The streets of Washington, DC, carry a distinct identity. Between the grand architecture, historic monuments, and the ever-present sight of U.S. flags, there’s no mistaking the capital. Just two weeks ago, those flags were lowered to half-staff—not to mourn a senior statesman or a decorated public servant, but by order of the White House to mark the September 10 killing of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old podcaster, far-right operative, and Maga youth figurehead, elevating his death into the realm of national tragedy.
Kirk built an empire online, pushing a brand of rage-driven, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic commentary. What drew millions was not only his rhetoric, but his normalization of cruelty, humiliation, and dehumanization—especially targeting college students. He once dismissed compassion altogether, insisting empathy was “a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.”
Charlie Kirk: "I think empathy is a made up New Age term that does a lot of damage" pic.twitter.com/KxyrCGvxW2
— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 12, 2022
As a Black woman, I felt no sadness seeing the limp flags in the heavy late-summer air, a city suffocated by threats of military presence. My feelings were unchanged hours later, when the Speaker of the House held a moment of silence for a man who was neither a public servant nor a veteran. That silence collapsed into chaos when congresswoman Lauren Boebert demanded an open prayer from the floor. Within days, the House passed a resolution honoring Kirk, with a striking 310-58 majority.
There was no grief in me when NFL teams staged in-game tributes. The Dallas Cowboys’ Jumbotron showed Kirk in a statesman-like pose, reminiscent of tributes usually reserved for presidents or league icons. Meanwhile, the same league once punished Black players for kneeling in 2020, while endzones still bore the hollow phrase “End Racism.” The hypocrisy was unmistakable.
These gestures weren’t meant for people like me to mourn. They were deliberate acts of political memory, installing Kirk into the national narrative as an ideological symbol. It’s an official embrace of his white nationalist, misogynistic, and homophobic vision—an assertion that his worldview reflects the interests of the federal government. The comparison is unavoidable: like Confederate statues raised long after the Civil War, these memorials are less about grief than about rewriting public memory and advancing racial politics of the present.
Public monuments often place their subjects beyond reproach. Rosa Parks, for example, was honored in 1996 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, cementing the civil rights struggle as part of America’s democratic legacy. By contrast, Trump’s promise of a posthumous Medal of Freedom for Kirk aligns his legacy with Confederate-style glorification, rewarding extremism rather than reckoning with history.
Kirk’s tactic of targeting opponents, shaming detractors, and leveraging cruelty has grown far beyond Trump’s own political vengeance. While his death was tragic, it cannot erase his unapologetic words: gun deaths were “worth it” to defend firearm rights. He also claimed Black women in media and politics lacked “brain processing power.” Now, tributes sanitize these words as “advocacy for free speech,” while critics who dare to question whether he should be celebrated are losing their jobs.
His organization, Turning Point USA, left deep scars in academia with its “Professor Watchlist,” a doxing campaign against educators who held views Kirk disliked. To describe this as “doing politics the right way” is to ignore the harassment and intimidation he unleashed on intellectuals nationwide.
This canonization echoes historian David Blight’s analysis of post–Civil War reconciliation, when northern and southern whites united by erasing slavery’s legacy. Confederate memorials allowed traitors to be elevated as heroes, while Black Americans endured violence, terror, and systemic exclusion. Today, Kirk is being enshrined in ways that suggest his brand of extremism is heroic, even as millions marginalized by his rhetoric are left exposed.
Calls for unity on these terms replicate past betrayals—like when white northerners reframed a war fought over human bondage into a sanitized story of valor and honor. To honor a man who denounced the Civil Rights Act as a “huge mistake” and called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” is to betray the memory of those harmed by his ideology, which openly flirted with eugenics and replacement theory, prompting a 2024 investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
To turn Kirk into a symbol of free speech and patriotism is an insult to every community he attacked. His death should not be used as an opportunity to reinforce a long-standing message: that America belongs only to some, and not to all.
