Audiences were on their feet and shouting “USA!, USA!” at the Turning Point Action Conference (TPAC) at the Palm County Convention Hall in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 14-15, as the 45th president took the stage on Saturday night. Thousands of supporters waited calmly in 90-degree heat in the convention center’s parking garage to go through security “provided” by federal agents to enter the main hall. I know. My family stood in that line.
The thousands of attendees at the first-ever TPAC broke records for the youth organization, headed by its CEO and president Charlie Kirk, who publicly apologized for the long wait times and the heightened security measures enacted by the Secret Service to place the building on lockdown ahead of Donald Trump’s speech. Such steps by federal law enforcement forced hundreds of paid attendees to wait outside, and many were yelling, “Let us in, let us in!”
“This will be the most important election,” opened Donald J. Trump, rallying his base in a standing-room-only auditorium. “This [election] will decide whether we inherit a fascist or a free country. Will Marxists burn the country to the ground or will young patriots stand up and fight for it?”
Trump’s remarks lasted 90 minutes. He noted the decline of America, which he termed a “third-world hellhole,” and called on “young conservative warriors” to not let this happen. “Defend your values, and you never will yield to the radical Left,” he urged. “You are the ones who are going to make America great again!”
In his signature, personable style, he promised that “we all together [will] become the 47th President of the United States,” before addressing a host of challenges facing the country, including the leftist takeover of higher institutions, unprecedented inflation, the billions in American tax dollars sent abroad to fight the war in Ukraine, election fraud, and the recent indictments waged against him.
Yet optimism also imbued his words, as he charged his supporters to stand for America and to bring about success and unite the country together.
“Now the gloves can come off. We were politically rough, but I would never have said this: Biden is the most politically corrupt president in the history of this country,” Trump declared. “I’m doing it for you. I’m being indicted for you. I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people in our country.”
The former president pointed to several recent polls that show him leading by as many as 50 points ahead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the Republican bid for the 2024 presidential election. He then took jabs at the governor for declining the invitation to speak at the event, and posited that “DeSanctimonious and the establishment handlers are wasting such precious time and resources to divide the party.” Indeed, DeSantis had declined the invitation to speak at TPAC, telling Kirk that he had a previous engagement.
Tucker Carlson, behind Trump, was the most celebrated speaker of the night.
Carlson decried the lies pushed by the media and the government to drive the insidious narratives pushed about January 6, the war in Ukraine, and Covid. He lauded the few brave truth-tellers who are not afraid to speak out, and challenged the audience to follow that path.
Crowds also heard from charismatic presidential candidate and millennial entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who spoke defiantly about the political establishment’s efforts to keep Americans silent and to censor the truth, noting the government-imposed Covid lockdowns and aggressive push for a “vaccine” that was proven to not protect against the virus at all.
“Once we acknowledge the truth, we can start to move forward in this country,” declared Ramaswamy. “I am not running against anyone in this race; I am running for this country. Our diversity is not our strength, our strength is what unites us across that diversity. America is a vision of what that place can be — e pluribus unum — from many, one.”
But it was the newest, brightest star on the stage — former U.S. agent Tim Ballard — and perhaps the modern-day movement’s Patrick Henry — “The War Room’s” Steve Bannon — who closed out the two-day program with the most electric performances, spelling out the clearest pathways to victory.
Expose, Expose, Expose
Ballard, whose personal plight to save children from and expose the horrors of the child sex trade, as depicted in the triumphant new film Sound of Freedom, reminded us that the villainization of his efforts by the Left are deeply rooted in the evil the party is determined to advance.
He told of his decision to visit the White House to meet and talk with President Trump despite the resulting loss of 1,000 supporters of his nonprofits Operation Underground Railroad and The Nazarene Fund who denounced that visit. Ballard emphatically stated that he “did not call one of them back to secure their donations.”
“It was a shock to me that there are people out there who hate one person or one party more than they love rescuing children,” he said.
Blasting the Left’s accusations that Sound of Freedom is propaganda propelled by the “conspiracy theory” group Q-Anon, Ballard said, “We have a serious, serious illness in this country where children are put way down on the list of priorities, and agenda and wokeness and leftism are the most important things. It’s spiritual warfare. Nothing else can explain this.”
The film, based on Ballard’s life story, was produced almost seven years ago, before anything was even known about Q-Anon, he posited. At that time, mainstream outlets even reported on the real-life child rescue in Colombia (the story illustrated in the film). “They applauded it and agreed with all the rest of us that child trafficking is real and it’s a good thing that we’re getting rid of it,” said Ballard. So why are they now villainizing the film? “What conversation is the Left afraid to have?” he asked.
Ballard spent 10 years on the southern border as an undercover U.S. operator, and a total of 12 years working for the Department of Homeland Security. For him, the solution to ending child trafficking is simple: Building a secure border wall means rescuing children.
He shared harrowing stories of girls as young as 11 and 12 being trafficked over the border, transported to major U.S. cities, and raped 15-20 times a day for as long as five years.
“In the last two years alone, 85,000 unaccompanied minors … under five years old … crossed the border alone,” informed Ballard. “This is an organized criminal effort by organized criminal organizations to traffic children.”
The fact is, America has soared to become the No. 1 consumer of child sex pornography in the world, and, as Ballard revealed, “It’s harder to adopt a cat from a shelter than it is to pick up a kid from the border.”
“That’s our country right now, and that’s why they don’t want you to see Sound of Freedom,” he declared. “But we’re going to force this conversation down their throats and we’re going to wake up this country! I believe God is behind this movie, and if nothing else than to expose the evils.”
“We Are at War”
Closing the night, Bannon preached fire and brimstone in his call to action, telling the audience that we are at the crossroads of the nation going awry or toward recovery. “When Donald Trump takes his hand off the King James Bible and is sworn into office on January 20, in the year of our Lord 2025, we are going into the CIA, the FBI … all of them. We’re going to release [the names of] every single person that either trafficked people or looked the other way to traffic people. We’re going to put it all out [there] for the American people,” he exclaimed.
“We don’t need any more detailed, tough letters [from senators] over to DHS. We need names; we need information, and the American people are going to weigh and measure it,” he declared. Bannon’s words demanded that the audience rise to their feet and join his call to become the cadre that will stand for this country. The crowd was awakened, erupting in loud applause with shouts of “USA!, USA!”
Bannon’s no-nonsense exclamations for “no more talk” were a successful and exciting close to an amazing conference that will bring more “boots on the ground” to move forward the MAGA agenda to save America.
