I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, one week and two days after Charlie Kirk was killed in Orem, Utah. I wanted to see the memorial that his grieving organization, Turning Point USA, was holding in the Arizona suburbs. In the last nine days, Charlie Kirk had gone from right-wing celebrity to martyred hero. It felt like something had tipped in our culture, and I thought I might be able to get a better sense of what that thing was if I attended the funeral.
The day before the memorial, I went to TPUSA headquarters in southern Phoenix. Thousands of people had left flowers, prayers, songs, Bibles, notes and tears along the street, which was blocked off and guarded by local police. Kirk was from the Chicago suburbs but had found a home in this Sunbelt city, where notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio had once held sway. MAGA-style politics had an accepted place in local debates here, while suburban sprawl had created an atmosphere friendly to TPUSA’s aspirations. I spent 15 hours at Kirk’s vigil, from morning until night, talking to the constantly rotating cast of mourners. Most of those I encountered treated the street as a place that was sacred. It was quiet and occasionally solemn. People talked about God and Charlie in the same breath. Politics seemed far from their lips.
I met a man named Tim, who told me he felt called to come, so he flew down from Nebraska. He said losing Charlie was like losing a friend. He told me Kirk was an inspiration to him, maybe more in death than in life. He recounted an interview he’d seen on YouTube with Kirk’s wife, Erika Kirk. “She said that he had never raised his voice at her or the children. Not once, not ever,” he said. “Man, that really showed me how I gotta be a better man, a better husband and father, ya know?” He stumbled over his words, almost catching himself from speaking but not quite.
“I’ve yelled at my wife and kids tons of times just in the week since he died,” he said.
At the memorial the next day, there was a pen set up in the middle of the sun-soaked asphalt. Five people stood inside it, each representing a different issue: Palestine, queer rights, anti-ICE, anti-Charlie and a single anti-abortion protester who didn’t seem to know that she was surrounded by 100,000 people who agreed with her. I thought maybe she was in the wrong place. After an hour or more of silence, she screamed at the people standing in line to go into the memorial.
“Archangel Michael and the saints of murder, I call upon you to take these killers to hell!”
We all shut up and listened.
“You see where the nicey nice got you?” she shrieked. “Nicey nice gets you shot! No more nicey nice!”
Another woman who had been screaming the joys of Christ at a queer rights protester, stopped, turned to the pro-lifer and said, “Hey, stop with your witch bullshit!”
I wondered how I could photograph something like this: the flags, the men in ties, the women standing with their Madonnas? I looked at the children wrapped in fearful arms. I looked at the hands — 200,000 hands of 100,000 people, silhouetted against the sky, their nuclear shadows burned against the clouds.
I wanted my photographs to dive below the sheen of spectacle, the scintillating surface of America, but I was constantly taken myself by the glitter of it all. I took a picture of a short-haired young kid in a tie, standing with a group of people holding a massive flag. I thought for a second, I’ve done it — I’ve captured the intersection of America-first youth and 1950s nostalgia that marks this strange moment in our history. But when I looked at the image later, I didn’t see any of that; it was just another picture of the surface, the sheen, the glitter.
Everyone’s vision of Kirk — “Charlie,” everyone called him, as if he had been their best friend — seemed to come from their own reflections in a funhouse mirror. “He showed me I needed to be a better man. He taught me to be a better Christian. I learned I needed to care more about politics.”
But the world that Charlie Kirk championed felt so lonely. There was no sign of real community, no sense of support. Instead, there was a fear that came from a vision of a nonexistent alternate reality. People kept telling me that it was the fault of trans people that a cis man had shot Charlie. They told me that Kirk was killed because of his faith. They told me that Democrat terrorists hated him because he believed in God. They told me he was a martyr, that he was the reason that people were coming to God in great waves around the globe. My head swam in the heat of midday. The memorial felt nothing like the vigil from the previous day; it was a Trump rally, a MAGA demonstration, not a funeral.
I took the same picture over and over again. I saw it everywhere: a woman alone with a toddler in her arms, looking terrified as the men around her screamed about a world that had lost the face of God, a world in which liberals want your babies dead, a world in which our souls are being corrupted by people crossing borders. After a while, I couldn’t stop seeing those women — they were everywhere, at night at the vigil, alone under the hot sun in a parking lot, surrounded by men who ignored them, offering no comfort or support as they proclaimed the holiness that was Charlie Kirk.
Underneath it all, I saw a loneliness that overwhelmed the entire weekend.
Produced with support from the Magnum Foundation.
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