Erika Kirk on the final day of Turning Point USA's annual AmericaFest conference at the Phoenix Convention Centre in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo / Getty Images
The microphone Charlie Kirk had been holding when he was fatally shot was displayed onstage, encased in glass, under a spotlight.
The T-shirt design that he was wearing – “FREEDOM,” in a sans serif bold across the chest – was for sale in at least four colours, US$35 ($60) each.
And the tent from Kirk’s “American Comeback Tour”, the very one under which he took his last question, was on display in the exhibition hall.
There was a ring light stationed nearby so attendees could pose for pictures underneath it, in the spot where Kirk last stood.
Kirk is gone, and yet he was everywhere at AmericaFest, the annual end-of-year gathering held by Turning Point USA.
His image was plastered on the walls, sometimes three storeys tall, his hand raised in a victorious gesture. His voice carried over the sound system during set breaks on the main stage.
His name was on the tongues of the speakers: “For Charlie”, many said. His presence was palpable to attendees, some of whom showed me goose bumps on their arms as proof.
The undertones of religious martyrdom were not subtle.
“There’s somebody else that was on Earth that accomplished a lot in a short time just like Charlie,” Ken Paxton, Texas’ Republican attorney-general, told the crowd on Saturday. “His name was Jesus.”
That’s a lot of pressure for the people running Turning Point in Kirk’s stead.
Jesus had apostles; Kirk has his wife and his friends. Those lieutenants and confidants have been left to steer the organisation he founded through a make-or-break moment, now that Kirk’s “on permanent assignment with God”, as right-wing activist Jack Posobiec, one such ally, put it.
Turning Point spokesperson Andrew Kolvet, who now hosts Kirk’s podcast, said it this way: “We were all behind Charlie’s enormous shadow, and now we’ve had to step out”.
Kirk’s shocking death and subsequent veneration had drawn droves of newcomers to “AmFest” – not just youngsters who are involved with Turning Point on their campuses but their older family members, too. What they found, in addition to the usual fellowship and pyrotechnics, was a movement struggling to fill the void the late founder had left.
On Saturday morning local time, Tyler Bowyer sat on a velvet couch behind a curtain backstage at the Phoenix Convention Centre, a makeshift greenroom. His eyes flicked up to the flat-screen monitor, to conservative commentator Brandon Tatum taking the stage to columns of smoke and music so loud it shook the floor.
“It feels like you’re missing a co-pilot, flying the plane by yourself,” Bowyer told me.
Bowyer is the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the group’s political arm. He’s also the person who’d first connected Charlie Kirk to his wife, Erika.
Over four years of marriage, Erika Kirk had only occasionally found her way into the Turning Point spotlight – most often as Charlie’s feminine foil, exemplifying how to prioritise Christ, a strong marriage, and raising children (in that order!) over having a career.
Now Erika is Turning Point’s chief executive, helming the organisation as her husband had requested, and Bowyer is part of the inner circle running the organisation via group texts, which revolve around the question: What would Charlie do?
For now, there’s “not a lot of debate” over what he would want, Bowyer added. That’s why Erika stepped onstage to open her husband’s “Super Bowl”, as she called it, and endorsed Vice-President JD Vance as the successor to US President Donald Trump.
“This has been very much in line with the gospel of Charlie Kirk,” Bowyer said of the Vance endorsement and programme in general.
More than 30,000 attendees poured down escalators into the basement of the convention centre in a multigenerational smear of red, white and blue. It was the American flag on everything: on ties, on vests, on hair ribbons, on the front of US$400 Ralph Lauren sweaters.
What those present were for and against, they proclaimed on their T-shirts: “Christ over Culture”, “Faith Over Fear”, “Proverbs Over Algorithms”.
And, of course, there was Kirk iconography. AJ Yvette, a member of the Dallas County GOP, wore leggings printed with images of the Kirk couple that she’d had custom made for the weekend.
“It was just so sudden and tragic,” Doug Fabian, a father from Idaho who came with his wife and teenage daughters, said of Kirk’s death. “We just wanted to be here and support what Charlie was doing.”
“If he was willing to die for this – like literally die – what more could we be doing?” said Audrey Vitarisi, a high school student from Walnut Creek, California, who’d skipped exams to be there.
“Like we’re scared of persecution, we’re scared of people not liking us – no, he literally died for this cause and it’s super admirable.”
Whatever swag they didn’t bring, they could buy in the exhibition hall.
For the cool girls, there were ball caps proclaiming “Bannon was right” and sequin jackets touting the “Gulf Of America” in bold varsity letters.
For the New Right intellectuals, there were copies of neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin’s Gray Mirror and attractive new printings of the Hardy Boys series from Passage Press.
For the Maha-curious, there was a “miracle molecule” tea that promised to improve energy and a vibrating platform that promised, among other benefits, to vanquish pain.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service had recruiters stationed along a back wall.
Damaris Visan, 20, of Portland Oregon, said she wanted to spend time with like-minded conservatives.
“Every day I am talking with transgenders, with gay people, people that don’t agree with my beliefs morally or biblically,” Visan said. “So I wanted to come here and get inspired to go home and get more energy for standing stronger for my beliefs.”
