Tim Miller attended the latest Turning Point USA wingnut gathering in Arizona. Let’s just say the fever has not broken:
It was meant to be lit. Maybe even based. A celebratory jubilee replete with ground-shaking bass and enough lasers to achieve net-energy positive nuclear fusion.
Such was the plan when MAGA-wing of the MAGA Party scheduled the second edition of Turning Point USA’s AMERICAFEST six weeks after the general election in Maricopa County—home to the most-MAGA slate of candidates in the entire nation. The plan was for the hottest influencers and most populist pols to take a victory lap following their expected midterm triumph to the cheers of 11,000 faithful. It was there in the gleaming Phoenix Convention Center that a hometown hero would bask in the spotlight(s) and ascend to the throne as the movement’s new queen.
You know what they say about best laid plans.
The midterm elections put a kink in AMERICAFEST’s party planning. A coronation was not on offer. There was nary a liberal tear to be sipped. So as I arrived in the valley of the sun on Saturday afternoon, what I was most curious to find out was how these right-wing political stars would grapple with that failure.
The answer? They didn’t.
AmFest navigated their electoral shellacking with neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth, but by undertaking a metamorphosis from political conference to tent revival for a GenZ God Squad that needed to be lifted up after a Fall of fails.
Instead of reflecting upon what they might have done to bring about such an unexpected, ahistorical midterm face-plant—and strategizing on how they might change course next cycle—the MAGA movement’s leaders cloaked the audience in a warm blanket of their existential rightness amidst a world gone mad.
As the conference’s chief memelord, Benny Johnson, told me Monday morning: A stage with “pyrotechnics” is not the place for boring lamentations or lessons from the types of candidates who performed better. “A guy like Mike DeWine would have a heart attack up there with all that firepower” he said, before imploring me to include that line in my dispatch (Note: Mike Dewine won by 25.6 points. Blake Masters lost by 5.)
Most of the speeches reflected Benny’s proposed rhetorical posture: ignoring the midterms beyond vague acknowledgments that some attendees might be dispirited while focusing instead on three main categories of material:
(1) Megachurch-style Ted Talks about how woke ideology has turned America into a fallen Sodom and Gomorrah that requires missionaries in an existential battle against evil itself.
(2) Celebrating the areas in society where they believe conservatives are ascendant, such as comedy.
(3) Harangues against the election thieves, particularly the host county’s municipal officials.
In practice, that meant being treated to:
A 20-minute speech entirely concerning the evils of preferred pronouns (by Matt Walsh, natch).
A competition for who could offer the most ostentatious praise to the gathering’s South African golden calf and his epic victory over Taylor Lorenz (on Twitter.)
Repeated ridicule of Sam Brinton, a non-binary deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Department who was fired recently after they were charged with felony theft.
A panel about how the American left are the spiritual successors to the Gnostic and Hermetic pagans and how they are on the cusp of either bringing Nazism to America or installing the devil in the kingdom of heaven.
Assorted treatises on how woke-ism is an assault on truth, followed by brazen lies about election theft and vaccine efficacy.
And speaker after speaker came back to one unifying message: The fight for MAGA values must continue, but believers should fear not—because the heathen Democrats are not really in charge, the man upstairs is. As such these foot soldiers were called to not concern themselves with worldly matters such as elections, but by engaging in a demographic competition of sorts by siring lots of children, getting a plot of land, and putting their faith in the Christian God.
“The way we win is to do away with the World Economic Fund, Great Reset garbage. We buy land. We have lots of kids,” Johnson said.
If you wanted to be generous, you could see this as the natural response of reactionary, but earnest, believers who see faith as their saving grace in the face of a culture that has gotten away from them.
That would be a fundamentally American response, actually, one with a tradition that dates back to before America was even a country so much as an unexplored land where settlers came so they might exercise their faith freely. And I’ll admit, there were a few moments where I saw somewhat heartening signs of this purity, such the break-out section on the “Blueprint for Masculinity” where a TPUSA leader beseeched attendees to be men of virtue who read to their kids and treat their wives with respect (Unmentioned: Herschel. But I’ll take what I can get.)
