Skip to main content

Martyrs and Storms: The Charlie Kirk Memorial as Fascist Liturgy

Figure 1: Stephen Miller at the Charlie Kirk funeral (from Stephen Miller Laces Into 'Enemies' at Charlie Kirk Memorial)

In State Farm Stadium's shadow, under the same lights raining down upon Super Bowls and spectacles of empire, tens of thousands gathered on September 21, 2025, for Charlie Kirk's funeral. It was promoted as a funeral. It was, in fact, a resurrection ritual.

The 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder who had been just gunned down at a Utah campus rally a few days earlier was reborn in that instant—not as victim, but as martyr. Red, white, and blue flags waved in the air. Faces equated grief with grievance. And the choreography of the event enacted what it was actually about: a fascist liturgy, consecrating Kirk as saint and warrior in a holy war for the nation's soul.

A Rally in Disguise as a Eulogy

It wasn't jus another service. With the Department of Homeland Security numbering it alongside the Super Bowl, TSA checkpoints and federal agents ringed the arena. Inside, the mise-en-scène rivaled Nuremberg, slogans reading "NEVER SURRENDER REMEMBER CHARLIE KIRK" plastered everywhere, minute-long ovations, minute-long chanting of "We Are conservatives." uniting tens of thousands into one body politic.

Pastor Rob McCoy invoked scripture. Benny Johnson declared Kirk a martyr "in the true Christian tradition." President Trump and Vice President JD Vance granted the power of state, the latter vowing Kirk's podcast to endure in his voice.

It was liturgy as logistics: grieving became mobilization, grievance as grief, Kirk's body being transformed into relic.

Christian Nationalism at the Core

At the center of this theater pulsed Christian nationalism—the fusion of evangelical zealotry with the mythology of a white ethno-state. Kirk himself embodied the archetype: young, white, straight, railing against queer and immigrant "threats" to "traditional values." His memorial sanctified that role, turning him into warrior-saint.

"Raise your hand if Charlie Kirk brought you closer to Christ," Johnson bellowed. Erika Kirk promised to carry the cross of her husband's work, linking Christian faith with organizational expansion. This was not mourning. It was theocratic infrastructure building, comparable to Modi's Hindutva in India or Orbán's illiberal Christendom in Hungary.

Kirk's death was framed not as a random shooting but as leftist terrorism assassination. His Calvary, America's salvation.

Stephen Miller's Inferno

The most telling moment came with Stephen Miller, Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. His six-minute half-elegy, half-edict speech laid out the fascist machinery in motion.

"You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You've immortalized him," he shouted, portraying a lone gunman as the emblem of a huge "left-wing terror" movement. The crowd applauded. The foe had been named. The purging was at hand.

Miller's repetition, "We are the storm," deliberately echoed Nazi propaganda regarding Horst Wessel, the murdered SA officer martyred and whose blood sanctified violence. As Wessel's blood sanctified the volk, Kirk's blood sanctified the MAGA faithful now.

The intention was clear: grief became state power. Miller pledged to bring the full palette of Homeland Security and Justice upon "identifying, disrupting, dismantling and destroying" the targeted networks that had killed Kirk. Policy violence wrapped in holy vestments.

From Ritual to Repression

And this is the fascist shift: language as edict, eulogy as dictum. Already, the regime threatens to investigate "left-wing factions" that "gloated" over Kirk's death. Vance urges supporters to cause "trouble" for critics online. Miller's "righteous indignation" becomes cover for deportations, ramped-up detention, and dismemberment of programs for vulnerable communities.

Bodies most at risk—trans kids, immigrants, Palestinians, Black activists—get converted into fuel for re-empowerment of white Christianity. The memorial, then, was not closure but opening shot.

Organizing Infrastructure

For Turning Point too, it was building infrastructure. Its biggest event ever, the memorial sowed new chapters, validated the fusion of spectacle and surveillance, and made Kirk a sainted disciple of Trump's.

Sergio Gor, longtime MAGA operative, declared Kirk "all Trump, personified MAGA." Trump himself described the legacy "automatic." But this "immortality" is based upon the violence Fanon warned against—the violence of the colonizer coming full circle in fresh resistances.

What Resistance Demands

And here is the danger: silence. The left's failure to speak out against the Christian supremacism that is at the heart of MAGA lets the narrative go unchallenged. To counter, we have to give voice to those Kirk attempted to silence—migrants, queer children, Indigenous water protectors, campus activists demonized as "snowflakes."

We have to uncover the monument not as tragedy but as template. Its message: fascism born on a cross and waving a flag. Its method: martyrdom rendered as mandate.

Kirk's death is a manifestation of the polarizing he engendered. His canonization is the metastasis of the symptom. And Miller's storm is not theirs alone. History tells us that storms cut both ways—where the dispossessed rise, as well.

The decision is ours: to relinquish the narrative or to construct otherwise. To name, to disassemble, to dream a pluriverse beyond the fever fantasias of white Christian empire.

Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more