How two mid-tier MAGA influencers ended up in a scrabble in the gravel.
Will Sommer at The Bulwark:
SOMETIMES, THINGS GET A LITTLE CRAZY at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA conventions. Maybe that’s to be expected—after all, this is the new right’s premier youth organization, hosting parties in hotspots like Miami. But it does seem like there’s been an unusual amount of eyebrow-raising behavior in the House of Kirk lately. [...] After I covered that sordid episode, several people asked me: What exactly happens at these conventions? While they’re mostly speeches and Benny Johnson dancing and smoke machines, I do have another story to relate today about outlandish behavior at a TPUSA convention. This situation did not involve a carnal act, but a violent one. And months later, TPUSA is still dealing with the consequences.
Let me set the scene for you. It’s late December 2024: Trump has won, the right is ascendant again, and TPUSA partygoers are living it up in Phoenix for the group’s annual “AmericaFest.” Ben Shapiro and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are on the speakers list. And for two men, the night will take a grave turn in a gravel lot. Let’s meet our combatants. There’s Bryson Gray, a popular Christian conservative rapper with songs like “Trump Is Your President” and “Gun Totin’ Bible Thumper.”
Gray will face Zack Bonfilio, a less prominent but still very polarizing MAGA personality known as “Misfit Patriot.” Bonfilio, to his credit, is a “misfit” because he often asks his fellow Trump supporters to have a modicum of decency—he’s perhaps best known on the right for criticizing MAGA’s embrace of accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate. In an X message exchange, Gray told me he was “attacked because of my faith” and said TPUSA lied about the circumstances of the fight. Bonfilio told me the fight was “the dumbest thing to write about.” (But hey, it’s my newsletter, so that’s up to me to decide.) TPUSA didn’t respond to a request for comment. The trouble started in a hotel lobby.
In a video posted after the fight, Gray said he was there talking to Jimmy Levy, the Christian singer from the viral “Boycott Target” song who is perhaps best known for his pharaonic beard. Gray, fresh from the Daily Wire party, was feeling good. But then Bonfilio walked up and started talking to him. He was mad that Gray had called a gay friend of Bonfilio’s an “abomination.” Gray later recalled that he stood by his words, telling Bonfilio, “Biblically, he is an abomination, it’s just that simple.” Bonfilio exchanged a few more words with Gray, then slapped him. In an X post months later, Bonfilio claimed he “slapped [Gray] 3 feet off his barstool,” though he conceded he had had too much to drink. According to Gray, Bonfilio then fled. In X messages to the now-retreating Misfit Patriot, Gray offered a deal. Either they would fight like men in a proper boxing match, or Gray would press criminal charges over the slap. Bonfilio agreed to the fight.
Still, a location was hard to secure. Gray would later claim they could’ve fought in a gym if Bonfilio hadn’t procrastinated on deciding whether they would brawl. Instead, in Gray’s telling, the pair met up at night in a random gravel lot by a road. Fortunately, someone took a video of the showdown that happened there, so we can judge who won this surreal fight over how the MAGA movement should handle gay rights. At first, there’s a lot of dancing around and circling each other. But the brawl turns against Bonfilio when, in a moment of hubris, he tries to flip Gray over, pro-wrestling style. Instead, Bonfilio slips on the gravel and bangs his own head. Gray then crouches over the stricken Misfit Patriot and starts whaling on him.
But Gray gets in only a few blows—he later claimed in a video that he pulled most of his punches to avoid injuring Bonfilio so badly that he might risk a prison term—before Bonfilio yanks on Gray’s leg and trips him. That is apparently enough for Gray, who decides to get out while he can plausibly declare victory.
“Oh my God!” Gray says, speed-limping away from Bonfilio. “That’s a fucking street fight!” The next morning, Gray put out a post-fight statement recorded from his hotel bed, saying he had warned TPUSA that Bonfilio might try to fight him again later on in the convention. Right-wing journalist Andy Ngo reposted the video of the fight itself, and soon the scuffle was the talk of right-wing media. Frustratingly, to my mind, there was no clear winner. On the SimpCast, a raunchy podcast for conservative women, an all-female panel was similarly unimpressed with the fisticuffs. Reactions from the hosts ranged from “This is supposed to be a fight, not a dance” to “They look like they want to make love.”
At last year’s TPUSA AmericaFest, a brawl between two mid-tier MAGA influencers broke out and became the object of discussion in right-wing circles. The combatants were the militantly anti-LGBTQ+ rapper Bryson Gray and Zack Bonfilio (aka “Misfit Patriot”).
