Republican politicians, far-right media personalities, Trump administration officials, Holocaust deniers and other white supremacists attended the AmericaFest conference held in Phoenix, Arizona, December 18-21. The gathering was the first major conference organized by Turning Point Action following the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA.

The roster of speakers at AmericaFest underscored its role as an organizing hub for the Trump administration and the Republican Party. Participants included Donald Trump Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson, “border czar” Tom Homan, Republican fixer Roger Stone, Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, alongside numerous Trump loyalists and right-wing operatives.

As support for the Trump administration continues to decline due to its pro-billionaire, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class policies, the conference was marked by infighting among speakers over the future direction of the Republican Party and the “Make America Great Again” movement, once the increasingly deranged Donald Trump exits the White House.

In his speech, Zionist Ben Shapiro, founder of the Daily Wire, attacked Candace Owens, his former employee, and those he claimed refused to condemn her “truly vicious attacks,” including fellow AmericaFest speakers Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly. Owens has asserted, without presenting any evidence, that Kirk was assassinated in an operation orchestrated by the French Foreign Legion and Israelis because Kirk offered tepid criticism of the Zionist state and its ongoing US-backed genocide.

Seeking to position himself as Trump’s political heir and unite reactionaries of all stripes behind his campaign, Vice President JD Vance was given the headline speaking slot on the final day of the conference, following the public endorsement he received from Erika Kirk as the Republican Party’s 2028 presidential nominee.

In a rebuke to Shapiro, Vance’s address centered on the consolidation of the Republican Party with the most reactionary, racist and fascistic forces in American politics, advanced under the unstated but unmistakable banner of “No Enemies to the Right.”

Rejecting any “purity tests” within the MAGA movement, Vance declared that political unity must be maintained regardless of fascist, racist or antisemitic views.

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance told the crowd. “He says Make America Great Again because every American is invited.”

Invoking the death of Charlie Kirk, Vance warned against internal criticism of the far right:

I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or deplatform and I don’t really care. … The best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he refused to do in life. He invited all of us here for a reason.

Vance repeatedly described Trump and Turning Point USA as “builders,” insisting that “winning requires teamwork” and that he was “honored to be on Turning Point’s team.” The purpose of this “team” is to serve as an umbrella organization among youth and college student Republicans, for the benefit of Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and open white supremacists.

Vance’s appeal for fascist unity is not new. After revelations earlier this year that Young Republican leaders in multiple states participated in months-long group chats filled with admiration for Adolf Hitler and racist bile, Vance posted on X that he would “refuse to join the pearl clutching,” declining to condemn the fascistic views expressed.

In his speech, Vance appealed directly to white supremacists and gloated about the rollback of diversity programs, declaring, “In the United States of America you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

In line with the anti-science agenda of the Trump administration and following an earlier appearance by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Vance boasted that the US military was now “welcoming patriots instead of firing them for refusing to accept an unlawful vaccine mandate.”

Using Kirk’s death to justify expanded state repression, Vance declared his support for the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against all left-wing and anti-capitalist political opposition:

To honor Charlie, but to also honor all of you, we are working to end the scourge of left-wing violence in the United States of America. We are going after the far-left crime networks, but we are 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 are going to prosecute them too.

Vance then explicitly called for eliminating Senate filibuster rules to accelerate prosecutions:

“Do you want more prosecutions?” he asked, to cheers. “Donald Trump and I have a list of judges and prosecutors to enact justice, so join us in the fight against the stupid Senate rules that stand in their way.”

As support for Trump’s mass deportation operation continues to erode, Vance urged the audience to enlist directly in the immigration Gestapo:

“So go to ICE.gov/join because we are building an army of patriots and we need good people who care about the country to help us secure the border and do it even faster.”

Next to vendors selling hats in support of the failed coup of January 6, 2021, Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents established recruiting booths.

Continuing Trump’s racist attacks on Somalis, Vance sneered, “Democrats are not sending their best. Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu. Wait, I mean Minneapolis.”

