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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.
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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 Jew