And yet this generous assessment was often undermined on the main stage, as the lineup of Righteous Gemstones’ calls to give oneself over to God were often followed by ridiculing women as fat, or celebrating a scheme that used refugees as props in a big troll, or by flipping the bird at the “bastards” in the media. Most of what was on offer looked like a brand of Christian nationalism that’s thick with Christian iconography and thin on Jesus’s teaching.
But regardless of whether this preaching was a real calling or a sacraligious scam, as a political matter, it was a bit beside the point. Because ostensibly the purpose of politicians and political advocates at a political gathering in a democratic nation is to gather support for an agenda that might appeal to their fellow man.
On that count the answers were shockingly spare.
This conundrum was on display most clearly in the remarks of the weekend’s keynote speakers, Tucker Carlson and Kari Lake.
For Lake the question of how to deal with the midterm losses was made somewhat easier by the fact that in the gauzy, vaseline-coated fantasy world she inhabits her defeats didn’t happen.
She began her remarks with this subtle declaration: “We won. We did win. Big.” After this she marveled over how there was not an empty seat in the house (my row had 11 unfilled chairs).
Lake proceeded to engage in a feud with “fake news” media members which was fake—in the literal sense— the mainstream press was not in attendance except for three or four reporters scattered throughout the hall. At multiple points Lake instructed the crowd to turn around and taunt a riser that she pretended was filled with media members—but actually was populated by unsuspecting regular attendees who wanted a higher vantage point to watch Lake from. Her speech also had a running schtick about how the media’s TV cameras’ red lights were turning off anytime she uttered a provocative election falsehood. But the only cameras on the stage were for the event’s house feed; and they never turned off.
After her most bawdy heckle of this non-existent foe—flipping the bird at the imaginary “bastards”—a middle school-aged girl looked at me typing on my computer, worried I might be one of the evildoers, and offered a sheepish grimace. She mouthed “you are not a reporter are you” before putting her hands over her face. Her expression gave me a sharp pang of sadness.
Lake went on to dub herself a “proud election denying deplorable” cringily declaring that her pronouns are “I/Won” before getting into the same old song and dance that the Stop the Steal movement’s Fat Elvis has thrusted in our face for years now. “They have to outright steal elections . . . at 3am everything changed . . . highway robbery . . . free and fair elections is the issue of our time . . . sham . . . rigged . . . fraudsters . . . etc. etc. etc.”
Her big reveal was to tell the audience that she is taking the Arizona election challenge all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. This was received with whooping and thundering applause. (Meanwhile here on earth, a lower court judge sanctioned Lake’s legal team for “furthering false narratives” and the morning after her speech 8 out of the campaign’s 10 legal claims were dismissed outright).
At a hotel bar after the speech, Lake’s team assured me that her hallucinatory claims about the “steal” are in fact genuine, which I find preposterous. But whether or not Kari Lake really believes her own nonsense is neither here nor there. What matters is that the performance she put on was convincing enough to win over many of the assembled. Many of those I spoke to told me that they believed she was robbed. The cheers for her attacks on Maricopa County election officials were raucous and she was mobbed by admirers in the VIP section of the Project Veritas after-party. I did encounter one glimmer of sanity in the form of a student who told me he thought she lost and this was all part of a PR strategy to ingratiate herself with Trump. (I am concerned that this astute young man has a one-way ticket to Cucktown!)
Like many other speakers, Lake infused her delusions with Christian Nationalist bromides. The former kabbalah practitioner declared that “We are Americans and we bow to one king. That is our creator, God.” She went on, “We gotta bring back God, guys. I wanna bring someone else back too. I think you know who I’m talking about. Donald J. Trump.”
I don’t know how many of these people there are. But I’d guess it’s in the millions and probably enough to affect the GOP primary if anyone decides to challenge Trump. These people may all say they like Ron DeSantis now, but wait until Trump corners him on this stuff. I’m not sure where they’ll go but at the very least they’ll split the party. This is where the activist base is and they have huge email lists and their own social media. Don’t assume they are fringe anymore.
If you’d like to support this old blog and keep the lights on for another year, you can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below. Thank you! And Happy Hollandaise, everybody.