It’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am driving a cream-colored Hummer H3 with side decals in the style of a Lake Havasu tramp stamp. This car is the real deal. It has shiny, star-shaped hubcaps and a rack of LEDs on the grill that can turn any pedestrian parking lot into a crime scene. Aesthetically, it seems to trigger something instinctual in certain male nervous systems. As I pull up to a red light on Seventh Street, the man in the car next to me rolls down his window and lets out an obligatory, high-pitched Rebel Yell. I return a single-thumb salute. Together we join the flow of lifted trucks and Jeeps with flags waving from the tailgates — not the little 9/11 garden-stick models, but heavy-duty mothers whose clapping sound does a damn good impression of a gunshot. Trump 2024, Don’t Tread on Me, and ol’ glory are all firing into the breeze as we shoot headlong toward downtown Phoenix, home of Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest. 

AmericaFest is huge. It features speakers like Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Steve Bannon. It has live music, including pop-country legends Big & Rich, and a whole night dedicated to a megachurch service called Strong Church. It is, as I will be told repeatedly this weekend, the largest grassroots conservative convention in the history of the United States of America, which is itself, as Turning Point USA’s young founder likes to say, the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world. 

Turning Point is the brainchild of 30-year-old Charlie Kirk, a native of Arlington Heights, Illinois, who rose to national prominence 11 years ago when he appeared on Fox News to expose the progressive bias of high school American history textbooks. As he tells it, Kirk started Turning Point from his garage (“like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates”) when he had no money and no resources — just a dream to unite fiscal conservatives like him on college campuses. Kirk himself has never graduated from college (he was rejected from West Point), but his idea found early support in business magnate Bill Montgomery, who wrote a blank check for the then-19-year-old Kirk after watching him debate the merits of free markets with supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “Everyone was captivated,” Montgomery told the Illinois-based Daily Herald in 2013. A decade later, Kirk has built a movement that, for all its controversial antics, has clearly tapped a need: There are a hell of a lot of college kids who don’t fit the postmodern mold their professors have carved out for them. When Turning Point USA hosted its first convention in 2013, there were only a few dozen attendees. AmericaFest 2023 was said to top out around 13,000.

I brushed shoulders with Turning Point back when I was a student at Arizona State University, located just a few miles south of the organization’s headquarters in Phoenix. At the time, the group was mostly a dumping ground for guys who were rejected during rush week and needed a place to wear their old prom suits. I knew one student who was a member, an African-American kid who had tried his hand at stand-up comedy with me. I remember he had his real estate license, and I remember his suit. Of his comedy I cannot say much, but we became buddies of sorts over the course of the semester. 

Then, on my 26th birthday, a stray notification from Facebook pinged my phone like a bolt out of the blue. It was a happy birthday message from my old friend. I clicked his profile. It turned out he had put away his jokes and gone on to have a successful career as an attorney. He was frequently seen in the company of a beautiful blond woman and appeared to have put his real estate license to work. He was evidently an upstanding citizen. Meanwhile, I had done little more with my twenties than accumulate useless degrees and unpublishable writing. 

Worse yet, I had begun the slow drift to the left, which was an insult to my multigenerational Arizona heritage of Goldwater Republicanism. When my father was my age, he was a preacher, a homeowner, and a father (to me). When I turned 26, I was an “aspiring writer,” a renter, and firmly childless. I had also moved to a small Dutch city called Brooklyn. The male brain supposedly stops developing at age 26. Perhaps theirs had developed earlier than mine. 

 My old college friend was not alone, though. Now sucked into my biannual Facebook doom scroll, I saw most of my old acquaintances busy pursuing what I had thought was tacitly agreed to be the most repugnant fate imaginable: suburban domesticity. They got married, bought homes, went to church, and had kids — emphasis on the plural — all well before completing their third decade of existence. Nestled between the new baby photos and property listings on their profiles were short videos of young, attractive people lambasting the urban lifestyle I had succumbed to. Some of these people were pastors, some were influencers, and some were politicians, but all shared a common institutional affiliation: Turning Point USA. 

It turns out that Turning Point is no longer the wannabe fraternity I had once known it to be. Over the past few years, Kirk successfully turned a club for free-market bros into a powerhouse of grassroots conservatism — one that’s deeply rooted in the evangelical faith. Through Turning Point USA and its subsidiary, Turning Point Faith, Kirk now preaches a message of American prosperity founded on Christian family values. His messaging has struck a serious chord with young, mostly white twentysomethings who have hitherto been universally mocked in popular culture for their preposterous desire to get married and have kids and otherwise pursue happiness in ways that had formerly been regarded as normative. Consequently, Turning Point’s largest college chapters are no longer in business schools, but Christian colleges. Kirk’s biggest backers are not stockbrokers, but church leaders. Thus what started as an organization for promoting fiscal conservatism has turned into a full-blown American reawakening, complete with revival events all around the country. AmericaFest 2023 promised to be the biggest tent show that Turning Point had ever pitched. Seeing how many of my friends had fared under its shadow, I went to see if there was room in it for me, too.

