The memorializing of Charlie Kirk around the country this week has been astonishing in its breadth: from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to NFL games, from hundreds of churches and synagogues to city and town parks. It culminated in his official memorial on Sunday, which brought together more than a hundred thousand people at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona (with tens of thousands more outside), including President Donald Trump, his entire Cabinet, many other high-ranking members of his administration, Elon Musk and various far-right figures, including the white supremacist Jack Posobiec. The federal government devoted enormous resources to the event: It deployed nearly 800 Secret Service agents and the Department of Homeland Security gave it the highest threat designation.
In eulogies delivered by leaders of Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization, Trump administration officials, Kirk’s widow Erika and others, the slain far-right activist was lauded as simultaneously a staunch conservative, a champion of the First Amendment with a zest for democratic debate, a compassionate head of his household — and, most of all, a Christian martyr for America. Indeed, Christian demonization of the left was the most potent message.
From behind bulletproof glass, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller shouted, “You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk! You have made him immortal! And now millions will carry on his legacy!” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described Kirk as “a warrior for country, a warrior for Christ.” Vice President JD Vance angrily excoriated those who had shown so much “hate” and admonished us to remember that Kirk was “a hero to the United States of America” and “a martyr for the Christian faith.”
Befitting her new role as head of Turning Point USA, Erika Kirk gave what became an ideological sermon about Christian marriage and the future of the nation. In his ambling speech, Trump praised Kirk for his character and for the critical role he played in securing the president’s 2024 victory.
What do national rituals of memorialization mean for a nation? In “Pericles’ Funeral Oration,” the historian Thucydides records the Athenian leader praising soldiers who have fallen in battle with Sparta for having died to keep Athens free. “They gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received,” Pericles says, “each for his own memory, praise that will never grow old.” Pericles then urges survivors to grieve and honor the dead by modeling their lives after them: “You, their survivors, must resolve to have as unfaltering a spirit as they did, though you may pray for a safer outcome.” Such bravery, he tells mourners, will be the best way to preserve the democracy, civic responsibility and freedom unique to Athens. “Take these men as your model: and judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valor, never decline the dangers of war.”
This classic speech defending democracy by turning grief into resolve has been a key text in American political culture. We see it in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, where he asserts that the living must be “dedicated to the great task remaining before us” to bring about “a new birth of freedom.” It is woven through memorializing speeches given by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. In each case, death is used as an exhortation to the nation to live up to the values represented by the fallen.
But what about the use of this oratory tradition by national figures to mourn Kirk, particularly in an explicitly Christian nationalist idiom? Kirk has, among other things, referred to “prowling Blacks,” has asserted that Black women do not have “the brain processing power to be taken seriously,” that “transgenderism and gender ‘fluidity’ are lies that hurt people and abuse kids” and that “it’s not Islamophobia to notice that Muslims want to import values into the West that seek to destabilize our civilization.” He called for public executions that would be required watching for children. He developed a “Professor Watch List” to surveil and intimidate scholars and teachers whose ideas he opposed. And he did all of this with the backing of wealthy donors who funded his multimillion-dollar organization.
These rituals of public grief make Kirk far bigger in death than he was in life, but they also do something profound to the country that performs them. The shocking assassination has been viewed millions of times. As humans, it is almost impossible not to identify, at least for a moment, when witnessing pain or death. That moment of empathetic distress, on the part of countless people who had never even heard of Charlie Kirk, was swiftly enlisted in a narrative that cast him not as the deeply polarizing figure he was, but as a husband, as a father and — most significantly — as a symbol of American values.
The shock and grief caused by Kirk’s murder have afforded ultraright actors mainstream legitimacy and helped them expand their political reach. In Eugene, Oregon, for instance, a thousand people showed up to hear Kirk eulogized by none other than the founder of the Portland-based fascist street-fighting group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson. As he always does, Gibson preached a message of love while amping his audience on righteous outrage. “It’s hard when people keep coming after us, they keep killing us, they keep putting us in prison, constantly lying about us, taking away our jobs,” he told the crowd. “I get it. But the most important thing is that we continue to just love and stand tall and keep your faith in Jesus.” To top it off, attendees at the Eugene memorial helped lift an enormous American flag into the air, which organizers claimed was the same one that hung off the side of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Conservative exhortations to praise and honor Kirk as the flower of American ideals might seem unsurprising in a country collapsing into authoritarianism, but the adoration didn’t stop there. The prominent liberal journalist and podcaster Ezra Klein told readers in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” He went on, “I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.” Meanwhile, California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is seen by many liberals as the Democratic Party’s last best hope for 2028, said that “he admired [Kirk’s] passion and commitment to debate.” The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed a “National Day of Remembrance” resolution making Oct. 14 “Charlie Kirk Day” with a unanimous vote in the Senate and the support of 95 Democrats in the House.
Just as remembrance is key to national identity, so, as the 19th-century theorist of nationalism Ernst Renan pointed out, is selective forgetting. The making of Kirk into a national symbol requires the erasure of his extensive record of dehumanizing statements. This move is itself consonant with so much of the national forgetting at the heart of Trumpism, such as the president’s executive order to the Department of the Interior to have national parks remove information relating to slavery or the persecution of Indigenous people.
True to the authoritarian politics calling for the nation to mourn Kirk, obedience to the rituals of mourning is coercive. On Sept. 11, the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, posted on X that “foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country” and said he had directed consular officials to “undertake appropriate action” against those deemed to be “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s death on social media platforms.
In the days after Kirk’s murder, Vance guest-hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, telling listeners that if they heard anyone celebrating Kirk’s death they should “call them out, and hell, call their employer.” ABC canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s show on orders from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr after Kimmel said that Trump was politicizing Kirk’s death and suggested that Kirk’s killer “was one of their own.”
Entreaties to live like Kirk and embrace his values inspire some to affirm a national identity that reflects his far-right politics, and relegate others to the role of designated mourners (from public officials to football players). But whether or not the apotheosis of Charlie Kirk transforms American political culture over the long term, the Trump administration has seized this moment to strengthen its grip on power and dismantle any political opposition.
Speaking as a guest on the podcast episode that Vance hosted, Stephen Miller spoke for the dead with a message for the living. “The last message that Charlie sent me was … that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “And I will write those words on my heart, and I will carry them out.”
Vance added, “We’re going to go after the NGO [nongovernmental organization] network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” As administration officials are preparing an executive order targeting nonprofits, Justice Department officials are discussing the use of federal domestic terror and racketeering laws to dismantle liberal funding networks.
The summer of George Floyd protests was a season of grief over a racist murder by the state. He was mourned from below through the largest and most diverse democratic protest movement in U.S. history, one marked both by the remembrance of this country’s origins in slavery, and by the possibility, one day, of a multiracial democracy. The autumn of Charlie Kirk, by contrast, is more a season of grievance than grief. He is mourned from above through the memorialization of his far-right commitments, the policing of how he is allowed to be remembered, and through acts of state repression that cement authoritarian rule.
“Spotlight” is a newsletter about underreported cultural trends and news from around the world, emailed to subscribers twice a week. Sign up here.