Charlie Kirk’s Memory Is the Only Thing Uniting AmericaFest Attendees, by Joe Lowndes – 23 December 2025

From New Lines Magazine

This year’s edition of Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest conference, held last weekend in Phoenix, was, first and foremost, a tribute to the memory of Charlie Kirk. That isn’t surprising: The assassination of the conservative organization’s founder just three months ago has left it reeling. TPUSA’s leaders and members are traumatized by his death, and the organization has come under severe internal strain. The only point of agreement seems to be how much they miss their founder.

Tribute is an understatement, really. Wherever attendees walked inside the exhibit hall of the Phoenix Convention Center, they were met with 50-foot images of Kirk’s face, or a 50-yard timeline of his life depicting all its major events, or a giant image of George Washington in military garb astride a horse, next to the words: “Choose courage. Reject comfort. Continue the work. For Charlie.” Even the side of an escalator depicted Kirk’s face and hand gesturing upward toward the word “Freedom.”

It would be a mistake to imagine that AmericaFest attendees found any of this unnerving. Among the more than 30,000 people who gathered for this year’s event were thousands wearing versions of the T-shirt that Kirk was wearing when he was shot. And if you needed one, you were never more than 100 feet from a vendor who had them in all sizes and colors, short-sleeved and long — next to baskets of wristbands emblazoned with “We Are All Charlie Kirk,” mugs, hats, carved wood depictions, oil paintings and countless other renderings of the slain leader.

Perhaps the oddest commemoration, nestled between a militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle and a semitruck bed bearing a mural of Donald Trump and Kirk shaking hands, was a replica of the “Prove Me Wrong” tent where Kirk was killed, complete with a ring light for selfies. A continual stream of attendees wanted their photos taken inside. Once they were in, though, many were unsure what to do. Should they smile like tourists, or look somber like mourners? The very microphone he was holding when he was killed was encased in a clear plastic reliquary, completing both the kitsch and sacred aspects of the pop-up martyry.

But Kirk’s ghost was perhaps felt most of all on the main stage of AmericaFest, where his life and legacy were less a site of reverence than of conflict. How could it be otherwise? He was the one thing everyone could agree on, yet major figures in the movement all wanted to claim him for different ends, as deep fissures in the organization and in the broader American right came to the surface. For the first time in its history, AmericaFest was less a feel-good gathering of the faithful than a donnybrook that left the future of the organization in question.

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Joe Lowndes is a Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Charlie Kirk’s Memory Is the Only Thing Uniting AmericaFest Attendees, by Joe Lowndes – 23 December 2025

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