What are the main events organized by Turning Point USA?
Executive summary
Turning Point USA stages a portfolio of recurring national conferences, identity-focused leadership summits, campus tours and activist-training events designed to recruit and mobilize conservative youth, with flagship gatherings like AmericaFest/Student Action Summit drawing tens of thousands and high-profile speakers [1] [2] [3]. The organization’s affiliated advocacy arm, Turning Point Action (TPAction), runs larger political-activism conventions such as ACTCON and coordinates voter operations, illustrating a mix of cultural messaging and direct electoral organizing [4] [5].
1. National flagship conferences: AmericaFest and Student Action Summit
Turning Point’s most visible events are large, multi-day national conferences—historically promoted under names like the Student Action Summit and more recently AmericaFest—which assemble celebrity conservative speakers, activists and thousands of attendees for speeches, panels and spectacle; the 2025 AmericaFest reportedly drew as many as 30,000 people and featured headline names across media and politics [1] [2] [3]. These gatherings are produced with concert-like staging and have been described in reporting as both movement-building pep rallies and marketplaces for right-leaning media personalities, hosting controversial figures and creating flashpoints for intra-right debate [6] [7] [8].
2. Identity-focused leadership summits: Young Women’s, Black and Latino leadership events
TPUSA explicitly runs targeted leadership summits such as the Young Women’s Leadership Summit (YWLS), the Young Black Leadership Summit and the Young Latino Leadership Summit to recruit and train demographic cohorts that the group sees as key to conservative outreach, with the YWLS singled out in coverage as an intentional counterprogramming to mainstream feminist spaces [1]. These summits combine speaker programming, networking and merchandising and have been platforms for partisan messaging aimed at reshaping cultural narratives among specific student constituencies [1].
3. Campus tours, debates and “on-campus” programming
Beyond big conferences, Turning Point operates campus-centered events and touring formats—reported examples include “Prove Me Wrong” campus events and a planned “pick up the mic” debate tour—that aim to bring one-on-one debates, confrontational campus activations and recruitment tables directly to high schools and colleges [3]. Student chapters also host local speakers and campus-level trainings; TPUSA’s public events calendar describes a slate of specialty conferences and training sessions intended to “energize and grow the conservative movement” on campuses [5] [3].
4. TPAction events and voter-activation conferences (ACTCON and similar)
Turning Point’s political arm, Turning Point Action (TPAction), hosts its own large activism conferences—ACTCON in 2023 drew roughly 6,000 attendees and featured major figures such as Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson—and runs ground-game operations that the group says are built to affect turnout and ballot-chasing efforts [4]. TPAction’s events intermix campaign tactics, canvassing technology and messaging strategy, reflecting an organizational axis between cultural influence and electoral mobilization [4].
5. Format, scale and who shows up: speakers, merch and media attention
TPUSA events regularly feature high-profile and polarizing speakers from conservative media and politics—names cited at recent conferences include Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and others—and are accompanied by heavy merchandising, social media amplification and live-streamed videos that draw substantial audience views on platforms such as C-SPAN [2] [1] [6]. Coverage of recent editions highlights both the organization’s ability to produce spectacle and the internal tensions those stages can expose, from public feuds among right-wing personalities to debates about the movement’s direction [6] [7] [8].
6. Implicit agendas, criticism and organizational strategy
The event mix underlines TPUSA’s twofold agenda: cultivate a youth-focused conservative culture via identity-targeted summits and campus confrontations, while scaling up national spectacles and activist conferences to consolidate political influence and fundraising—an approach critics say prioritizes spectacle and partisan recruitment over neutral civic education, and supporters present as essential youth outreach [5] [4] [6]. Reporting also shows these events can become lightning rods for controversies—speaker rhetoric, conspiratorial claims and intra-movement fights have surfaced repeatedly at TPUSA stages—so the events serve both as mobilizing platforms and as mirrors of broader fissures in contemporary conservative politics [6] [7] [8].