AmericaFest this year felt less like a conference and more like a call to arms, and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman delivered one of the clearest wake-up calls of the weekend when he warned plainly that “we are in a survival situation.” The emotional heft of his remarks — about duty to yourself, your allies, and the country — landed because Keeperman spoke from experience as both a culture warrior and a publisher who’s stared down Big Tech and the academic wrecking ball.
Keeperman isn’t a random podcaster; he’s the co?star of BlazeTV’s new Rufo & Lomez show and the CEO of Passage Press, a figure who has earned his platform by calling out the rot in our institutions. That background matters: he’s not selling panic, he’s diagnosing a collapse of institutions and norms that conservatives have been warning about for years, and he did so with the calm, disciplined clarity audiences crave.
AmericaFest itself was the right venue for this kind of blunt talk — Turning Point’s big December gathering in Phoenix drew tens of thousands and was saturated with tributes to Charlie Kirk and fierce debate about where our movement goes next. The crowd there is not timid; they want truth and they want leaders who will fight, not moderate away our principles to appease a hostile media class.
What made Keeperman’s speech cut through the noise was his personal story of gratitude toward Charlie Kirk: he spoke of meeting Kirk after starting his publishing company, of learning even from someone younger than him, and of how obligations to comrades and country must come before ego. That humility — paired with a ferocious insistence that conservatives must stop pretending the cultural and institutional decay is someone else’s problem — is exactly the medicine we need.
Let’s be honest: the left will mock the language of “survival” because it exposes their failure. They prefer to paper over collapse with virtue signaling and victim politics while outsourcing the real work of nation-building to bureaucrats and CEOs who profit from chaos. Keeperman’s speech was a rebuke to that complacency and a loud reminder that freedom does not preserve itself.
If AmFest showed anything beyond grief for Charlie’s absence, it was that conservatives still have the energy to rebuild and the will to defend what’s left of free institutions. The weekend’s program — from policy arguments to cultural fights — proved that this movement is more than personalities; it’s a network of people ready to act, and Keeperman’s blunt framing of our moment should galvanize, not paralyze, those patriots.
Hardworking Americans don’t need another think piece; they need straightforward leadership and a plan. Keeperman offered the kind of sober, unromantic clarity that moves people from outrage to organization, and conservatives would do well to heed his call: prepare, organize, and retake the institutions that matter. The future won’t be handed to us by elites or Silicon Valley overlords — it will be taken by those who refuse to surrender.
