trump in his brilliance said, ‘We’ll do that and we’ll call it the 12-day war and it’s over.’
Now, the Israel first crowd, they are the ones that are destroying Israel.
Only then did Bannon get to the part that got picked up in the MSM, here’s the “Ben Shapiro is a cancer” riff in context.
After describing the role of Breitbart (which Bannon ran at the time) in the 2016 election of Trump and reminding TPUSA attendees that Shapiro called them “Trump Pravda” at the time, he goes for the kill:
Ben Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads. It’s a cancer and it metastasizes. He tried to take over Breitbart and I ran him out of there.
He tried to take over David Horowitz’ (Freedom Center) …
Don’t ask me. Ask the guys associated with David Horowitz what he did there. He tried to take that over.
And mark my word, he will make a move on Turning Point because he’s always been envious of Charlie Kirk. This is not about speech. It’s not about deplatforming. This is about power politics.
Readers will forgive me for missing parts of the TPUSA livestream to watch celebrity boxing for my other gig, so I’m not entirely sure when Megyn Kelly took the stage for an interview with Jack Posobiec, but we’ll cover her part after a brief detour.
Nationalist Red Meat the Background Noise at TPUSA
I don’t want readers to think I’m losing the forest for the trees so let me include this quote from Posobiec, via Vanity Fair, to give a feel for the underlying dynamic at TPUSA:
Jack Posobiec, known for promoting the “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, spoke in histrionics about the fight against political opponents. “We are up against radical Marxist domestic terrorism, and they are going to keep shooting us until they are stopped,” he said. “The only thing that stops the bully is a show of force,” concurred Posobiec’s co-host. Posobiec added that “leftists” are not interested in conversation. “If that means that we can’t play nice, then we’re not gonna play nice.” The crowd cheered. The co-host clarified that they were not encouraging violence. “We are not an extrajudicial people,” he said. The crowd went quiet.
Ok, perspective restored, let’s get back to the breaking news from TPUSA.
Megyn Kelly Gets the Camel’s Nose Under the MSM Tent
Here’s a juicy morsel from the Posobiec-Kelly interview:
Jack Posobiec: Do you think that there has been an inseparable rift in the conservative movement that we’ve seen since the death of Charlie?
Megyn Kelly: I mean, there’s a rift, but it was starting even before we lost Charlie, and it revolves around Israel.
Um, there just is. It’s gotten worse without him. He was helping us navigate it.
And this is another area in which I miss him so much because I feel like Charlie and I were completely in lock step on this.
And you guys may have seen the episode that we put out, what we re-released of Charlie and yours truly talking about Israel weeks before he died where we had a really powerful heart-to-heart on where we both were.
We were both ardent Israel supporters…then we had a discussion at the Student Action Summit in July where there was a passing comment about if Epstein was an intel asset, whose would he have been, which Charlie asked me.
And I said it would make sense that it was the Israelis since he was very close with the former prime minister and um the former president. And then we both got called anti-Semites by some legitimate Jewish organizations for that conversation…and we were both on our heels.
The same Vanity Fair article quoted above has two more paragraph that reveals why the fights at TPUSA matter so much:
A young couple I spoke with had traveled from Waco, Texas, for the event. After a while, Dan, the husband, brought up Israel. A Baptist like his wife, he grew up immersed in evangelical zeal for Zionism. “As a Baptist, I was taught that supporting Israel is biblical, so supporting it during difficult times seemed straightforward,” he said. Now they’re both questioning Republicans’ unequivocal support for the country. “The Ted Cruz interview was a turning point for me,” said his wife, referring to Tucker Carlson’s interrogation of the Texas senator, who struggled to explain his support for Israel.
“What Charlie and I saw at the same time was that the country is turning,” Kelly said. “And young Republicans are turning on Israel.” She argued that figures like Shapiro and Weiss are actually fueling the rise of antisemitism through their attempts to censor criticism of Israel. “They are making antisemites,” she said. “Tucker is not making antisemites. They are.”
If that is the climax of our look at TPUSA, the Vice-President delivered the anti-climax.
I’m Sorry Did the Vice-President Say Something?
The bearded boy from Appalachia got the closing slot. Here’s his full remarks.
I’ll let an image grab of headlines from Google News serve in lieu of another 1000 words in this already over-long piece:
pic.twitter.com/Y4rMt5VO01
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 23, 2025
And here are some of the Vance statements NPR quoted in its coverage and how they summed it up:
“We don’t care if you’re white or black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring, or somewhere in between,” he said.
Vance didn’t name anyone, but his comments came in the midst of an increasingly contentious debate over whether the right should give a platform to commentators espousing antisemitic views, particularly Fuentes, whose followers see themselves as working to preserve America’s white, Christian identity. Fuentes has a growing audience, as does top-rated podcaster Candace Owens, who routinely shares antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“We have far more important work to do than canceling each other,” he said.
Vance ticked off what he said were the accomplishments of the administration as it approaches the one-year mark, noting its efforts at the border and on the economy. He emphasized efforts to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies, drawing applause by saying they had been relegated to the “dustbin of history.”
“In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” he said.
Vance also said the U.S. “always will be a Christian nation,” adding that “Christianity is America’s creed, the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the current favorite to be the Republican nominee for President in 2028.
Too bad for J.D. that Trump has three more years to drive his polling numbers even deeper under water.
Vance has some serious work cut out to disassociate himself from the disaster that is Trump 2.0.
We have many miles to go before we sleep and I’ll be back next week with more.
