What follows is the truest version of the story y’all can get me to tell. In covering an event of the scale we saw with Charlie Kirk’s memorial, especially being so widely broadcast as it was, one might assume there are not stories from the ground left to be told. May this be my counterexample…
-Max E.
As I went inside, the garage door was still rolling open. I stepped between cardboard squares and magic markers while the person I came for laid on the concrete floor, with her hands pressed against her forehead racking her mind for things to put on a sign. In the first moment of silence given to us by the motor overhead, she asked “Should I try and find a Bible verse? I don’t think those suckers can resist a Bible verse.”
Valorie has never been so far from civilized society than she was planning to be on Sunday. I on the other hand, am experienced in navigating right-wing political fervor. “We want to be incognito, for sure… whatever we come up with we don’t want to antagonize them.”
She found her verse in Leviticus. I’ve heard that book really had it out for idolatry.
Mine was a little more on the nose, a pointed hood with the words “SEE YOU INSIDE” scribbled across. “If they confront me, I’ll have to pretend I’m a part of the Klan.” Valorie nodded as I went on “They have a chapter in Glendale, sure to be attending. Under that guise I can out-American any poor Patriot standing in my way.”
A phone call interrupted us just as we were starting to break a sweat in the garage. “If I go outside, they’ll lynch me!” I heard a voice bark through the phone “A black, hispanic, trans antifascist is the worst thing they could imagine… Is there anything else I could be that would piss them off more?… Do you have any idea what that crowd is just begging to do to a person like me?”
I took a moment to compose my thoughts before responding, “Of course Scaredy Cat, they want to hang you and leave your body for the scavengers.” I asked what it felt like to have a mob like that come to your door.
“These people are high off the violence they saw. They’re so soft, they don’t know what it does to you to be a part of it. They only ever see it. If you’ve spent your whole life being shown violence from across all of fucking time and space but haven’t had to face it for yourself how scared of the world would you be?”
She went on, “A few thousand people were there for the shooting right? Two people experienced it as anything more than a bystander, and one of them is too dead to remember it. Think of the millions, or tens or hundreds of millions, who’ve only seen it through a screen. They never get a chance to grow from it, just to gawk at it.”
The same could not be said of the death of Trey Reed. Whoever put him up in that tree did experience murder, and the media made sure nobody saw it the same way they saw the death of the right-wing demagogue.
I met with Valorie at 6:00 in the morning and we headed down to the memorial. “Do you think those two are going?” I ask, as we fly past a pair of geezers on the sidewalk dressed in red, white, and blue. “We’re a few miles away-“ she thought out loud “hopefully they’re waiting for their Uber.”
“I saw a delivery driver earlier, on my way to your place” I said, “pushing packages at five in the morning… nobody we’re about to see here is important enough that society needs them up doing their job at five in the morning on a Sunday.” We passed another cop car parked behind a building. “They’re sure having a busy morning.” As she says, pointing out another speed trap . “I’m glad to hear you say that…” I let out a sigh before adding “for a bit there I thought I was being gangstalked.”
Traffic came to a standstill miles from the parking lot, and the side of the road was host to hundreds of hopeful attendees. “The dress code said Sunday best” I reached for my jacket in the back seat “most of these people are barely dressed”.
Valorie took her hands off the wheel, after being at a stop for a couple minutes now. “Remember, these people don’t go to church.” she quipped. “Neither do we, but at least we look good.”
I get out of the car, and shove my jacket pockets full with supplies. “Notebook, phone wallet… pen, keys, pistol… tourniquet, and two spare magazines.” With my pat down complete, and Valorie changed into her church clothes, we merged into the crowd.
The only moving vehicles were in the median, where police and fire vehicles flew past sending a gust of air through the gridlocked cars in all four of the rest of the lanes. Unmarked police cars, ambulances, a pair of livestock trailers, even Game & Fish were on their way to reinforce the arena.
In the middle of her own conversation, a woman in gaudy pink pants asks “did she look Middle Eastern?”, her friend responds “she said she was Israeli”. “she didn’t look it; fairer skin, light eyes, her family is probably Polish.”
I tasted their cigarette smoke around me, as we kept trekking down 91st Avenue. Every empty space off the road was crowded with parked cars.
Pink Pants piped up again, “Well I sure hope she’s Polish”. Before she snuffed out her cigarette. They went on talking about fashion, which was rich coming from a woman who got her pants from a highlighter factory.
