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.
Olivier Touron / AFP / Getty
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.
