An American Turning Point in Phoenix

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An American Turning Point in Phoenix

America’s biggest-ever conservative tent show has more hot chicks per capita than Coachella

Charlie Kirk is the new Elmer Gantry, mistaking the American Religion for the American Spirit

God doesn’t give a crap about who you vote for

It’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am driving a cream-colored Hummer H3 with side decals in the style of a Lake Havasu tramp stamp. This car is the real deal. It has shiny, star-shaped hubcaps and a rack of LEDs on the grill that can turn any pedestrian parking lot into a crime scene. Aesthetically, it seems to trigger something instinctual in certain male nervous systems. As I pull up to a red light on Seventh Street, the man in the car next to me rolls down his window and lets out an obligatory, high-pitched Rebel Yell. I return a single-thumb salute. Together we join the flow of lifted trucks and Jeeps with flags waving from the tailgates — not the little 9/11 garden-stick models, but heavy-duty mothers whose clapping sound does a damn good impression of a gunshot. Trump 2024, Don’t Tread on Me, and ol’ glory are all firing into the breeze as we shoot headlong toward downtown Phoenix, home of Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest. AmericaFest is …

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Ariel Pink Won't Stop Making Music

Canceled Indie Icon Plays Vegas

Exalts Art Over Politics

A Trumpist in a Teapot

By Armin Rosen

Ariel Pink is a test that America might never pass. Between the late 90s and not so long ago, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, aka Ariel Pink, was the creative and commercial edge of true psychedelic freakdom, playing every instrument on a series of swampy self-released astonishments before penning several of the bona fide classics of the 2010s indie boom. “While y’all nigga masturbate, I’m in that Ariel Pink,” Donald Glover rapped in 2011. Charting four albums on the Billboard 200 and recording with Miley Cyrus, Rosenberg could’ve gotten massively rich and famous by making his sound everyone else’s sound too. Instead, he decided that such debasements are better left to the Jack Antonoffs of the world. Then he blew his whole career by attending the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC, on the morning of January 6th, 2021 — though not the festivities at the Capitol later that afternoon — at which point the music suddenly ended. Rosenberg was decried as the face of indie rock’s alleged male …

An American Turning Point in Phoenix

Agricultural Digest

Ariel Pink Won't Stop Making Music