A pair of green racing bikes wove in between the cars. “No lane splitting!” one driver exclaimed. “That isn’t lane splitting” Valorie butted in “because you aren’t moving. That’s filtering.” She turned to me “as long as surrounding traffic is going under 35 miles per hour it’s legal here.” I nodded my approval as we kept moving down the sidewalk.
“Do you see that flag?” I whispered to Valorie. Every third or fourth truck on the road had an American flag sticking out of its bed. “The white one with the cross?” She asked, as she hushed her tone down. “They didn’t make an evangelical Vatican without telling us did they?” The truck in question peeled out into the median, and nearly careened into the gridlocked intersection ahead. “Arizona drivers…”
“Three cops in the road and these people still can’t figure it out?” She asked. It made sense to me- “just look at them. They’re waving their arms every which way. Nobody knows where the hell they’re being pointed.”
A voice called “Move out of the damn road” from a patrol car’s PA system. Two ambulances then weaseled their way out through the bike lane, pushing halted SUVs out of their way.
We filtered through the blocked crosswalk with the other pedestrians. People are flocking out of their cars, into the street with drivers staying behind and cheering on their passengers, now in a sprint towards the gate.
I asked Valorie “should I fire my pistol in the air? To start the race?” “Everyone would run away” she sighed. I told her – that’s how a race is supposed to work.
The whole walkway smelled like shit, sweat, and morning humidity. I could guess where two of those were coming from, but I kept an eye out for the turd.
“They say Jesus walked in the desert for forty days”, Valorie said to me as I clamored up a sewage vent to see over the cinderblock wall. A line of MAGA shirts maybe forty strides long marched across the desert, a dusty lot off the right side of the road, towards the Secret Service checkpoint – past which all of their cherished freedoms disappear.
“No guns, no bags, and no queers allowed. Just one factory sealed water bottle.” I muttered under my breath as I straightened my back and stood tall. I told her we couldn’t get any closer, “…not with you and your backpack or me and my weapon.”
I looked over the wall, seeing the east parking lot packed with bodies snaking in one seemingly endless line. “There are too many of them-” I groaned “not even all these folks are getting inside.” But the crowd didn’t stop.
We kept walking, this time against the flow of bodies. Merchandise was being sold from tents and rolling clothes hangers. “HATS! HATS! HATS!” one man shouted like the bustle’s pulse. A child looks up at me, “Sir… do you want Charlie Kirk baby clothes!?”
She held up a onesie with the dead man’s face screen printed across it, and behind her stood a box as tall as the child with thousands of these grotesque garments stuffed inside. Confronted with the legacy Charlie was leaving behind, I ran for Valorie. When I caught up, I tried telling her “your shoe is untied-”.
“Huh?” Valorie hollered back. “you need to tie your shoe!” I said for the second time, as we pushed through the thickest regions of the crowd. We stopped in a dead space behind an electrical transformer, which left a little vortex in its wake as the bodies streamed by. “They’re hustling over all these memorial goers with triple digit markups on Chinese screen prints.” I told Valorie. She barely heard a thing I said, responding “that man over there is buck ass naked.”
She was right, he was in the middle of the street donning newly bought merchandise from head to toe. “I don’t think anyone notices.” I said, looking around for anyone else who looked to be paying attention. Everyone but she and I was singularly focused on going ahead, completely blind to the chaos in their peripheral vision.
“There’s an empty Turning Point stand over there across the field” I brought to Valorie’s attention. She responded “If we get up close to the fence we’ll be able to get a shot towards it.” “Don’t say it like that.”
The fence was a quick-assemble barricade meant to stop cars from plowing through, and on the other side was staging for law enforcement. Deputies were there from three counties, troopers from the state, and a whole menagerie of Feds.
There were three federal agents in their kit, sitting under an awning playing cards. I hear one mention the security measures and I tune in… “ATF has a signal truck on the north entrance, and we have drone jammers posted up over here… fuck who dealt this mess? They’ve got local cops working outside the perimeter, really bringing in everyone they can.”
“Finally…” one of the feds said back “we’re putting them to use!” before both of them broke into laughter, terminating when one of them spilled their drink across the folding table. I snap a couple pictures of their camp before moving along the fence. At an overpass to the south gate, hydraulic beasts of burden pushed a gigantic steel barricade into and out of place for black SUVs being waved through the checkpoint. Attendees are still funneling through on the sidewalk below, as Valorie and I wait for a convoy to pass so we can cross the street.