The early morning arrivals are all convivial on day one of AmericaFest. The vibe is located somewhere in the matrix of a high school debate tournament, church service, and NFL game. The country club set comfortably lays claim to prime real estate at the coffee bar, while young men and women greet each other with nervous excitement, as though they’ve snuck away from home. They’re joined by the rally circuit faithful, all decked out in red, white, and blue. I watch a man wearing a suit painted to look like a border wall embrace a man in a suit painted with Trump’s mugshot.

“I’m here on vacation,” a woman from Massachusetts tells me proudly. She throws her hands up like she doesn’t know what else to say. “This is my vacation!” 

At first, I’m admittedly confused why anyone would choose to come here on vacation. The convention center has no restaurants, limited seating, and zero access to the weather outside, which is supposed to be gorgeous all weekend. I assumed the whole appeal of hosting an event in Phoenix during the week before Christmas would be the desert’s spectacular climate, but every attraction at “AmFest” will take place underground, in conference halls that offer as little exposure to the outdoors as the belly of a whale. It’s not until a pair of handsome TPUSA staffers usher us down twin sets of escalators that I begin to understand the appeal. 

Much can be said about TPUSA staffers, upon whose shoulders the next four days of speakers, sponsors, vendors, concessions, and logistics will depend, but for now you should know that the first two I meet are representative of the whole: white, young, and good-looking in an athletic sort of way. The coeds are particularly stunning and seem to give off a perpetual post-workout glow. I mention this because much is made of the supposed gulf in conventional attractiveness between young conservatives and leftists; in the case of the TPUSA females, I concur that the gap is indeed undeniable. They all look like cheerleaders. These women would not have made their faces to shine upon me in college, but today they are all gorgeous smiles. They give off an air of easy confidence that is somehow both motherly and sexy. 

Their male counterparts are less inspiring. Whereas the TPUSA ladies are clearly here because grassroots leadership paired with motherhood represents the absolute zenith of conservative femininity, TPUSA males give off the distinct impression of having tried, and failed, to succeed at a more prototypically masculine enterprise. They trail the coeds by a few digits on the hotness scale, which manifests in subtle but obvious ways: most are a shave below average height, showing early potential in the gut region. They have uninspired haircuts, often to conceal premature male-pattern baldness, and a pent-up eagerness to please. Nobody would call these guys ugly, necessarily, but nor would anyone — TPUSA coeds especially — confuse them with the apex-predators of Greek row. During the next four days not a single TPUSA staffer, male or female, will fail to offer me five-star level hospitality.

People ooh and aah as we pass under a landing that’s decked out floor to ceiling in decorative AmericaFest wallpaper. Phones emerge, many on hand-held gimbals, whose flashes cast our shadows on the wall as we’re carried downward to Sponsor Hall.

One of the two main showrooms at the convention center, Sponsor Hall is large enough to house the Spruce Goose. The room is swathed in deep blue carpet and lit like a Costco. As I enter, the scent of fried concessions mixes with essential oil diffusers, creating a thick, bewildering fragrance. Vendor booths are laid out in a series of three rectangles. Standard booths are the width of a single fold-out table and run north to south in rows of ten. The bigger players share rows of five. The atmosphere is that of a locker room that has just witnessed a coach’s pre-game hype speech. Everyone is raring to go. 

The majority of the 109 booths in Sponsor Hall repackage every service you can imagine into a Conservative Christian brand. I discover Conservative Christian athleisure wear, fire pits, diapers, basketball shoes, makeup, planners, audiobooks, jewelry, and room diffusers. There is a Conservative Christian digital marketplace called PublicSquare and a Conservative Christian mobile network called Patriot Mobile. There’s Conservative Christian healthcare, payment processing, and credit unions (“If you love your country and you love Jesus, you deserve a better financial partner”). There are two distinct Conservative Christian water companies: Freedom 2.0 and Woke Tears. After noticing that a Freedom 2.0 tagline reads “Bottled with Woke Tears,” I ask the brand rep if the two companies are partners.

“Ah, no,” he says shiftily. “But, I mean, it’s all just water at the end of the day.” 

I sip Conservative Christian coffee and check out the Conservative Christian comic books. There’s a complete set of Bible comics, including a thick volume for the Book of Revelation. I’m generally a KJV guy, but I have to admit the illustrated Revelation is fucking awesome. Chapter six includes an illustration of Death wearing black steel armor and a triple-pronged weightlifting belt, sitting atop his smoking horse Hades, holding a scale for human souls fashioned out of a crow’s skull. If Marvel Studios doesn’t option this stuff they are frankly out of their minds. I buy two copies.

