Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Turning Point event in Phoenix was billed as a triumphal gathering of the youthful, the righteous, and the aggressively certain. What it turned out to be instead was a three-day Freudian slip festival—a live demonstration of what happens when grievance, ambition, and unchecked self-regard collide on a stage wired with microphones.

Everyone there was supposedly reading from the same script: patriotism, faith, civilization under siege, blah blah republic on life support. And yet, sentence after sentence, speaker after speaker, the mask kept slipping. Not dramatically—no Scooby-Doo unmasking moment—but in the far more revealing way people tell on themselves when they’re convinced the room will cheer no matter what comes out of their mouths.

The most telling moment came when a speaker—introduced as honoring a fallen figure in Charlie Kirk’s image—accidentally referred to him as a grifter. Cue the split-second panic. The verbal record scratch. The frantic backpedaling: “Oh—oops—that’s not what I meant.” Except it very obviously was what was meant, because you don’t trip over the word “grifter” unless it’s already living rent-free in your subconscious. That wasn’t a slip of the tongue; that was the truth briefly escaping captivity before being dragged back behind the curtain.

And that moment summed up the entire event. The Phoenix conference wasn’t about ideas; it was about affirmation. Speaker and audience locked in a feedback loop of applause, outrage, and self-congratulation. It was ideological mutual admiration society—less a political movement than a self-soothing ritual, where everyone reassures everyone else that they’re the smartest people in the room, bravely saying what “they” don’t want you to say, while charging admission for the privilege.

The irony is that Turning Point loves to accuse others of groupthink, yet the Phoenix event functioned like a closed ecosystem where dissent can’t survive and self-awareness goes to die. Every “accidental” phrase revealed the cracks: the obsession with money while denouncing elites, the thirst for power while claiming victimhood, the grift-denial delivered by people who somehow always have a new book, a new donor link, and a new VIP package available in the lobby.

What made it almost impressive was how blind everyone seemed to their own tells. These weren’t hostile journalists catching people off guard; these were friendly rooms, safe spaces of their own making. And still, the truth kept slipping out—about motivations, about money, about the fact that this entire operation runs less on principle than on performance.

In Phoenix, Turning Point didn’t expose its enemies. It exposed itself. A movement so convinced of its own righteousness that it no longer bothers to listen to what it’s actually saying. A conference where the biggest danger wasn’t cancel culture or Marxism or whatever the villain of the week was—but an open mic and an unguarded moment.

Because when the applause is guaranteed, honesty tends to leak out accidentally. And in Phoenix, it leaked everywhere.