“Look ahead” I tell her, “we’re gonna have to go down to the sidewalk once we get to them.” She looks forward to see what I just noticed, a cluster of state troopers guarding a work team clamoring to put up more fence. I caught the eye of a Secret Service agent standing guard next to the forklift. He shouted for me to “Stop!” as he and his partner moved through the gate towards Valorie and I.
“Where are you going?” “West” I replied.
“What are you doing?” “Walking west.” Apparently that wasn’t specific enough for this nosey pig. “Those guys probably don’t want us in their business” as I gesture towards the state troopers ahead “so I’m gonna go downhill and keep walking west if you really have to know.”
It did us no good to stand around and argue. We started downhill to join the rest of the crowd flowing along the sidewalk below next to the pathetic stream this enormous channel hosts. “Build that wall! Build that wall!” I let out for the half dozen day laborers working double time on establishing the perimeter.
“You’re going the wrong way!” someone called after us. “Just going somewhere else!” we responded. “Christ, these people really think they’re going to make it in-“ I asked Valorie “didn’t they hear the line started last night?”
“Wishful thinking can get you to waste a lot of your time” she mused, as we stepped off of the slope and took in our new perspective from below. The dome of the stadium loomed even more impressive from down there, and the sky was lit but the sun was not yet visible from the east.
“I haven’t seen this many cops in one place since 2020” I told Valorie, as we walked in the trench underneath a shoulder-to-shoulder wall of State Troopers with M4’s and full battle rattle. They loomed over the walkway, picking up security where the fence left off. As we ascended out of that ditch, two convoys arrived and reinforcements poured out of their cars- doubling the already company sized element at the scene.
“Are they already full?” One of the red-hatted faces asked me, “no, you’ll definitely be able to get in if you hurry!” I lied through my teeth “we’re just here to document the crowd.” She looked confused, there were real reporters everywhere. I whispered, like it was our little secret “I’m not like the rest of that FAKE NEWS MEDIA…” she seemed to soften up “I’m here to talk about what REALLY matters.”
“GODBLESS!” She shouted as she ran across the highway, toward the crowd she had been lagging behind. Valorie told me “you lied to that lady” as if I didn’t already know, but she seemed upset. “Will your readers know you’re a liar?”
“When I tell them, they will” I said “but until then, there’ll be some tension.”
On the west side of the Stadium, businesses in the surrounding blocks were either packed or their entrances barricaded and with tow trucks standing at the ready. “I don’t think those are parking spots” I say about a dozen cars with their bumpers hanging over the edge of a canal. At this one corner, there weren’t as many people, probably because it smelled even more like shit than the east gate.
We smoked a bowl as we found ourselves a break from the hustle and bustle to be found on the North, East, and South roads adjacent to State Farm Stadium. “All those flags lining the road” I rambled between puffs “they don’t match. I wonder where they scraped them all together.” Valorie laughed as I tried to figure it out. “Do you think they’ll be left here? Are these different peoples’ flags or did some intern have to scrounge through three different Walmarts for the two hundred or so out here?”
I felt bad for a car driving in circles, hoping to come across a gap that wasn’t there. “They’re wasting their time” Valorie said, but I didn’t agree. “They’re as close as they’ll get. Imagine the walk from the nearest parking spot to the stadium… they’re not going through all that. It’s almost nine.”
In that same parking lot, a delivery driver was trying to squeeze pallets between the parked cars along the curb. I looked around, asking “Why not use the fire lane? Where is it?”. Turns out, as Valorie was quick to point out, it was behind the cars our workingman was struggling against.
At the intersection ahead there were only police cars and a pair of school busses. “There aren’t enough words on the side for those busses to be Glendale Unified”. Valorie pointed out “They’re not from Peoria either, it’s just two words…” As we got closer we kept trying to read them off. “Fast School” was one of the guesses, so were “Final School” and “Fast Student”.
Once we got within fifty yards I could make out the vowels. “First Student” turns out to be a company specializing in charter transportation and trying to get school districts to outsource their fleets. What two of their yellow school busses were doing at the memorial remains a mystery.