After a quick trip to the john, I check out the merch tables, where there are two styles of couture on offer. The first is deadpan graphic tees and bedazzled MAGA caps. It’s all kind of archaic, but also avant-garde. I can’t be the only person who finds much of this MAGA merch, or at least the people who wear it, genuinely beautiful. There is an enviable freedom in their sheer rodomontade. It’s difficult to believe someone who says they don’t care about your opinion if they’re dressed in ironed pants and a button-down shirt. It’s the kind of outfit that in all its manifestations screams “conformity.” But put on a shirt that says “Just Got My DNA Test Back Turns Out I’m 100% LIB SLAYER” and I pretty much take your word as gospel truth. My favorites on offer include a handbag screen-printed with Google images of Melania Trump ($250), a rhinestone purse shaped like a glock ($400), and a graphic tee featuring the Geico Gecko sporting Trump’s signature pompadour ($25, and fits me great). 

“Now that one is cute,” a middle-aged woman in lavender-tinted sunglasses and bootcut jeans says, nodding towards the gecko. She’s wearing a shirt that features Joe Biden with a photoshopped Hitler mustache. Above and beneath it are the words “Not My Dictator.” I ask who her dictator is, but she just laughs and puts a finger over her lips as if to say shhh.

I wager that you can tell a lot about the future of the American conservative movement on the basis of Turning Point merch. For all its gaudiness, the Trump merch has an undeniable air of originality. It stands out. It’s also surprisingly androgynous — the vast majority of items at the rally booths are sized unisex. The TPUSA merch, on the other hand, is more strictly gendered and conforms to pre-existing pop culture norms by taking millennial or Gen-Z fashion trends and repackaging them to promote conservative principles, which is how you wind up with a knock-off Chanel crop top that says, “No1 Cares About Your Pronouns” or a baby-pink hoodie that says, in flirty lower case, “assume my gender.” It’s all a bit pathetic in a very literal sense — for all the community they’ve managed to find with each other, young conservatives still feel left out. But it’s also kind of hot, in a “have my baby” sort of way. Everyone knows that an obsession with sexual purity winds up making every situation a little more horny. I watch a college kid’s eyes go wide as his girlfriend fingers a preppy crew neck that says “Stay at Home Mom University,” and then gives him an imploring look. 

“Buy this for me, babe.”

“The most endangered species in our country today is young white males,” Charlie Kirk declares during the opening address of AmFest. “But masculinity is the answer.”

I’m listening to Kirk at the Speaker Tent, which is nearly twice the size of Sponsor Hall and is packed wall-to-wall. Unlike the hall, the tent is dimly lit by a blue raspberry shade of LED strips that crisscross the ceiling. It feels more like a Miami nightclub than a Baptist revival, with the accompanying sound system and LED screens flanking the stage. The press box is full of “student-journalists,” so I’m forced to take a seat directly in front of a concrete pillar. The woman next to me, Pam, is a retired executive assistant from Dallas who tells me that she, too, is having herself a vacation. She kindly offers me a piece of Big Red and says that she doesn’t mind the pillar because “we can see them all on the TV,” by which she means the jumbotrons. A big, warm woman in a frilly leather skirt and a pair of honky-tonk boots, Pam gives my arm a little squeeze each time Kirk brings up young males, which is a lot.

“Let me give you a picture of a left-wing male,” Kirk says. “A guy with a lisp, zipping around on an electric scooter with a fanny-pack, carrying his birth control, and supporting his wife’s career as he works as a supportive stay-at-home ‘house husband.’ He has a playlist that is exclusively Taylor Swift. The left’s idea of strength is this beta-male’s girlfriend opening a pickle jar for him.” 

A video flashes across the screen. It shows a college kid dressed in skinny jeans and a flannel, with long hair tied back into a bun, hurling insults at a bemused Kirk. I can’t tell if the kid has a lisp; he doesn’t resemble the rest of Kirk’s colorful description either. No matter, the crowd jeers the man-bunned strawman all the same.

“No country was ever saved by a male ‘feminist,’” Kirk continues. “At Turning Point USA, we soundly reject this. We believe that strong, alpha, godly, high testosterone, high achieving, confident, well-armed, and disruptive men are the hope and not the problem in America.”

Young males in the crowd make a distinctive male noise, somewhere between a dog bark and an oorah, as Kirk drives his point home. One thing that needs to be said about Kirk is that he is larger than his internet personality — quite literally. It’s easy to satirize Kirk from a distance — his weaselly face, his bitterness at being rejected from West Point, his posturing as a college-insider when he’s never graduated from college himself. But in person he’s far from your typical right-wing media troll. He is a broad-shouldered man at well over six feet tall, a former varsity basketball player and Eagle Scout, who grew up in the American heartland and married a beauty pageant queen. Physically, Kirk certainly passes the would-grab-a-beer-with-him test, and among the guys around me, he seems to be the living answer to the young man’s blues.

