JD Vance headlines AmericaFest 2026 alongside BlazeTV’s Nick Freitas and John Doyle
AmericaFest is Turning Point USA’s flagship annual convention, and this December it returns for its sixth edition. Charlie Kirk launched it in 2021 as a place for patriots to gather and be encouraged and equipped through political speeches, activism training, music, and networking under one roof. Held at the Phoenix Convention Center, AmFest has grown into one of the largest and most influential gatherings on the political right.
Last December was the first AmFest held without its beloved founder, a weekend set aside to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy and carry on the mission he started. His widow and TPUSA’s new CEO, Erika Kirk, has kept the event pointed at what her late husband cherished most: faith, freedom, and love of country. This year’s theme, “Restore the Culture,” carries that same charge.
Last year’s convention drew a massive crowd of 30,000 people, and this year promises to be another knockout. Vice President JD Vance closed that first AmFest without Charlie by asking the crowd: “If you miss Charlie Kirk, do you promise to fight [for] what he died for?” He returns this December as a headliner, alongside Erika Kirk, Donald Trump Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and many of the biggest names in the conservative world.
BlazeTV hosts Nick Freitas and John Doyle will be on the stage as well, bringing the same straight talk their audiences already know them for.
Nick Freitas is a Green Beret combat veteran and former Virginia delegate who built his platform on clear, unapologetic arguments for faith, family, and liberty. On BlazeTV’s “Making the Argument,” he takes on today’s biggest fights surrounding culture, policy, and the ideas underneath them and walks his audience through why they matter and how to combat them.
John Doyle hosts “The John Doyle Show,” a BlazeTV program designed to cut through the noise and speak the truth about where the country actually stands. Younger and blunter than a lot of the names on the AmFest program, he has made his name pushing back on sanitized history, soft official narratives, and leaders who talk about restoring America without meaning it.
AmericaFest 2026 runs December 17-20. The weekend is built to carry forward what Charlie started, keep the mission he set in motion, and mark the country he spent his life defending. Tune in to join the fight and catch Nick Freitas and John Doyle live from the AmericaFest stage.
Blaze News Poll Watch: Your new home for tracking the 2026 midterms
With Election Day less than a month away, keeping up with the midterm elections can mean sifting through a constant stream of polls, headlines, and competing narratives.
That’s why Blaze Media created Poll Watch — a new destination designed to streamline the process of following the races that matter to you.
Poll Watch brings Senate, governor, and House races together in one place, giving you a straightforward way to follow polling and see how races are shaping up as Election Day approaches.
Track more than 200 races in one place
Instead of jumping between different polling sites and news stories, Poll Watch puts the races together in one centralized destination.
The platform features more than 2,000 polls across 200+ races, covering major Senate, governor, and House contests.
Whether you’re following a competitive race across the country or keeping a close eye on an election closer to home, Poll Watch makes it easier to find the information you’re looking for.
See the Blaze polling average
Individual polls can tell part of the story, but a single survey can also be an outlier.
Poll Watch provides a Blaze News polling average designed to put individual polls into context. The average is calculated transparently and updated throughout the day as new polling becomes available.
The goal is simple: Give readers another way to look at the available polling data without having to interpret every individual survey in isolation.
And there’s an important distinction to keep in mind: Poll Watch shows polling averages, not predictions. Rather than telling you what will happen on Election Day, Poll Watch provides polling data so you can see where the races stand based on the information currently available.
Follow the elections in your state
National races can dominate election coverage, but many of the most consequential contests are happening closer to home.
Poll Watch includes a map that makes it easy to find major elections in your state. It’s a quick way to see which Senate, House, and governor races are on the ballot and follow the contests that matter most to you.
Create your own watch list
Because everyone follows elections differently, Poll Watch lets you customize the experience with the My Races feature. Star the races you want to follow and build a personal watch list of the contests you care about most. Your selected races are available across your devices, and you are able to see when new polling comes in. That means you can spend less time searching for updates and more time following the races themselves.
Poll Watch is included with your Blaze News subscription
Poll Watch is included at no additional cost for Blaze News, BlazeTV+, and Blaze Unlimited subscribers.
There’s no separate purchase or upgrade required. Simply sign in using the same email associated with your Blaze subscription. If you’re already signed in to TheBlaze.com, you can get started right away.
With Election Day approaching, Poll Watch offers a single place to keep track of the races, polling, and elections you care about most.
Start tracking the midterms with Poll Watch today.
Not a subscriber? Join today and get $40 off a BlazeTV+ annual subscription with code POLLWATCH40.
Exclusive: DNSFilter censors some conservative media, including Blaze News
DNSFilter is a popular internet security service built to block malicious or misleading websites and thwart cyber threats. It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets, labeling them as “contentious” and “misinformation” so that users don’t see their content, and Blaze News is on the blacklist.
Earlier this week, we received a tip from a reader who said the reader couldn’t access Blaze News on a device with DNSFilter enabled. Naturally, we downloaded a free trial of the service and tested a litany of conservative and left-wing media. You’ll never guess what we found.