An officer waved us across the crosswalk where we merged with a small group who parked further west. “You know-” one of them got Valorie’s attention, “they won’t let you in with that backpack.” Valorie informed her that nobody out here now was going to be making it in. “Do you think so? How many people have you seen?” I added my two cents, “No less than two hundred thousand, the whole city of Glendale may as well be here!” but instead of solidarity with her people, who showed up in such astounding attendance, the woman deflated.
Above the freeway, the latecomers trickled across while the busses and emergency vehicles paraded back and forth with the other two lanes. “There are too many billboards” complained Valorie. I couldn’t disagree with her. In front of us, we saw a banner the size of a house pinned across the stadium walls. Along the highway, Charlie Kirk’s face was flashing intermittently across the electronic billboards.
“There is a checkpoint down there” the armored truck with antennae of all manner sticking out gave away who it was. “I think this is where the ATF is camped out”. As we stepped out onto the other side the First Student busses were turning around to leave back the way they came, before Valorie or I could see who the passengers could have been.
“That’s a radio truck” I explained to my captive audience of one. “It’s probably doing a few things; scanning, tracking, jamming…” “We know they use stingrays, that pretend to be cell towers. The fact we’re on this block means they can tell we are here.” I tap the phone in my pocket for emphasis, before thinking twice and pulling it out to take some pictures.
“Another thing they can do, that they’re probably doing right now, is jamming drones. Most of the commercial ones run off predictable frequencies-” My rant was cut short when Valorie noticed the mounted police staging in a parking lot ahead. Tempe and Scottsdale each thought it prudent to send a handful of horses to protect the president. While I couldn’t come up with a less necessary security measure if I tried, the flair was something I could appreciate as the rising sun reminded me that I was in Arizona after all.
“I want to confront whichever Scottsdale cop rides the Clydesdale…” the beast towered over all of the people lounging around it, under an awning with its human entourage. “First question: How small is it?” Valorie cracked a smile, “Second question: How did you convince your chief to get a bigger truck and a bigger trailer just to haul around your ego in the back?”
Alongside the equine enforcers, there were golf carts of ATF agents buzzing around the scene, with their rifles slung and legs hanging out the back like it’s a Toyota pressed into Middle Eastern service. “Meal Team 6” is how I introduced them to Valorie.
“I need to pet that dog.” She says, pointing to a chocolate lab resting in the shade to our right. “He’s working” I lamented, before asking “if I had a pipe bomb and I threw it, do you think the bomb sniffing dog would play fetch with me?” Their handlers’ reactions were inconsequential to my calculus. “They’re not trained to attack, just to alert. If anything, the scent of ammonium nitrate would get him excited not angry…”
I quieted down as a cart of feds whizzed by, their legs drooping off the back of the cart and their guts overflowing out the side. They did a figure-8 throughout the crowd nearly hitting more than a few oblivious pedestrians while Valorie hurried along out of their path, dragging me behind her across a little bridge into the mall.
“Look down” I instructed her as we went over the bridge. An armored car was parked below, with its driver shrunk to the size of a doll by perspective sitting under a little tent, scrolling on his phone. She just kept dragging me out of the parking lot and into the mall. The overflow venue was, itself, overflowing. “However many people were waiting when we got here” Valorie said “must’ve gotten here since then.” The interior courtyard was blocked off, with more typical rent-a-fence than the anti-vehicle barricades from before.
A whistle up ahead of us grabs my attention, where a cluster of Secret Service are hailing a local mall cop to open a gate. A younger black man jogs out from behind a building, then starts fiddling with the chain. On our left, every parking spot was filled as far as the eye could see. On our right, lines and lines of people.
“These people came to skip church so they could wait in line?” Valorie asked. I figured “Anything beats church I guess.” That was my policy growing up, anyway. “I wonder what they’re protecting in there…” More golf carts of cops and lost people expecting a closer parking spot than they should have were occasionally passing by on the road.
“Maybe it’s a golden calf?” but Valorie rejected my hypothesis “too on the nose. You’re right though, whatever it is it’s probably gold.” Whatever they thought they were getting into, these people couldn’t wait for it. There was an aggressive hum coming off the crowd generated by their collective anticipation. I wondered to my friend “Do you think they realize they’re waiting in line to watch a speech from the next building over, on a Jumbotron?”. Her face looked puzzled, wondering why I would even ask. “Half of them would be staring at a giant TV in church anyways, why wouldn’t they want to do it with a few hundred thousand of their closest friends?”