“Young boys and young men are looking for something that they can connect to that gives them purpose, that says it’s okay to be a man,” he tells us. “If you’re a young man here, you may be asking yourself, ‘What should I do with my life?’ Honestly, you should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Ignore the siren song of modernity. I know some parents here might be hesitant about this, but guess what: You’re wrong. I hope you meet your future spouse here and that you have lots of kids.” 

“Hey! That’s a good quote,” Pam says, squeezing my arm again. “If you had me as your assistant, I’d get that down in shorthand.” I feel like I’m supposed to ask Pam if she has a daughter who is single. 

The atmosphere in the tent feels spumy by the time Kirk finishes. It occurs to me that many TPUSA kids have traveled here from Christian colleges with strict rules about gender separation in dormitories. Those rules are not in effect tonight. After a pair of speeches by Christian conservatives Glenn Beck and Patrick Bet-David exhort the collective power of our heterosexual magnetism, the room feels borderline Dionysian. I know this feeling well from my days in the evangelical dating scene. I also know that there’s only one appropriate outlet for this hormone-rich brew: country music. By the time Big & Rich strike up a lusty set of innuendo-filled hits, the room is damp with artificial fog and hot breath. 

Despite the center’s colossal A/C system, I find myself breaking into a sweat. I move near the back of the crowd, where I find a circle of twentysomethings square dancing beneath a spotlit American flag as big as an endzone. I can hear the women’s loud eyes; I can smell men steeling themselves around the ring. Mr. Rich’s voice is standard country, beautifully textured, rough and soft at the same time, like worn suede. Nearby, a girl in a red dress fans herself with a “Jesus and Politics” pamphlet before she’s snatched up by a boy in a wide-brimmed hat, who twirls her under stars and bars as bright as their all-American smiles. 

After a night of jotting down my “impressions” of college girls dancing in daisy dukes, I start day two at mass. Saint Mary’s Basilica in downtown Phoenix is one of the oldest buildings in the city. Its Mission Revival interior is fabulously lit on another cool, clear desert morning. The crowd is overwhelmingly Hispanic, save for scattered TPUSA kids who have stumbled in from the convention center across the street. The scripture reading comes from the story of John the Baptist answering the priests and Levites who question him:

“Then said they unto him, 

What are thou? That we may give an answer unto them that sent us. 

And he said, I am the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness... ” 

Descending back below ground into the blue-lit Speaker Tent, I discover that today’s big event is Strong Church, a TPUSA-themed church service featuring evangelical pastors and big-band Christian worship. I recognize some of the billed names from Kirk’s own backstory: Rob McCoy, pastor at Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks, California, is credited with inspiring Charlie to engage Christian voters; Allie Beth Stuckey, a frequent guest on Kirk’s podcast, has a website featuring lots of loopy cursive fonts and blog posts like “Did Satan Tell ‘Elliot’ Page to Transition?” 

Kirk kicks off the event with a sermon of his own. He ditches the previous night’s navy suit in favor of a plain black t-shirt with the words “Here I Am” stitched across the front (for those of you who grew up evangelical the shirt looks exactly like the one you wear during a baptism). He warms up with the tried-and-true routine of Dem-bashing and RINO-hunting, then takes a long pause. He says that what he’s going to talk about next is something close to his heart. 

“We are in a spiritual war, everybody,” he begins. Amens ring out around the room. “During COVID lockdowns, I was shocked when the bride of Christ shuddered in fear, when we saw the faithful stay at home. When we needed a revival more than ever, the church cowered in fear. And that’s when I realized: The Marxists have taken over the FBI, they’ve taken over our colleges, and they’re taking over our church next.” 

The crowd explodes. In all my years of attending white churches I’ve never heard anything like it. For the next ten minutes, Kirk finds his wheelhouse, delivering a sermon about the biblical injunction for Christians to get involved with politics. He deals in verses like a newly minted seminarian; he spits out lukewarm pastors who act like “cool kids giving Ted Talks at rock concerts” instead of preaching hard Biblical truths; and he tells the segment of his audience who might be hesitant to embrace religion to “get over it.”

“This country was founded by courageous, Bible-believing Christians,” he proclaims. “Turning Point USA seeks on a daily basis to wake up the church and lead a movement to push back against secular totalitarianism in America. One of my favorite sayings in the Bible is the Hebrew phrase hineni: Here I am. Abraham at the binding of Isaac. Here I am. Moses at the burning bush. Here I am. Samuel, Isaiah, Joseph, all being called by the Lord, all responding: Here I am.” 

