Turning Point USA has found a way to disavow the embarrassingly small crowd at its Georgia event: by blaming liberals.
Andrew Kolvet, the spokesperson for the right-wing organization founded by Charlie Kirk, has pulled back the curtain on the sparsely attended, JD Vance-headlined event at the Akins Ford Arena in Athens on Tuesday.
Photos from the event showed thousands of seats left empty as the vice president spoke to a crowd of students. Kolvet interviewed Vance on stage in place of Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, who withdrew at the eleventh hour over security concerns.
Kolvet said about 2,000 students were at the venue. He later acknowledged that Turning Point USA had some 10,000 tickets reserved for the event. Tickets were free through a sign-up link.
“So a couple things happened,” he said in a Wednesday episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. “So we ended up having to open doors and close doors earlier than was previously scheduled. Okay? So that was something.”
“And then there were a bunch of left-wing groups that tried—and they do this at a number of events,” he continued, explaining that the venue could actually only fit 4,000 people once the stage had been set up.
“Massive, massive energy. Great, great enthusiasm from the attendees,” he said. “But—and this happens—the left-wing groups swarm the ticketing and they try and book up all the tickets, and then they don’t show and that’s one of their forms of protest. Normally, we’re pretty good at sniffing it out, but they use some new means and activities, and so we’re working with our ticketing systems to adjust for that moving forward.”
The poor attendance was roundly mocked online and on air, with MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough mocking the organizers as “Boring Point USA.”
The Red & Black, an Athens-based student publication, previously reported that protesters stood outside during the event holding up signs that read, “What would the real Jesus do?,” “God does not hate, Turning Point does,” and “Jesus warned us about JD Vance.” The signs were held up after his boss, President Donald Trump, posted an AI image of himself as Jesus and hit out at Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social.
Protesters were inside the venue, too. Vance was repeatedly heckled, with someone shouting at one point, “Jesus Christ does not support genocide.”
The vice president swiftly addressed “whoever yelled that out from the dark,” saying, “Yes, I agree, Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide... I think that’s a pretty easy principle.”
Erika, meanwhile, was a no-show after receiving hostile and threatening messages that raised security concerns, according to CBS News.
But the event was safe enough for the vice president of the United States, with the Secret Service determining that there was no credible or specific threat tied to the event, the venue, or Vance, who took the stage after being briefed by his security detail.
Vance’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