Staggering across the parking lot towards a circle of lawn chairs, an unidentified fed joined his crew chatting in a hushed circle. “I wonder what they’re up to?” I asked Valorie. “Tailgating the funeral, like us!” she said, making her way through the packed cars. I saw an empty bottle of Tequila tipped over in the bushes- “you’re not kidding, they might be going harder than us.”
I asked Valorie if my handgun was printing against my jacket. “Not that I can tell” she told me as we stepped over the curb. “Let’s look for a place to sit down” and we made our way to a little bench along the sidewalk.
The line to nowhere kept streaming by as we tied our shoes and checked on our waters. A golf cart of rambunctious cops nearly flattened a pedestrian, but he moved quick enough to just be knocked over while the officers sped on without regard. “I hear a Blackhawk” I told Valorie, as the hairs on my arm started to stand up.
Just after hearing them, we could see them. Directly overhead by a couple thousand feet two sets of rotors circled the parking lot. “Is it a patrol or a VIP?” I thought out loud, answering myself a moment later when the chopper moved towards the stadium. “Look at those stripes…” they must’ve been two feet thick and shone gold across the whole body of the aircraft.
In the line, a crew of men in pressed shirts pushed past the other folks’ moving with a purpose alongside the flow of people. Valorie tugged my jacket collar “keep an eye on them” with a serious look, so as they passed by I reached out for a handshake to the gentleman at the front of their formation with all of the gusto I could muster. “Welcome to the party, brother!” I shouted over the roaring ambiance.
As our hands shook and his sleeve lifted up, a blood drop cross exposed itself from under his cuff. The klansmen went on their way disappearing with their relatively diminutive stature into the sea of bodies. Once out of sight, Valorie and I exchanged silent glances and began moving back towards the road.
“They were never fans of the jews he worked with” I told her “but they had to show up for the poster child of WASPs across the nation.” She shuddered as she thought about how little everyone around would care if they knew what we just confirmed for ourselves.
As the two of us waited for our crosswalk to clear, Valorie spotted the Game Warden circling back towards where we spotted him before. I flipped him off, comfortable I could convince a Republican bystander to rally with me against bag limits. “Watch out behind you, they brought out the real tactical motherfuckers!” I hollered at a couple waiting with their windows down. The husband spun around searching but looked right past Game & Fish, rookie mistake.
“This neighborhood right here” I pointed towards where we parked. A small huddle of attendees were ahead of us with their attention locked in the branches of a tree. “What’s up there?” Valorie asked them. “A kitten-” answered a thin woman in khaki shorts “-and I already called the fire department. They said they don’t really do that.” I got in a huff, “That’s ridiculous!” I cried “Part of the job is being the people with a ladder.” The tree let out a faint meow, from thirty or forty feet above us “maybe you can call a painter, and they won’t have a stick up their ass…” but in the middle of my brainstorming Valorie interrupted me, “we’ve got to run, best of luck!” she said – mostly to the cat.
We pulled out and away from the traffic, meeting at a red light with the lane-filtering motorcyclist from our commute in. We made our way up the town, still teeming with pigs behind every blind corner and in every parking lot.
“Oh, he’s onto him” I hollered, the cop was driving so eagerly, I would call it body language. He just saw the motorcyclist from earlier pass the car in front of him. “He WAS going like, fifteen over the limit.” She rationalized, but I retorted that “the cop was going fifteen ov- I’m going fifteen over. All of us are doing criminal speed right now. If we weren’t we’d get rear ended.”
Valorie was on the edge of the passenger seat, asking me “if that red Subaru knows he stands between some guy and a ticket?” I proclaimed “It’s the responsibility of a neighborly driver to obstruct police up to the moment they’ll pull you over too for doing it…” That Subaru though, against my maxim, changed lanes putting the officer just behind our friend the motorcyclist.
“BOO!” we shouted, and as we rolled past the stop we screamed obscenities out the windows. “Maybe after this he’ll realize which team he’s on” I thought. It would be rational, these suburb cops are highway bandits. “But more likely…” Valorie saw my error “…he’s getting out of it by being a bootlicker.”