Pam sniffles next to me. 

“He was preaching right there,” she says. “We just been to church.” 

I sneak out of the tent after Kirk finishes to grab some food before the worship begins. Concessions at AmFest are prohibitively expensive ($10 for a hot dog) so I bum around the Sponsor Hall hoping to score some fruit from the alt-health tables. It’s not until I reach the far recess of the hall that I find Bob and Carolynne Fekete, a generous older couple offering free snacks. The Feketes’ table is in a row of humble booths at AmFest that switch the order of emphasis on the whole “Conservative Christian” thing, and in some cases drop the conservative moniker entirely. Folks here are genuinely friendly; nobody is selling a thing. Most seem to belong to more charismatic branches of Christianity, like Pentecostalism or Seventh-day Adventism. They’re mainly here, I’m told, “to love on people.” Bob and Carolynne Fekete are part of a group called evangelismbillboards.com. They give me a fig bar on condition that I accept a free copy of a book called The Great Controversy.

“It’s about the great controversy between good and evil,” Bob tells me happily. He speaks in a small, diminished voice that sounds trapped. “It’s about faith and truth!” 

The cover of The Great Controversy is split across the middle, with the American Capitol on top and the Vatican pictured beneath. I ask Bob who wrote it. 

“Ellen G. White,” he tells me. White is the founder of Seventh-day Adventism, but for a moment her name draws a blank. Bob is outraged, in a light-hearted way. “Who is she? She’s only the most prolific woman author in world history!”

He shows me chapter 35. “Brilliancy of style is not necessarily an index of pure, elevated thought,” I read. Bob hasn’t stopped smiling at me. He’s got hair coming out of the nooks of his ears and three mismatched pens sticking out of his shirt pocket. The book he’s peddling is a virulently anti-Catholic tract fetishizing the end-times, but he’s not really selling it, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. After about a minute of dialogue on The Great Controversy, he seems to forget about the whole pretense for our conversation and begins chatting freely about his travels. 

“We drove all the way here from North Carolina,” he says. “We go to all of Kirk’s events, Trump rallies, anything really. Usually we fly, but this time we drove.” 

When I ask why he drove this time, he tells me it’s because he’s on vacation, as though that was obvious. 

“Bob’s the one guy who keeps the speed limit,” a man nearby says. “Not that many people do. I’m not even doing it!”

“But God’s truth is free!” Bob says, unbothered by his own non sequitur. “His love is free!” 

I ask if he’s going to attend the worship concert. 

“No,” he says, searching for the reason why. Then it occurs to him. “We have 5,000 books to give away!” 

Bob tells me that he never really sees any speakers at the rallies. It’s not a big interest for him. As he tells me this, his wife Carolynne slips another fig bar into my book and presses the top of my hand gently. I thank them both and promise to return. 

Back in the Speaker Tent the stagehands are setting up for worship. I kill time chewing my fig bar and reading The Great Controversy: “While Romanism is based upon deception, it is not a coarse and clumsy imposture. The religious service of the Roman Church is a most impressive ceremonial. Its gorgeous display and solemn rites fascinate the senses and silence the voice of reason and of conscience. The eye is charmed.” 

I’m interrupted by a swiveling set of stadium lights that concentrate their beams on a ten-member worship band, led by a bearded singer in a fine-cotton denim shirt with pearl buttons. Smoke machines hidden behind stage curtains fill the room with a cloudy mist as the jumbotrons flash a high-definition montage of the church in action, punctuated by a slo-mo shot of a weathered, muddied Jesus bearing his cross towards Golgotha. A rich, ethereal sound fills the room. The crowd does not need to be told to stand. 

“Will you lift your voice with us here tonight!” the lead singer Ryan Visconti calls out. Visconti is the lead pastor at Generation Church, a local megachurch which, according to its statement of values, preaches that “Church Should Be Fun” and that Christians should “Make It Attractive.” All around me the same young men and women who danced breathlessly last night raise their arms to the sky. They look beautiful with their eyes closed and hands held high as the band strikes up a thunderous chorus. This is what living looks like / This is what freedom feels like / This is what Heaven sounds like / We praise You, we praise You. I know a solid number of church tunes by heart but don’t recognize this song, or the two that follow it. After Visconti prays over his audience, I ask the woman next to me, who had sung every word, if she knew any of them by name. Her eyes sparkle as she tells me no.

In local news on Monday morning, a man in a West Valley suburb shot and killed his wife, son, and dog before turning his gun on himself. 