This year’s AmFest is the final Turning Point event that Kirk had a hand in planning. He’d chosen the opening night’s line-up – which included conservative heavyweights Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles and Tucker Carlson – with the knowledge that such a combination could get a little spicy, Turning Point leaders said.
Shapiro took aim at Nick Fuentes, a far-right provocateur whose growing influence Shapiro was keen to extinguish. He criticised Carlson for hosting Fuentes on his show; among other topics, Fuentes had used the opportunity to talk about his concerns about “organised Jewry in America”.
Later in the programme, when it was Carlson’s turn to speak, the former Fox News host called Shapiro “pompous” and said he’d laughed at the Daily Wire co-founder’s speech backstage. “Calls to deplatform at a Charlie Kirk event?” Carlson quipped to the audience. “That’s hilarious.”
Knowles had the tricky speaking slot right between Shapiro and Carlson. “I’m caught between, uh ... what would be two good poles?” the Daily Wire personality told me before he took the stage. “I don’t know, Carthage and Rome?”
Did he think Kirk imagined things would get this spicy? “Charlie was curating a coalition that could advance the conservative movement,” Knowles said. “In his absence, the factions within and without have risen up again.”
Fuentes wasn’t the only young, outre influencer haunting AmFest in absentia. Candace Owens, once a Turning Point star, has stoked conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing and questioned the loyalty of his inner circle, even going so far as to suggest that Kirk was somehow “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA”.
As outrageous as Owens’ claims can be – she’s currently being sued for defamation by the President and first lady of France, for example, for alleging that Brigitte Macron was born a man – her influence, like Fuentes’, poses a potential problem for Turning Point in a post-Charlie world.
Erika Kirk has drawn a lot of attention and sympathy, including in the mainstream media. But Charlie’s old podcast – after a spike in listenership following his death – has fallen down the charts, according to available data from Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Owens’ podcast ranks among the most popular in the country.
Erika Kirk has publicly said that the conspiracy theories should “stop” and privately met with Owens last week in an apparent bid to cool things down. (Results are pending.)
At AmFest, however, it was Shapiro in the role of attack dog. In addition to barking at Carlson about his Fuentes interview, Shapiro accused his “friend” Megyn Kelly of “cowardice” for failing to condemn Owens. When Kelly took the stage later she retorted: “I don’t think we are friends anymore”.
If none of this right-on-right drama is especially familiar to you, don’t worry.
Some people who attended this conference had no idea what they were talking about, either.
“The first night I was like, ‘What the heck – is there, like, in-house division?’” said Michael Dortignac, 23, a first-time attendee from Orange County, California.
“I was not expecting that. I thought we were on the same team.”
Among the clued-in attendees, however, there was scepticism about the idea of tuning out controversial voices.
“I love Tucker,” Reagan Smith, 22, of Pennsylvania, told me. She doesn’t support Fuentes, but to her, Tucker’s interviews “are way more diverse than what Ben Shapiro does”, she said. “I think Ben Shapiro is very close-minded.”
“I believe a little bit of all of it,” said Teddi Wengert, an attendee from Arizona. “I definitely understand Candace’s perspective. I think there’s weird stuff that we need answers to. But also, I don’t know. I definitely agree with a lot of the other voices, too. And I think there’s a place in this movement – in this conservative movement – for all those voices.”
“It’s like what Tucker said, everyone has their own autonomy,” said Visan, the 20-year-old from Oregon. “Literally anyone can say what they want. That’s how it is.”
To be sure, there was plenty of common cause at AmFest.
At this conference, they believe DEI is bad, abortion is murder, borders must be as airtight as the nuclear family, and America is a Christian nation.
And they also think that, for whatever problems conservatives need to work out among themselves, the liberals are in worse shape. (“Democrats don’t care about anything other than maybe transing their kids,” Vance said onstage.)
Erika reminded attendees that her husband welcomed debate. As for the fractures in the Maga coalition that have emerged in Kirk’s absence: “It proved even more, once he was assassinated, how much of a peacemaker he was,” she said.
Others aren’t so sure Kirk could have kept the infighting at bay. “I think that these disagreements would have happened whether Charlie was here or not,” Bowyer said.
Either way, navigating those disagreements now falls to the apostles.
The massive crowd and high-wattage programme at AmFest showed how powerful Kirk’s legacy still is, at the moment.
The conference closed with an appearance by the Vice-President – and a surprise appearance from rapper Nicki Minaj, who joined Erika Kirk onstage to discuss her newfound support for Trump. Kolvet told me Turning Point’s allies in the White House have promised to have the organisation’s back.
And what happens later, if the memory of Kirk is no longer fresh or potent enough, to bind together the right, with all its ideological factions and media dominions?
“Listen, you have to fight with the army you’ve got,” Kolvet said when I asked him about this. “The one way you dishonour Charlie’s legacy is you throw in the towel and you quit.”
As attendees funnelled out of the convention hall, escalators took them past a timeline of Kirk’s life.
September 10, the day of his passing, was marked as “legacy cemented”. There was an image of Kirk, eternally 31, throwing hats out to fans at his final event.
“It hasn’t sunk in yet that he is dead and not coming back,” Alex Clark, who hosts Turning Point’s Culture Apothecary podcast, told me earlier in the weekend.
“And I think that the first time it’s really going to hit us is in the quiet after AmericaFest.”
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