Appealing to the antisemitic layers in attendance, Vance accused the “left” of seeking to “poison your kids with hormone therapy and put toxins in your water supply,” while denouncing “rogue district judges” and “the [George] Soros DAs who cheer on as their cities burn.”

He repeated the core claims of the Great Replacement Theory, a fascist conspiracy theory that has motivated mass shootings in the US and internationally:

“They hire the illegals they bring in to take your jobs. They censor you. They bring in millions of voters because they know they can’t win the argument with the people who are already here.”

The reactionary content of Vice President JD Vance’s appeal for “unity” was underscored by the presence at AmericaFest of Myron Gaines, a Holocaust denier and open supporter of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Gaines, pictured below with fellow neo-Nazi Jack Posobiec, wore a hooded sweatshirt to the event featuring the “Cookie Monster” muppet and the phrase “Let’em cook,” a reference to Fuentes’ claim that it would be impossible for the fictional character to “cook” 6 million cookies in an oven.

In his speech, Posobiec threatened violence against “leftists” and Marxists: “We are up against radical Marxist domestic terrorism, and they are going to keep shooting us until they are stopped.”

While Gaines was not afforded a speaking spot like Posobiec, his presence at the event illustrated the real meaning of Vance’s denunciation of “purity tests.” Terrified of a mass movement in the working class that, infused with socialist consciousness, will expropriate their ill-gotten wealth and abolish their immigration Gestapo, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the rest of the fascist financial oligarchy that bankrolls Vance and other capitalist politicians are resurrecting and promoting fascism.

The ideological glue of Vance and the Republicans’ proposed American Reich is Christian nationalism. In a blatant falsification of American history, Vance declared, “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.”

The United States was never founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution makes no reference to God, establishes no state religion, and explicitly prohibits religious tests for public office. The First Amendment bars Congress from establishing religion altogether.

This separation was not accidental. It reflected the Enlightenment foundations of the American Revolution, which rejected divine right, clerical authority and religious establishment in favor of reason, law and popular sovereignty. Leading figures of the founding generation were openly hostile to clerical rule and orthodox Christian doctrine. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, rejected the divinity of Christ and compiled his own edited version of the Gospels, stripping out miracles, the resurrection, and any claim of Jesus’s supernatural status in order to emphasize moral teachings alone.

The position of the early American state was stated unambiguously in the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the US Senate in 1797, which declared that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Vance’s invocation of a mythical “Christian nation” serves as ideological cover for authoritarian rule, the erosion of democratic rights, and the fusion of state power with religious reaction. It is a central component of the broader fascistic program advanced at AmericaFest and Turning Point as a whole, which seeks to replace constitutional principles with a techno-fascist dictatorship.

The ability of Vance and the Republican right to mount these attacks on American history is inseparable from the pernicious role played by the Democratic Party and its upper-middle class constituency. For decades, the Democrats have abandoned any defense of historical truth or democratic principles, replacing them with race, sex and gender-based identity politics aimed at dividing the working class and blocking the development of a socialist movement rooted in a shared history of class struggle.

The spearhead of this campaign was the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which advanced the reactionary claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery and that “white supremacy” is the foundational force of American history. This narrative systematically erased the Enlightenment origins of the Revolution of 1776 and denied its progressive content, including its challenge to monarchy, aristocracy and religious authority, articulated in the immortal declaration that “all” are created equal and deserve “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Leading historians and the World Socialist Web Site exposed and debunked the 1619 Project as a falsification of history that substitutes racial essentialism for materialist analysis and serves the political interests of the Democratic Party and the ruling class. By portraying American history as nothing but an unbroken continuum of racial oppression, the Democrats have ceded the terrain of history itself to the far right, allowing figures like Vance to posture as defenders of a mythical national past while advancing “blood and soil” conceptions.

The task confronting the working class is not the embrace of nationalist myths or racialist falsifications, but the reclamation of its own revolutionary history and the development of an independent, conscious socialist movement.