“The RNC meeting is largely a waste of time,” Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk began his January 29 podcast. “And we can complain from the outside, or we can create an alternative.”

Kirk was speaking from the first day of a two-day event organized by Turning Point Action, the Restoring National Confidence (aka “RNC”) summit in Las Vegas. He said it was “competing right up against the RNC,” which also held a winter meeting in the hotel next door. 

Tapping into what Politico reported as widespread dissatisfaction with the Republican National Committee, Kirk’s shadow summit joined conservative activists and media figures with local GOP chairs and Republican committee members for pro-Trump organizing. This included efforts to “secure” elections amid widespread suggestions that Trump’s second term was stolen from him, making the summit yet another display of the everlasting influence of 2020 election lies.

“The purpose of this meeting is not to shame the RNC or anything like that,” Kirk claimed. “It’s to challenge them and to say why haven’t you done this. Be better. Why haven’t you engaged the grassroots? Why haven’t you secured our elections?”  

The longer-term effect of Kirk’s RNC summit will be to pull these activists and officials closer to Kirk’s politics. By organizing the future nuts and bolts of Republican electoral politics, Turning Point and Kirk -- and their worsening records of extremism -- could emerge as an additional center of gravity, alongside Fox News, in influencing the Republican Party.

War Room host Steve Bannon cast Kirk’s event as critical to Trump’s re-election: “If we had had this meeting, of Turning Point and what you’re doing right now, in January of 2020, Donald J. Trump would be starting the fourth year of his second term.”

“Think of what’s happened to our nation because this didn’t take place in January 2020 and we depend upon the RNC, who is too incompetent to assist President Trump’s campaign in closing the deal,” he continued.

“We won in 2020,” Bannon falsely insisted. “We’re going to win again.”

Kirk’s RNC featured Jenny Beth Martin, a founder of the Tea Party Patriots, promoting her efforts to train “poll watchers” nationwide. The Tea Party Patriots were a sponsor of the pre-insurrection rally on January 6, 2021, acting as a “coalition partner” with the “Stop the Steal” movement. 

On Kirk’s show that streamed from the summit, Martin bragged of training poll watchers and cleaning voter rolls, which the Brennan Center for Justice describes as an “often-flawed” process of deleting the names of ineligible voters in specific elections from registration lists that has the potential to “disenfranchise legitimate voters.” 

“In 2022,” Martin told Bannon on War Room, “we trained 20,000 people who went on to be part of the 80,000 people that the RNC placed as poll watchers. That is massive.” 

The right-wing organizing and poll watcher recruiting that Martin described have previously led to widespread voter intimidation.

The summit also featured another mainstay of election denial media, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who gave two long speeches, according to Politico, about his “Lindell Plan” to stop the Democrats from stealing 2024. 

“The biggest applause was we have a plan,” Lindell told Bannon. He explained the plan as such: to  get “every county in the United States” to “get rid of the voting machines” from companies like Dominion and Smartmatic, which are suing Lindell for billions in defamation, in favor of “paper ballots, hand-counted, same-day voting.”

“We’ve got probably upwards of 200 counties committed out of the 3,000-some,” Lindell claimed, before being granted the requisite opportunity to sell MyPillow merchandise with Bannon and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec.

According to Bannon, the summit drew “60 or 70” Republican National Committee members, as well as numerous state and county GOP chairs, 75 of whom were flown in on Turning Point Action’s dime. 

“That’s a warning shot,” Kirk added, saying he hoped all would leave with “marching orders with great specificity,” especially in battleground states.

For The Charlie Kirk Show, Kirk interviewed three such chairs from three key swing states: Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon, who noted that 17 Georgia county chairmen were present at the event; Waukesha County GOP Chairman Terry Dittrich, who said that, unlike Turning Point, the RNC has not been a helpful data partner; and new Arizona GOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda, who also appeared on Bannon’s War Room to discuss various election lawsuits.

The RNC might take the summit as “an insult” because “they’re very fragile people,” Kirk said of the actual RNC, but he professed to hope that the appetite for his event would make the committee members realize “maybe we aren’t doing a good enough job” to help Trump win in 2024.