“It blows my mind how some people can be on the roads and still think of the pigs as their friends. They’re at war with commuters every day arbitrarily handing out fines for unanimously ignored statutes…” The fear of police violence leaves potent memories behind it…
They’ve sure scared me before. The dusty smell of a construction sight, and feeling the lead work its way into the groove of your fingers as you load magazines, the rhythm of your fingers pushing the rhythm of your mind along as you try to picture a way out of your situation that doesn’t involve what’s in your hands. I hear the radio come to life, stirring me as Valorie turns on the stream for us to listen in.
Copyright free music fills the dead space of the pending livestream coming out of my car stereo.
“They televise a protestant cult ritual, they rent out a Super Bowl venue, two hundred thousand people show up, and they couldn’t license some patriotic songs?” – “Why would they? These aren’t bad.”
A heinous noise screams out from the radio.
“BAGPIPES!” I shout “and why are they wearing kilts?”
“Are they wearing anything under them?” Asks Valorie “Now that is the real question.”
I look at the tiny screen and proclaim “holy shit, they painted him in the MLK pose!”
The droning and wailing continued until the cosplaying Scots were replaced by a mega church gospel rock band
I turned the radio down. Valorie called it “Music written for the lowest common denominator…” “…so any volunteer loser with a guitar can play the mass produced worship songs to his small town congregation.”
”Breaking through!” The voice shouts before going into his verse… “Breaking through-“
“Nobody’s picking up on his cues.” I note, “Except Marco Rubio, I guess” Valorie added. The little screen in the cup holder had his face displayed across it. “Well look at that, he’s mouthing along that little bastard!”
The singer went on playing his acoustic guitar with the ensemble. The audio mix didn’t let any of the interesting instruments come out so it sounds as generic as it would in any modern megachurch.
“I wish they would go back to the LoFi beats to relax and study to.”
As the musicians exit the stage, an intro montage plays introducing the first proper speaker of the day, Pastor Rob McCoy.
“Such a tacky and talentless medium as worship music should never ascend to the heights of this stadium performance.” “Do you think they feel how weird it is too?”
“I was with Charlie about um, a little over two weeks ago in Korea – as he was supporting the persecuted christians over there.”
“The Orientalism is insane.” I laughed as I went on “Are they implying South Korea persecutes Christians or that Charlie Kirk got a North Korean visa?”
Rob got interrupted by “The NEW three for five menu available at participating locations!
“Max! I think we found our Golden Calf” – “The Golden Arches! You called it, yes you did…” And we let out a deep sigh.
“Holy shit” “they interrupted the pastor for a fast food ad.”
“So if you scan this QR code”… it appeared on the livestream “…for TPUSA Faith…”
I turned down the radio to a soft indiscernible hum. “That’s a lot to unpack.” “He’s a Christian Nationalist, nobody can deny that.” “-he WAS one” I corrected her. “Oh, yeah, how could I forget.”
The volume rose as the National Anthem started to play. The voice was powerful, deep, and bombastic.
“Who the hell is this guy?” “He didn’t get an intro card?” “No, he must’ve not taken any pictures with Charlie while he was alive.” “For the montage?” “How could you do an intro card without a montage?”
“Charlie came to us the next day with the funding” a feminine voice bragged “$25,000 in one day”
“It’s almost like he did more than just honest debate.” We thought “But no- he was a martyr for the rhetoric.” “Just a podcaster when his shooter needs to look cold hearted…” “…but at the same time they’re throwing his a funeral like an Easter Service.”
“But Charlie died doing what he loved, engaging with people he disagreed with.
“He died for the cliché he himself started.” Valorie agreed, “his bit went on for too long.” If you disagree, prove me wrong.
Then, the stream turned into an ad from one of his fellow propagandists- from Hillsdale College. For anyone who hasn’t heard of them, think PragerU with a paywall hosted by your least favorite english professor.
“This could’ve been a youtube video.” “MIT OpenCourseware is better.”
The voice came back furiously shouting “The assassin will die!” – followed by a moment of silence and timid applause.
“We condemn all political violence.”
“They can’t tell it’s violence if what commits it is a system and not a person…” the wind roared through the window. “…the fit they’ll throw when they realize it’s people with paperwork all the way down.”
“Charlie’s assassin thought he could silence him with a bullet to the neck…”
“And he did” we said in unison, before breaking down into laughter. “If it didn’t you wouldn’t be the one giving a speech right now.”
