PHOENIX—At 6 a.m. on Dec. 21, the crowd outside the Phoenix Convention Center was already enormous. Before dawn, thousands of Americans chatted, sang, and chanted on the sidewalks.

They were waiting to hear Vice President JD Vance and other speakers on the final day of AmericaFest 2025, a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event.

Many were youthful: the conservative high schoolers, college students, and young adults whom TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk sought to motivate before his assassination on a college campus in Orem, Utah, on Sept. 10.

The shock and sadness of that moment were soon tempered by faith and purpose. The 31-year-old’s followers and allies said that Kirk, the man who built a Republican juggernaut for President Donald Trump and “America First,” would have wanted them to keep fighting.

“We’re going to do the things that Charlie was already doing,” Andrew Kolvet, TPUSA’s spokesman and the executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, told The Epoch Times.

AmericaFest 2025 bore the fruits of that ongoing labor.

On Dec. 18, TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk—the founder’s widow and the mother of his two children—told the crowd that the organization had received more than 140,000 requests to get involved since Sept. 10.

The event drew more than 30,000 people, a record for the annual event. Erika Kirk said more than one-third of the attendees were students.

“I think we could have doubled this,” Kolvet said of the turnout. “We had to turn the ticketing off.”

The Grand Coalition

Although the event was marked by conflict between some personalities, including Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, the sheer breadth of those who appeared was clear to see.

Speakers ranged from pundits such as Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck to top officials, including Vance and border czar Tom Homan, as well as Hollywood conservatives Russell Brand and Rob Schneider.

Jonathan Keeperman, a BlazeTV host and publisher of works by neoreactionary political theorist Curtis Yarvin, delivered remarks on the same stage as rapper and Vance meme aficionado Nicki Minaj, who walked out arm in arm with Erika Kirk.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Keeperman, who goes by @l0m3z on X, recalled that Charlie Kirk reached out to him after he was doxed by a journalist.

“Charlie, to his great credit, was intellectually curious,“ Keeperman said. ”He was not afraid of ideas.”

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Tim Marden, who does fundraising and marketing for the John Birch Society—a group of anti-communist, constitutional conservatives famously ostracized by a past movement leader, William F. Buckley Jr.—compared the treatment of the group’s cofounder, Robert Welch, to that of Trump, saying that they faced “exactly the same demonization.”

“I think we’ve seen a massive increase in interest from young people,” Marden said of the John Birch Society. “They really are truth seekers.”

AmericaFest 2025 also hosted the National Rifle Association and other mainstays of pre-Trump conservatism.

The high-profile Republican speakers reflected TPUSA’s apparent staying power in the GOP.

In remarks on Dec. 21, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said he would work with Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), another Dec. 21 speaker, to place a statue of the late Charlie Kirk in the U.S. Capitol.

Also on Dec. 21, Donald Trump Jr. declared that the GOP “isn’t the Republican Party anymore.”

“It’s the America First Party,” he said. “It’s the Make America Great Again Party.”

The president’s son called on those in the room to “stay in the game.”

“Midterms are coming around the corner,” he said.

‘Building the Red Wall’

Less than a year out from what could be a challenging election cycle for Republicans, AmericaFest also dove into the specifics of electing candidates—something that has become a strength of TPUSA’s sister organization, Turning Point Action.

At AmericaFest 2024, Michael Whatley, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Trump would not have won “if it weren’t for Turning Point and the people [in the audience].”

Whatley, now a 2026 Senate candidate in North Carolina, expanded on that impact in his 2025 AmericaFest speech.

“I had dozens, hundreds of conversations with Charlie throughout the course of the election, with folks from Turning Point all across the country,” he told the crowd on Dec. 21. “You were always there.”

Political consultant Roger Stone told The Epoch Times that the turnout was “very, very encouraging” as the 2026 elections approach.

Attendees had a chance to learn the nuts and bolts of electing Republicans.

Breakout sessions covered everything from handling local races and increasing electoral support from mothers to winning purple Pennsylvania and “chasing the East Coast vote.”

Gubernatorial candidates spoke, too, including Ohio Republican hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy and Arizona’s Biggs.

Amanda McKinney, commissioner of Yakima County, Washington, who is now running to replace outgoing Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), said Charlie Kirk helped guide her as she developed “a strategy to retire” the congressman, one of just two sitting Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

It was also clear that TPUSA’s ambitions extended beyond 2026.

“We’re focused on building the red wall ahead of 2028,” Kolvet said.

TPUSA endorsed Vance for president in 2028 during the event. The vice president has not declared his candidacy.

Keeping the Faith

As much as AmericaFest is about politics—and, more specifically, electing Republicans from the party’s dominant Make America Great Again wing—the event touched on more than winning races.

The late Kirk fostered a movement anchored in Christianity.

He was on his own journey, too.

“He was getting more and more faith-driven in his later years,” Blake Neff, a cohost of The Charlie Kirk Show, said on Sept. 17, a week after Kirk’s assassination, in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Religious-themed booths, a Sunday worship service, and Christian rhetoric—notably from Brand—helped define the experience.

Vance, a convert to Catholicism, offered a defense of the country’s Christian values.

“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 we always will be, a Christian nation,” he said.