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The veneration of Charlie Kirk began before there was even confirmation he had been killed, and it hasn’t let up since. The hagiography has been relentless, a veritable Lives of the Saints playing out 24/7 in both right-wing and mainstream media.
For people who don’t spend their time immersed in the fever swamps of conservative thought, Kirk was not exactly a household name, and it has to be fairly odd for the normies of the world to be bombarded by nonstop coverage of him.
Even writing about Kirk’s horrific assassination feels fraught. Just as quickly as the embarrassingly laudatory coverage began, conservatives began targeting anyone who wasn’t also uncritically shoveling praise at Kirk’s memory.
It isn’t just that conservatives saw Kirk’s death as a convenient cudgel, a way to attack the left. It’s also that they genuinely believe he was a hero and are furious that anyone would suggest otherwise. In their world, he loomed so very large. He put a respectable face on bigotry and freed others to display theirs as well.
But just being popular doesn’t really explain the rush to canonize Kirk. After all, he was a guy who hosted a streaming show and went to college campuses regularly to “debate” students, despite being 31 years old. Yes, he played an instrumental role in Trump’s 2024 win, increasing his share of the youth vote — well, mostly the male youth vote. But there are lots of people who work on campaigns and deliver victories who will never be showered with anything approaching the public glory Kirk is receiving posthumously.
Trump has always surrounded himself with sycophants and propagandists, people whose function is to push his ideas out into the culture. Sometimes those people are brought into the government, like Steve Bannon for a time, but sometimes they operate outside of it, like Roger Stone. Kirk was not a part of the government, but he was part of the regime.
Propagandists play a vital role in fascist movements. The most obvious example is Nazi Germany, of course. And while Trump certainly deployed propaganda effectively during his first term, in his second he’s really leaned into straight-up fascist iconography, building a world entirely focused on finding and eradicating the “other” — which in this instance is anyone who opposes him or is part of a disfavored group. That’s the entire point of the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence: to demonize and terrify immigrants.
But hey, the government can’t do it all, which is where someone like Kirk comes in.
MAGA’s Horst Wessel
There was no real daylight between Kirk and Trump when it came to messaging. That’s why numerous people have already pointed out that Kirk was basically Trump’s Horst Wessel — a young propagandist who met an untimely end and became a hero within the movement for it.
In that respect, Trump’s efforts to lionize Kirk and repress anyone who begs to differ resemble how the Nazi regime deployed propagandists:
During periods preceding new measures against Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews. In some cases the campaigns exploited the violence — both calculated and spontaneous — that ensued. The goal was to encourage passivity and acceptance of anti-Jewish laws and decrees as a vehicle to restore public order. Propaganda that demonized Jews also served to prepare the German population, in the context of national emergency, for harsher measures, such as mass deportations and, eventually, genocide.
Yep, sounds about right.
So, the mourning of someone like Kirk was always going to be over the top, confusing, and distressing to anyone unaware of how tightly he was integrated with the Trump regime.
The other reason so much praise is being lavished on Kirk is that Republicans don’t really have anyone else to admire. In the Trump era, there are no heroes.
Trump, with his tacky, mobster-esque authoritarianism, values two things above all else: fealty and malleability. People with core, immutable values, people in public service, people who would sacrifice themselves for a cause — these are not people who can exist within the modern Republican Party.
As far as Trump is concerned, those people are chumps. On the campaign trail in 2015, he mocked Sen. John McCain, saying that he was a “war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” The next year, he bragged during a debate with Hillary Clinton that he was smart for not paying taxes.
Americans who gave their lives to turn back the tide of fascism during World War II? Suckers and losers, per Trump. In August 2024, he said federal employees were “crooked” and “dishonest” and that if he won in November, he would hold them “accountable.” He’s defended Putin’s murderous regime because “our country does plenty of killing also … you think our country’s so innocent?”
The other reason heroes are in short supply on the right is that Trump doesn’t just want an authoritarian state. He wants a personalist regime like the one Vladimir Putin has. Here’s how the Center for a New American Security explains it:
Personalism refers to the domination of the political realm by a single individual. The leader's personality has an outsized impact on policies and outcomes, often trumping institutions and rules. In contemporary politics, we typically associate this sort of rule with authoritarian regimes. In such a personalist autocracy, the leader governs absent the constraints of other actors: Not even the leader's political party (should it exist) or the security apparatus exert independent control. Policy choices, in turn, reflect the whims of the ruler.