The speakers continually kissed the Widows ass throughout their rants, which could have come off earnest at a memorial if this woman hadn’t just been declared their new boss and their tone following closely what you would expect of workplace brown-nosing.
Valorie told me that “Air Force One has just touched down at Luke”. “What are the odds of the motorcade being longer than the drive?”
The voice on the radio compared getting a degree at ASU as the equivalent of no degree at all.
“I tried telling that to their enrollment office.” Explains the Turning Point presence at their campuses, people go there for the social elements.
“Be like Charlie! Fight back! Stand tall!”
“…Die like a bitch!” we thought to add. By the time we stopped laughing, he had been replaced by another employee I can only assume was hired to have a forehead around to overshadow Kirk’s.
“You um-” the crowd went on “you preempted my applause line so let’s- we’ll go over it again they deserve it.” In his stumbling, the crowd went silent. They missed his applause line after all.
Valorie’s giggles were visible more than audible over the wind roaring through the windows. “You’d think the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk show would be good at this sort of thing…”
“He’s a prophet! of the Biblical kind!” The voice screamed from the stage.
“With all this easter preaching at a funeral just call him Christ if that’s what you think.” “Someone needs to check on him, if that’s the case.” “It’s been three days already, turns out he couldn’t deliver.”
“FIGHT FOR CHARLIE KIRK!” it went on “who could feel the Holy Spirit in the room tonight?!”
We both turned to the clock on the dashboard… “It isn’t even noon?” “But they’re clapping.”
“All of you have had a little Charlie moment haven’t you?”
“Goes to show how many people he radicalized, he was a whole generation of queer kids’ high school bully… and a generation of high school bullies’ role model.” It was hard to even hold the scale of the spectacle in our heads all at once.
The next words out of the radio leapt out at me- “Did Charlie help you achieve your American Dream?”
I turned to the passenger side and quoted the definitive source on the American Dream… “And now look at me:” getting Valorie’s attention “half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles an hour across death valley in some car I never even wanted.” She kept staring, expecting me to go on “…I forgot the rest. It’s from a book, a good book.”
“Charlie is a martyr in the Christian tradition” they babbled on with their heresy’s.
“Do they realize he wasn’t actually an evangelist?” “He was an evangelist for something.” “But whether Christian or not…” I looked down at the screen, gazing upon the people who made it inside, “it’s their religion.”
“May we pray that our rulers here rightfully instituted by god wield the sword of terror against evil men in this country for Charlie’s memory.”
“Are they admitting that the United States is a state sponsor of Terror?” Valorie asked me sarcastically. “Go woke go broke, that’s what they say.”
Ben Carson’s repetition of the words “Radical Leftist” and “Our Land” rang, and the crowd cheered louder than they had all morning.
“They barely finished stealing this land, and listen to how they talk about it already.” “They can’t imagine what this place could be other than some Empire’s borderlands.” – “But will we ever get it back from the Imperial transplants and settlers?”
As speakers tangent off into anti-semitic dog whistles and New World Order conspiracies, the painting of Charlie in Dr. King’s iconic pose was brought into frame.
“These people literally established the one world order…” “Maybe that’s why they’re so paranoid about a new one.” “But I thought capitalists loved competition!”
“We are all Charlie Kirk now” must’ve been said a dozen times by now. “Charlie Kirk died for you all” maybe handful in comparison. “Charlie Kirk will live forever! For all future generations!…” “And are you ready to put on the armor of God? Do it! Do it now! Now is the time!”
“He died for them as he lived for them… as a public demonstration of their weakness” but it’s around that weakness, the talk of persecution and martyrdom, that they rally. “Show them what they’re afraid of…” “…and shelter them from what they can do about it.”
Dr. Evil’s voice came on the PA system and I knew it was time for Steven Miller’s Nuremberg Rally. “Our legacy goes back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia…” “they cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen within us.” “To our enemies… You have nothing, you have nothing, you are wickedness you are jealousness you are hatred, you have nothing you can build nothing you can create nothing. We are the ones that create, we are the ones who build”… “nothing nothing nothing!”
But I had this livestream of an ad-filled state funeral for a podcaster turned lobbyist.
“ah, that made me emotional. Made me emotional to see that.”-“Suzy Wiles had tears in her eyes -eugh which you don’t often see in politics but… I think this is the most unbelievable thing I have ever seen”. He went on to satirize the bible while cackling in his usual fashion.
