Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?
The streets of Washington, D.C., are unmistakable. Beyond its iconic architecture and monuments, you know you’re in the nation’s capital when you can barely walk half a block without seeing an American flag. Two weeks ago, those flags were flown at half-staff, not to mourn the death of a senior government official, as is customary. Instead, the White House ordered them flown at half-staff in a highly politicized gesture intended to commemorate the September 10 murder of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old podcast host, far-right activist, and young MAGA influencer, as a national tragedy.
Kirk ruled an online fiefdom that promoted his signature brand of outrage: racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric. It was not only his virulent style, but also his promotion of cruelty, humiliation, and dehumanization of his political opponents, especially students, that drew millions of people to his audience. He called compassion “a New Age term that does a lot of harm.”
As a Black woman, I felt no sadness seeing those lifeless, faded flags hanging from vine poles in the humid, bitter summer heat, which, even on the eve of fall, would not liberate a city suffocating under the threat of federal military occupation. I felt the same way when, just hours after the shooting, the Speaker of the House of Representatives called for a moment of silence on the floor to mourn a citizen who had never held public office or served in the military. (That brief silence erupted seconds later in a violent melee when Rep. Lauren Boebert asked members to hold a public prayer service for Kirk from the floor.) Nine days later, the House passed a Republican resolution honoring Kirk by an overwhelming margin of 310 to 58.
I felt no sadness when seven teams in the National Football League—the same organization long criticized for its contradictory and often hypocritical stance on the place of politics in sports—held memorials for Kirk, who never played professional sports or held a position in the league. At the Cowboys’ stadium in Dallas, Texas, the giant screens displayed a statesmanlike image of Kirk, the kind you’d expect from a former president or a longtime teammate. This grandiose gesture was fraught with hypocrisy: the silencing of Black players punished for standing up for social justice in 2020, while the painted turf in the end zone read “End Racism”—a reminder of how fleeting the league’s motto was in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement just a few years ago.
I feel no sadness because these memorials for Kirk weren’t meant to make me cry. Rather, they seek not only to embed Kirk in the national consciousness, but also to reinforce the national memory of what he represents ideologically and culturally. This glorification constitutes an official attempt to integrate the state into his movement—a blatant declaration that his consistently homophobic, misogynistic, and white nationalist beliefs represent the interests of the federal government and, by extension, what the presidency considers a national priority.
This recalls the period following the Civil War, when Confederate memorials, until the late 20th century, were erected not by those seeking to mourn an individual, but by those wishing to send a message about the racist policies of the era. Some are convinced that the recent years of anti-racist protests and organizing have succeeded in destroying enough of these Confederate monuments that their whitewashed history has collapsed with them. But the memorials erected by the country’s most powerful institutions in Kirk’s honor signal the revival of a new version of neo-Confederate commemoration. Like Confederate tributes and monuments of the past, today’s Church of England memorials stifle any questioning of their purpose. Those elevated to the status of official national commemoration are generally—with a few notable exceptions—to figures the public regards as beyond reproach. For example, by awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rosa Parks in 1996, Bill Clinton sought to sanctify the entire civil rights movement for which she fought. This distinction made the era a national honor, for it championed the meaning of democracy and freedom for all Americans.
By contrast, with the immediate tribute to Kirk, Donald Trump’s announcement that his late personal friend would receive the Medal of Freedom posthumously echoes the intentions behind the Confederate memorials of the past. Instead of a public tribute reflecting the long journey toward national reconciliation with our past, monuments like the one erected for Kirk elevate his far-right record beyond public accountability.
Kirk’s approach of targeting those who have questioned his ideologies and punishing his critics is an agenda that goes far beyond Trump’s record of suppressing his personal and political enemies. While, like most of Kirk’s critics, I do not support his assassination, Kirk himself has stated that gun deaths are “worth it” to preserve gun rights. While his extremist rhetoric, including his claim that Black women in government and the media lack “brain processing capacity,” is touted in eulogies as his “defense of free speech,” media figures and government officials are fired for openly questioning his public praise.
Furthermore, hundreds of university professors have been slandered, harassed, and threatened by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its infamous “Professor Watch List,” which published the names and information of any academics whose views Kirk deemed incompatible with his own. It is curious that a virtue like “doing politics right” could be bestowed upon someone who sought to destroy the lives of academics and intellectuals.
The glorification of Kirk shares another, more enduring legacy with the commemoration of the Confederacy. Historian David Blight notes that in the aftermath of the Civil War, the call for reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners came at the cost of erasing the legacy of slavery from the postwar narrative. Thus, white citizens were reunited on typically Southern terms, exacerbating racial atrocities that had never been addressed in the postwar era, and leaving Black Americans lynched and terrorized on a massive scale throughout the South.
Moreover, the reunification campaigns exonerated rebels, by definition traitors and enemies of the state, and elevated them to a status once reserved for statesmen and decorated American veterans. It was a powerful statement: even those who sought to overthrow this country would be celebrated as heroes before Black Americans were treated as citizens. The same approach is evident in the tribute to Kirk, which glorifies a controversial ordinary citizen as a national hero.
Left-wing elected officials, journalists, and public figures who emphasize calls for unity now do so on right-wing terms, recalling the arrogance of white Northerners who sought to reframe a war waged explicitly against human trafficking and slavery as a national moment to celebrate duty, honor, and military courage on both sides. Those who call on us to honor the life of a man who called the 1964 Civil Rights Act a “terrible mistake” and Martin Luther King Jr. “atrocious” have betrayed those who heard Kirk so clearly embrace eugenics and replacement theory, with such massive online influence that the Southern Poverty Law Center launched an investigation in 2024.
The glorification of Kirk by his far-right defenders is an insult to the millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived daily under the fire of his rhetoric. The commemoration of Kirk by his supporters and defenders is nothing more than another opportunity to proclaim an old message about who belongs in this country and who doesn’t.