“I’m starting to think we need to bring back the patriarchy,” Jack Posobiec is telling his audience during an 11 AM speech. Posobiec, an editor of the website Human Events, is the first in Monday’s gauntlet of speaking engagements, building toward AmFest’s top-billed speaker, Tucker Carlson. Sadly, Pam is not here to keep me company. She has been replaced by a steady stream of newcomers, all single, middle-aged women. There’s Tatya from Twentynine Palms, whom I discovered plays cards at the same casino as me; Shafre from Massachusetts, who I thought was crying but was instead using a dropper of colloidal silver to cure an eye irritation; and Olivia from Austin, who enthusiastically nodded in agreement throughout Roger Stone’s speech while simultaneously liking every single photo she scrolled past on Instagram. 

I sense an uncomfortable tension between these women and the rhetoric onstage. The young speakers seem to confirm the value of life choices that the people seated next to me clearly have not made. When one speaker mentions how frequently he receives desperate emails from women who “wasted their married years chasing after careers,” Olivia lets out a laugh that sounds like it hurts. I can’t tell if it’s a case of defensive scorn or heartfelt regret, but her reaction makes me think that Turning Point has become not only a refuge for twentysomethings disenchanted by modernity’s insane attitude towards careerism and eroticism, but a sort of therapy for older Americans who have suffered from it. Each of these women attempts to give me some bit of life advice, but the worldview they now labor under precludes any genuine reflection on their own past. As each of them, without fail, plead with me not to vaccinate my (nonexistent) children, their own lives begin to sound like a song sung backward: What real meaning there may have been has become garbled, the lyrics not their own. The confusion at least has the comfort of impersonality; still, I get the feeling the women who sit next to me are all trying to save a child they never had. 

The seven hours I spend seated next to them pass in a red, white, and blue blur. Of course, I do my journalistic due diligence and scribble down the memorable bits of each speech: There is radio host Glenn Beck heaving a six-foot-long sword in the air and screaming “Freedom! Freedom!”; Representative Cory Mills using the phrase “Christian-Judeo values”; internet personality Benny Johnson tearing up at a photo of Tucker Carlson and his wife in a golf cart; Congressman Matt Gaetz saying that the real American heroes are Thomas Jefferson, Donald Trump, and Davy Crockett (?); Christian apologist Eric Metaxas saying, “The evidence for God is insane. You cannot even believe how much evidence there is”; Donald Trump Jr. claiming that the reason he responded to a court-ordered subpoena was “because I was a man”; the head of the Ayn Rand Institute, who is a Harvard grad and lives in Malibu, telling a crowd of homeschool parents from Bullhead City, “I was in the savasana at my shala when I had the realization that… ”; the comedian Rob Schneider, of 50 First Dates fame, opening his talk by saying, in a voice that conveyed newly sounded depths of despair, “Alright let’s get this out of the way: You can do it.”

The rest of the speeches are brutally formulaic by design. This is because the whole function of a right-wing political speech is to serve as a device for audience participation, which is itself a far more sophisticated system of rhetoric. To the untrained eye, a MAGA rally like AmFest may seem like complete chaos, but spend enough time at one and you’ll slowly discover its surprising sense of harmony. There are, for example, different vocal roles that certain demographics play. Husky men with baritone voices typically supply a sonorous “Amen!” to statements of belief. Wiry old kooks with nasal sopranos punctuate moments of wide agreement with the phrase, “Thas right!” (the older the man, the more of that first word he’ll bite off, right down to “S’right!”). Grizzled rancher types pitch in with cattle-clearing whistles to elevate applause, while younger aggies have my favorite calling card of all: a yodel-like sound that bears a faint similarity to the traditional American “Yawp,” but which engages the entire diaphragm. Done right, it leaves one lightheaded and dizzy. Women of all ages add a base layer of ambient “mmhmms” throughout. In my experience, the only permitted female solos are given to that generation of older women who have ravaged their vocal cords on a 50-year supply of ex-husbands and Virginia Slims. Their grainy voices often harmonize with a single declarative to underscore any statement made about an enemy of the party — “Traitor!” 

Here’s one example among many, pulled from my notes during Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s speech:

Greene: “There’s one Republican who doesn’t think there is enough evidence, and doesn’t think that there is a smoking gun, and doesn’t think that we have done a good enough job on the oversight committee, to prove that Joe Biden should be impeached… Do you all know who that was? ... I’m hearing… I’m hearing… I’m hearing some names. I’m hearing… Mitch McConnell. I’m hearing… Lindsey Graham… It’s Lindsey Graham.”

Ms. Virginia Slim: “TRAITOOOOOOOOooooooooor… !!!”

The traitor call is a high honor reserved for only the most seasoned rally circuit vets. When it speaks, the crowd follows. The best performances come from women with the precious lung capacity to hold out that second syllable to a point that extends towards eternity, leaving one with the impression that the speaker, and the crowd who subsequently echoes her call, are all presently falling off a cliff.

