Charlie Kirk Is Not Jesus

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Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

When Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last week, it was immediately clear that whatever followed was not going to be good. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know anything about the shooter, their motivations, or even what was going on in real time. No crystal ball needed, though. The discourse and political repercussions were obviously going to be bad, and the potential for violence even worse.

That said, I don’t know that I could have predicted the widespread and fevered rush to make Kirk—a proud racist, xenophobe, misogynist, and conspiracist, among other things—into a martyr. I expected it among the MAGA crowd, of course, but not the wider world, especially since I’d argue that large swaths of the American public didn’t even know who Kirk was before last week. It doesn’t matter; he’s apparently their fallen angel now.

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I’m tempted to get into the grotesquery of this statue from a purely aesthetic standpoint (as Katherine noted in Slack, all statues suck now for some reason??), but I’ll restrain myself because its spiritual grotesquery is far worse. We’ve had so many moments over the last eight months that feel like a new low or rattling omen, but the aftermath of Kirk’s death reeks of something different. The reaction and subsequent overreaction serves as an eerie confirmation of just how far gone we’ve gone culturally, and how much more there is to lose as popular opinion veers to extreme conservatism.

People in power aren’t merely sanitizing his legacy, they’re sanctifying it, as the following, somehow very real, examples show.