Vice President J.D. Vance spoke Sunday at Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest conference, where Erika Kirk, widow of the group’s slain founder, endorsed Vance for president in 2028. Vance demonized “the left,” promoted Christian nationalism and right-wing populist conspiracy theories, and, unlike other speakers, refused to criticize far-right and antisemitic elements of the conservative movement like fascist personality Nick Fuentes.
Other conference speakers were willing to challenge the movement’s bigots and extremists. Podcaster Ben Shapiro took on Tucker Carlson for having provided Fuentes with an overly friendly platform from which to spread his poison. (Carlson, also invited to speak, mocked Shapiro’s concerns.) Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy challenged Fuentes's bigotry along with racially coded ideas like “Heritage Americans” that have taken root in the MAGA movement.
But Vance, who has his eye on 2028, was apparently not willing to risk alienating anyone on the right, demonstrating the concept of NETTR—“no enemies to the right”—that has been at the center of the ongoing turmoil over Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defense of Carlson’s promotion of Fuentes.
“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests,” Vance said from the stage.
“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or deplatform,” Vance said, asserting that “the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life.” Kirk, Vance said, “trusted all of you to make your own judgment,” adding, “And we have far more important work to do than cancelling each other.” The truth is that Charlie Kirk had both denounced Fuentes and banned him from TPUSA events.
Vance deployed shameless demagoguery against “the left.” People of faiths, he claimed, have realized that Democrats “don’t care about anything other than maybe transing their kids.”
After criticizing some progressive politicians, he said that what they all have in common is that “they are puppets." He continued: "They don’t actually matter. They are cogs in a machine that wants to make you poorer, that wants to make you less powerful, and wants to make you less safe in the country your ancestors built.” Vance urged attendees to honor Charlie Kirk by fighting to “take the country back from the people who took his life.”
He celebrated the Trump administration for achieving “net negative migration” and relegating diversity, equity and inclusion “to the dustbin of history.” Vance declared, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
Vance also touted plans to target organizations and funders that oppose the Trump regime’s agenda:
To honor Charlie and to honor all of you, we’re working to end the scourge of left-wing violence in the United States of America. We’re going after the far-left crime networks, but we’re also going after the monsters that fund them. We don’t just want to go after the antifa member who threw a brick at an ICE agent, we want to know who bought the brick and we’re going to prosecute them too.
Vance slammed “activist groups,” “rogue district judges,” “Soros DAs” and others, before claiming:
What unites them? They win when our country loses, they get rich when you get poorer, they hire the illegals that they bring in to take your jobs. They drink fine wine in the countries they ship your jobs to. They censor you because they’d rather destroy the Constitution than risk losing an argument. They bring in millions of voters because they know they can’t win the argument with the people who are already here. And you know what else unites them? We’re going to kick their ass in November and every year after that.
TPUSA has followed its founder’s path from libertarianism to Christian nationalism, and Vance delivered a similar message, declaring, “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America, is that we have been, and by the grace of God always will be, a Christian nation.” (Historian Heather Cox Richardson has addressed the Christian nationalist aspects of Vance’s speech in her newsletter.)
“I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American. I’m saying something simpler and truer. Christianity is America’s creed—the shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond,” Vance said. “Across that history, our country’s major debates have always centered on how we could best as a people please God.”
“Even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept,” Vance said. “Because we’re all creatures of God, we must respect each individual’s pathway to that God.”
He then shifted into the kind of religious-persecution rhetoric that the Christian nationalist right has long used as a political organizing tool, culminating with the notion that patriots may need to be willing to sacrifice their lives if “that’s what God asks them to do”:
But over the last 50 years there has been a singular focus, a war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America. And let me say, of all the wars that Donald Trump has ended, that is the one we’re proudest of.
For decades, the left has labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square. Freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion. And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it. They told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group. They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family—that men and women could rely on and turn to one another—with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they brought the right bunch of pills from big Pharma. They had all the religious fervor of a zealous convert, without any of the grace or forgiveness of a true Christian. Scripture tells us, by your fruits ye shall know them. And we might ask, what are the fruits of these people and their principles? And the answer is a man named Tyler Robinson who killed my friend.
Think about it. He is everything that the far left wants from our young men. He rejected the conservatism and the spirituality, the values of his small town family. He moved into a small apartment. He became addicted to porn. He became addicted to hate. And he ended up sleeping with somebody who doesn’t know whether they’re a man or a woman. That is the nightmare scenario. But that is the scenario that the left has actively advertised that they want for American families. And the young men in the audience in particular, that is exactly why we have to fight them. Because the fruits of true Christianity are men like Charlie Kirk. The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons. And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asks them to do.
Because so many of us recognize that it is better to die a patriot than live a coward.
Vance closed with a pledge of victory:
if you miss Charlie Kirk, do you promise to fight what he died for? Do you promise to take the country back from the people who took his life? Do you promise to help defeat the radicals who cheered his death? Do you promise to honor his memory by having faith in the God he loved? My friends, commit to these things and I promise you victory.