I take a break from the Speaker Tent during Tulsi Gabbard to grab more fig bars from Bob and Carolynne. On the way I meet another evangelismbillboards.com member in a “Liberty” ball cap and checkered short-sleeve shirt. He has one arm, which reaches out to offer me a copy of The Great Controversy. His name is Don Reed. He tells me that he lost his “hammer hand” in a trucking accident in 1975. I already have three copies of The Great Controversy in my backpack, but I take another and ask how he got involved with the group. 

“It’s very simple. When COVID took place, my own church was closed down for 12 weeks. I was incensed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it! Then one day I happened to see — the Lord directed my eyes — to a billboard. And I said to myself, COVID or not, that baby is preaching 24/7!” 

Don goes on to describe how he started evangelismbillboards.com, which is responsible for many of those wacky Jesus Saves signs you see on highways all over the country. He bought his first billboard using a modest inheritance he received after his father’s passing and claims he has subsequently spent every last dollar building these things. It is his life’s work. He is especially passionate about the arcane details of billboard size and placement. 

“My first billboard was a 12’ x 24’ on a five-lane highway at 45 mile n’hour on SR 25E in Tazewell, Tennessee. Twenty-four-hour illumination, 15,000 vehicles per day.” 

He thought long and hard about what to put on it. 

“I thought, you know what we should do? Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. That’s the Fourth Commandment. It’s the one that’s been forgotten!” 

According to his website, 13 million vehicles pass one of Don’s billboards every month. 

 Don, like Bob and Carolynne, is a Seventh-day Adventist, which means that he believes in the imminent return of Christ. When I hint that billboards aren’t exactly the best means for urgent communiqué, he looks at me like I’m missing the point.

“This is about evangelism. I’m not trying to force you to do anything. You pick your own path. Just go for goodness sake!” 

I ask Don if he wants to go see Tucker with me, but like the others he evinces zero interest in the speakers. It’s probably for the best, as I wind up having a mini meltdown during Tucker’s speech, which was precipitated by a particularly hypocritical comment he made about immigration. I realize how pitifully predictable I sound writing this, but here goes: Tucker told a high-school aged Latina fan, who had bought VIP tickets to see him, and who had rushed to the mic to ask a question about the rights of children born to illegal immigrants, that he “doesn’t really see how we have a choice” when it comes to deporting people like her. It was obvious to anyone watching that she expected a different answer. Tucker had just spent an hour arguing Western civilization is historically superior to all other global civilizations because it has never participated in what he calls “collective punishment” — i.e., punishing a whole group for the crimes of a few. While the girl, who looked uncannily similar to a student I once taught on Phoenix’s westside, silently returned to her seat under deafening applause, a morbidly fat man in an electric scooter behind me yelled at her, “Life’s hard — get a helmet!”

Awful, right? However, by that point I’d heard plenty of this shit; to be entirely honest, my reaction was probably more due to the fact that I had been in my hometown for three days and, like most people in that room, had seen about four hours of sunlight, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for fig bars. I stumble out of the room as a high school student from Lafayette, Louisiana asks Tucker if he would “fully support a theocratic governing structure based on the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The crowd behind me roars. 

I brush past Don and Bob and Carolynne and walk to a nearby hotel bar, where a couple from Las Vegas buys me successive rounds of double ryes and lectures me on property taxes. I drink, get drunk, and wind up at a house party hosted by some former Turning Point campus reps. I was surprised to find the house in the Willo neighborhood of Phoenix, one of the oldest and hippest in the city. Inside, though, I find a crew of young men in untucked polos, drunk-dancing to bad hip-hop and slamming Modelos. A couple of the guys get a kick out of the idea that I’m a writer (they’re aspiring “congressional staffers”).

“Check out this guy,” one of them chortles. “He’s got an actual notebook.”

I ask them what they thought of Tucker’s speech, but they’re distracted by the arrival of girls — actual girls. 

“This guy has Mike Pence’s number on his phone,” a wingman with a close-cropped buzz tells a coed, slinging an arm over his comrade. 

“Oh shut up!” 

“Bet,” he declares, and pulls out the phone. When I ask them to call the number, they look at me like I’ve just committed the cockblock of a lifetime. I quickly find myself left alone in the kitchen, so I start rummaging through the pantry: half-empty bottles of Malibu, Tito’s, and Costco-brand tequila. On a dining room table stands a chess game lost to history. I grab the tequila. 

By 1 AM a Bible school kid I just beat at beer pong offers me a toke from his dab pen. Everyone around me is enjoying a bad parody of a good time. I know readers will probably want to know more about this party, but there’s really nothing else to say. It’s a middling house party. It certainly is not some Arcadian dreamworld of unabashed heterosexuals feeding each other grapes. Nor is it some kind of mini-Nuremberg rally. 