In such a world, only Trump’s wishes matter. When he praises Kirk effusively, his followers have to do the same. But everyone knows that had Kirk fallen out of favor with Trump before his death, his supporters would not be turning Kirk into a holy martyr for free speech.
The propaganda machine keeps on humming
All of the ceaselessly fawning media coverage was already weird and exhausting, but not nearly as weird and exhausting as the official government adoration.
It wasn’t enough for pretty much every Republican elected official to make a statement praising Kirk. His body was flown home on Air Force 2. Trump is going to posthumously award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — yes, the same one that people like Neil Armstrong, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Madeleine Albright, and Robert Redford have.
There was a prayer vigil for Kirk on Sunday at the Kennedy Center, with dozens of members of Congress and Trump administration officials in attendance. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made it real weird with a story about meeting Kirk in 2001 and how they instantly became “soul mates.” (Kirk was eight years old in 2001.)
Notably absent from the vigil? Donald Trump, who was busy golfing and couldn’t even bother to pretend to be aggrieved about Kirk’s death the day after he was murdered.
Rep. Nancy Mace took time out from being incredibly creepy about trans people to say she would be offering a resolution to have Kirk lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. Given that Kirk bragged about sending “buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president” two days before January 6, 2021, and then took the Fifth when investigated by the House January 6 Committee, it’s fitting that he might continue to dishonor the Capitol even unto death.
The comparisons to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination are probably the most galling, but they are also the least surprising. Conservatives love to deploy the only King quote they know — "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" — even as they willfully misunderstand it. In their fantasy world, King was calling for their version of colorblindness, one where they would just get to ignore the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, one where we don’t have pesky things like the Civil Rights Act.
One does have to wonder how Kirk would feel about all the comparisons, given that his view of King was that he “was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he didn’t actually believe.” Kirk also said that “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
And now, what more fitting way to fully merge the propagandist and the regime than to have the sitting vice president host the Charlie Kirk Show on Monday from the White House? During the broadcast, Vance told people they should call the employers of anyone they perceive as being insufficiently tender about Kirk’s death in the name of “civility.”
This must be a definition of “civility” the rest of us were hitherto unaware of.
There’s a neat symmetry to this, as Vance is a propagandist first and foremost. This isn’t a man who is engaged in, or who enjoys, the business of governance. Vance enjoys hurting people and isn’t bothered at all if he has to concoct dangerous lies in order to do so. That was basically his core function during the 2024 election. He popped up to declare that immigrants here legally under certain types of protected statuses were actually illegal aliens, because he said so. He told deranged lies about Haitians in Ohio eating dogs and, when called out on it, declared it wasn’t his fault that the media didn’t check his statements.
Trump will need to find a new Kirk. Nick Fuentes is too rough around the edges, Ben Shapiro too wussy, Alex Jones too … Alex Jones. But until one emerges, Vance will probably do in a pinch, and the propaganda machine will keep humming along.
That’s it for today
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Speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum, detached from emotion, identity, and consequence. That’s not how humans work.
Language shapes behavior. We internalize it, react to it, and often act on it. Dehumanizing speech doesn’t just float in the ether, it embeds itself in culture, policy, and relationships. It primes people to see others as threats, as less-than, as disposable. That’s not theoretical; it’s observable across history and psychology.
Violence rarely erupts spontaneously. It’s cultivated through repetition, normalization, and rhetoric that numbs empathy and inflames fear. Words don’t pull triggers, but they can load the gun.
To dismiss the power of language is to misunderstand the architecture of human behavior. We don’t just act, we narrate, justify, and rehearse our actions through speech. That’s why words matter. That’s why they can wound, and why they must warn.
And if this provokes a response, especially one that insists speech is harmless, it only proves the point. Words move people. That’s why they matter. That’s why they must be used with care.
This is also what I research and write about…
Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics
I’m just so sad and sickened by what is happening in our country. It’s not just Charlie’s kids we grieve for, but all our children who are living in fear - of being killed in school, of coming home to find their parents taken away, of expressing their opinions, choosing the wrong religion, or following their heart to love someone of the same sex. For them we must speak up and demand our democracy lives on.