It is supposed to protect users. Instead, it is censoring some conservative media outlets.
Looking at 26 popular conservative media outlets, five websites were met with a content warning, stating that each domain “is blocked because it's associated with the Contentious & Misinformation category.” These five sites were:
- Blaze News
- the Daily Caller
- One America News Network
- The Federalist
- RedState
As for the rest of conservative media at large, big names like the Daily Wire, Breitbart, Turning Point USA, Fox News, and the Babylon Bee were all permitted without any content warnings.
Naturally, we wanted to know if this phenomenon extended to the other side of the media aisle. Maybe we weren’t alone.
First, we tested several corporate sites, including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. All of them made it through DNSFilter, despite their track records for spinning stories.
The real test would be how DNSFilter responded to the openly contentious sites on the left. If these outlets weren’t blocked, clearly we had evidence of bias within the "contentious & misinformation" category. Sadly, our hunch was correct. When navigating to the Guardian, Slate, and Vice, all three sites directed straight to the homepage without an alert. They were all allowed.
By the time our test concluded, not a single left-wing media site on our list was blocked.
RELATED: Government funded a weapon to fight terrorism — and then tested it on Blaze Media
This isn’t the first time Blaze News has been caught up in a mass censorship campaign. If you recall, we moved to a subscription model in 2023 after Big Tech suppressed our content and stifled our ad revenue. Thankfully, readers like you support our work so that we can continue to cover stories like these. Thank you.
Blaze News was also among several conservative sites that were blacklisted by NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index in an effort to demonetize us and kick us off the internet. To these organizations' chagrin, we survived. Needless to say, we’ve been here before, and we’re exposing all of it.
Armed with evidence, Blaze News has contacted DNSFilter for comment. We wanted to know why the service targeted specific conservative media outlets while leaving others on both sides of the aisle untouched. We did not receive a response before the deadline.
We did, however, receive a comment from Amber Duke, the editor in chief of the Daily Caller:
Secretly blacklisting legitimate news organizations as "misinformation" is exactly the kind of censorship that fueled the rise of independent and new media. Americans are sick of Big Tech gatekeepers telling them what they’re allowed to read. If this company has decided to summarily block our content, it needs to explain who made that decision and why.
If you use DNSFilter, you can whitelist Blaze News by going to the Policies page in your account. Select Filtering and edit your policy. On the allow list, add “TheBlaze.com” and save.
If you don’t have access to your DNSFilter settings, please ask your administrator to follow the directions above. Alternatively, the administrator can disable the “contentious & misinformation” category altogether. Clearly it is incorrect, biased, or both.
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Victim 0001: A chaplain's last walk into the fire
In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus remarks that a good shepherd will leave 99 sheep to go looking for one that is lost. FDNY chaplain Father Mychal Judge spent most of his life living out some version of that — with alcoholics, AIDS patients, and firefighters on their worst nights.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, at 68 years old, Fr. Mychal did it one last time. He left his friary and walked straight toward the fire that everyone else in the city was running from.
'I'm not finished here.'
Inside the North Tower lobby, Fr. Mychal stayed close to the men he had come for. He moved through falling debris and the bodies of people who had jumped, stopping again and again to kneel, to anoint, to bless, and to pray for whoever was in front of him — the dying and the already dead, treated with the same unhurried attention.
Someone offered him a way out, a seat with the officials heading somewhere safer. He said no. "I'm not finished here."
Witnesses remembered his lips moving without stopping, the same prayer said over and over into the noise: "Jesus, please end this. God, please end this."
He was reportedly still on his knees, mid-rite, when the South Tower gave way at 9:59 a.m. The collapse sent a wave of debris through the North Tower lobby, killing him where he knelt before the building he was standing in had even begun to fall.
A cop, two firefighters, an emergency worker, and a Wall Street employee who had wandered over to help found Fr. Mychal first, feeling through a smoke-choked lobby until someone tripped over his body in the dark.
A photographer caught the moment he was recovered — ash-covered men cradling a priest between them, his body carried like something too precious to be dropped.
RELATED: The little chapel that didn't lose a single window on 9/11
It didn't take long for people to name what they were looking at in that image. They started calling it "the American Pietà" — the same posture as the Virgin Mother cradling her Son.
Because his was the first body to reach the medical examiner that day, the paperwork simply read: Victim 0001. Of the nearly 3,000 people who died that morning, his name went down first — the shepherd, oddly, arriving ahead of the flock.
One firefighter later said as much himself. It felt fitting that Fr. Mychal would go first, as if he had simply done what he always did — walked ahead, so that whoever came next wouldn't be walking into the dark alone.
Fr. Mychal was carried the rest of the way to St. Peter's Church and laid before the altar.
The street where his friary still stands now carries his name. And every September, firefighters and family retrace his final walk — from the church where he served, to the firehouse nearest where he fell — covering once a year on foot the same distance he covered without once looking back.
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