I’m making my way out the front door when I meet John, an ag-school kid who looks equally disenchanted with the scene. Out on the front lawn, he tells me that he’s studying grass at Eastern Oregon University. He doesn’t have much to say about Tucker, but he has a lot to say about grass. I tell him that in Phoenix folks who like summer lawns opt for Bermuda while winter lawns are usually rye seed, which is the beginning and end of my knowledge about grass. It’s enough to get John going, though. He tells me about thatch levels and root systems and mowing heights. He tells me that most people don’t know this, but there’s more Kentucky bluegrass grown in northeastern Oregon than anywhere else in the world. 

“Traditionally in northeastern Oregon we grow a lot of Kentucky bluegrass with a little bit of creeping red fescue mixed in. There’s some other varieties of fescue but the big cash crop is really Kentucky bluegrass… ”

I close my eyes. The sprinklers of Phoenix tick pleasantly upon the dark lawns around us, and I’m reminded of what a pleasure it is to listen to an American who knows what the hell he is talking about. 

I wake up on a couch in midtown Phoenix and walk a mile back to the convention center at dawn. The sky is mercifully overcast but soon starts to rain. The word for the smell of desert rain is petrichor. It is my favorite smell in the world. It vanishes the moment I step back inside the convention center, where Kirk is closing out his remarks with another call to action. 

“Ask God, ‘What are my marching orders?’ It might be running for office, it might be homeschooling your kids, it might be starting a Turning Point chapter, it might be getting involved in the most important election in my lifetime and, maybe, civilization’s lifetime,” he instructs. He finishes by sharing the conclusions of the official AmericaFest strawpoll: 82 percent of attendees say that if the primary were today, they’d vote for Donald Trump. 

“Zero point one percent of you say they’d vote for Chris Christie. Point one percent! Where are you, point one percent? I know you’re in here!” 

He’s enjoying himself, glorying in what he’s accomplished. Aside from being (allegedly) the largest multiday grassroots conservative conference in American history, AmericaFest has felt like Kirk’s coronation ceremony as the crown prince of conservatism. He had already amassed hundreds of millions of fans on the internet (before being blocked from Twitter, Kirk’s handle was one of the top ten most engaged in the world), but AmFest shows that Kirk, like Trump, has the special ability to inspire people to make sacrifices on his behalf. 

“I’m thankful for those of you who came here and maxed out your credit cards, and went into your savings account, because you love your country so much,” he tells the crowd without irony. Kirk gets unfairly lumped with Tucker and Bannon as merely a media loudmouth. But unlike these two media personalities, Kirk demands, and gets, far more than clicks and retweets, from his audience. Under Kirk’s direction, Turning Point USA is currently amassing $108 million for a campaign in only three battleground states. That’s nearly a third of the Republican National Committee’s total take for the year prior. By successfully pulling off the unfathomable ménage à trois of free-market economics, American-first nationalism, and Biblical fundamentalism, Kirk now has his hands in some of America’s deepest political pockets.

Yet despite all this, I can’t shake the feeling that Charlie Kirk has disappointed me. Kirk has clearly chosen the unrighteous violence of the demagogue for the righteous cause of his American manhood. He is our newest Elmer Gantry, and we ought to lament to see such a broad young man, as Sinclair Lewis wrote, “who would have been so happy in the prize-ring, the fishmarket, or the stock exchange,” poking around the cobwebbed corridors of politics. Like Gantry, he is an unbelievably gifted orator and a born fighter: You see it in his posture and footwork on stage, which is a mix of Jack Dempsey and Oral Roberts. But Kirk, like Gantry, has mistaken American religion for American spirit, and he has falsely assumed that American religion is a synonym for Christianity, when in fact America’s only true religion is what Kirk himself knows best: entertainment.

After Kirk finishes, I return to the tent to dig soiled copies of The Great Controversy out of trash cans. People approach me to ask if I can take their photo, then back away when they see what I’m holding. By the time I return to Don, Bob, and Carolynne I’m carrying an armload of their books. They’re packing up the remaining supply in old cardboard boxes, sealed with tape that is yellow with age.

The American theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote an essay on the preternaturally corny methods of American evangelism, chief among them the highway billboard. “God only knows what kind of person must have crawled up there with his bucket or brush to slap the words on,” he writes. But the effect on those of us who read them is always the same: embarrassment. 

“Maybe Jesus Saves written up there on the cliff or the abutment of the bridge is embarrassing because in one way or another religion in general has become embarrassing: embarrassing [even] to the unreligious man because, although he doesn’t have it anymore, he has never really rooted it out of his soul either, and it still festers there as a kind of reproach.”

Carolynne wants a picture, so Bob and I pose for one with our arms around each other. Everyone smells like they haven’t showered. A few guys my age burst out laughing as they walk past, and I pull Bob closer. When it’s over, Carolynne offers me some leftover fig bars as a token of gratitude. I take enough to last for the long road ahead.