“Holy shit, Tucker Carlson can not turn the voice off.”
“I think he quoted Taylor Swift.” “Can I be his coke dealer….?”
This yankee nepo-baby from the Ivy leagues then prescribed religion as what this mormon de-convert needed.
“One of my sources said they found his reddit this week” Valorie perked up “I picked through it. Not much of a trail, just one deleted post on an AnCap board and some anecdotes about religion and abuse.” Jesus may have had some role in the choice Robinson allegedly made, showing him what it’s like to be under the thumb of power through faith. Spreading that was Charlie’s legacy.
Tulsi Gabbard stood behind bulletproof glass while speaking to the city her goons have been terrorizing, any curious reader can find the laundry list of first, second, fourth, and eighth amendment violations perpetrated by or assisted by DHS in the Valley throughout their recent campaign of terror and militarization.
“Bitch.”
Marco Rubio was brought to power in large part by TPUSA’s astroturfing campaigns and bragged about it at the founder’s funeral.
“I wonder how he feels about never needing to run for anything again?” “The authoritarianism is palpable.” I said “It’s in the air while they’re here. They talk like they don’t need anyone but their base.” She asked me, “Do you think they’ll ever have to run from anything again?”
Hegseth honored Charlie’s memory with imitating his bullshit, claiming college campuses are the “Darkest of Places” (per the Secretary of War and overseer of countless black sites and illegal prisons.)
Valorie notes, “The military industrial complex is in his hands and all he wants to fight is a culture war.”
I dropped off my partner and continued towards where I was staying.
I put on my shooting earmuffs when RFK was speaking. Honestly, didn’t hear a thing. The one liner this could’ve been would not be worth the suffering.
And the rest of the way I sang “Una mattina mi sono alzato”
“Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!”
“Una mattina mi sono alzato E ho trovato l’invasor”
Once I stumbled back into the AirBNB, I was able to watch Trump’s address on the big screen. His dialogue was in pieces, with a cadence suggesting he was being repeatedly caught off guard by the teleprompter. “And on Monday… we have a – big announcement. I won’t say what it is, but it’s about a big thing. Autism.” was the last note I could write in my notes before my morning caught up to me and I fell asleep…
I found myself at Westgate again, still busy but this time quiet. Tracing my steps back to the stadium and to the top of the bridge, the whole crowd was as still as it could be without ceasing to be alive. People still swayed and birds still flew by, but the motors and murmurs both went silent.
Below me in the West parking lot, soldiers were shouting, wrangling, and searching their way through an approaching line. Bags were dumped onto the asphalt, people forced to strip in front of the strangers around them for the stranger in front of them weilding a baton.
Outside the wire, folks were looking around at the birds and the cats in trees, while feeling the late summer breeze. None of them had anything to talk about, they were completely idle.
Instead of heading towards MAGA's street market, I turned off into a side street and wove my way through alleys and apartment blocks. Occasional clusters of red, white, and blue clad strangers were sitting down. Some were picking at the grass like bored children in a Little League outfield. After some walking, I found myself at Scaredy Cat's door.
The face that answered looked down at me, shouted something indiscernable and slammed the door in my face. I turned to the window, seeing curtains drawn behind it and my own sweat mopped brow in the light bouncing back towards me. I wasn't terrifying, but for a moment what she saw - and I didn't - is that I was one of them. I ran back to my car in half the distance it should have taken, and speed off. There were no other cars on the road, any potential drivers were all loitering or picking flowers off of the bushes. When I turned on the radio, though, familiar words came over the broadcast...
“To our enemies… You have nothing, you have nothing, you are wickedness you are jealousness you are hatred, you have nothing you can build nothing you can create nothing. We are the ones that create, we are the ones who build”… “nothing nothing nothing!” and at the end, gunshots rang out through the speakers at their full volume. My hand clamored across the floor for my ear muffs, eventually finding them and pulling the band over my skull. It couldn't stop the sound of the execution, no knob or button on the console could stop the blasts from ringing out either for the rest of the way home.
And the rest of the way I sang "Una mattina mi sono alzato. Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao! Ciao! Ciao! Una mattina mi sono alzato E ho trovato l'invasor"
I woke up alone on the floor of the McMansion I had rented for the weekend. The broadcast was over. Outside, trying to find some fresh air, I started to sort through the notes I had taken earlier in the day.