"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."
"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."
A two-story image of Charlie Kirk dominated the Phoenix Convention Center lobby; VIP areas played clips and attendees posed beneath a 'Prove Me Wrong' tent replica of the one Kirk used. Attendance reached roughly 30,000. Prominent MAGA figures such as J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon spoke and frequently invoked Kirk; Mike Johnson proposed erecting a Capitol statue and Ken Paxton compared Kirk to Jesus. Concurrently, disputes over Nick Fuentes fractured the gathering. Ben Shapiro denounced Fuentes as a "Hitler-apologist," drawing boos, while Roger Stone characterized the Fuentes controversy as exaggerated.
Read at The Atlantic
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