President Donald Trump used his speech at the memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sunday at 63,400-seat State Farm Stadium in Arizona, to continue obscuring Kirk’s long record of hateful and bigoted comments and views. Other speakers were also a part of the process of using what was billed as a memorial service instead as a political rally for the right.
“He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them,” Trump said. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie; I hate my opponent.”
Hate was central to Kirk’s career as a political organizer for the right and as a political pundit. From his platform, Kirk preached bigotry against multiple groups of Americans. He struck out against transgender people, in January referring to the “trans mafia” and the “purple haired jihadis” who he praised as “being run out in decent society.” Years before that he said a trans student in Wyoming should be bullied and imprisoned.
Kirk also called for former President Joe Biden to be executed and argued that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is Black, did not “have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously” and “had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, also brushed past her husband’s incendiary rhetoric in her speech, instead alleging that “the greatest cause in Charlie’s life was trying to revive the American family.”
By contrast, figures like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have condemned Kirk’s killing while also speaking out against efforts to whitewash who he was.
On Friday, while speaking in opposition to a congressional resolution honoring Kirk, Ocasio-Cortez noted, “We can deeply disagree and come together as a country to denounce the horror of this killing, and it is not a license for the abuse of power and whitewashing of American history.”
The measure passed the House with the support of 95 Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The right and the Republican Party have chosen to weaponize Kirk’s death and to use it as an excuse to go after the left in America. The killing is being used as a flimsy cover for attacks on free speech and the First Amendment, most notably the decision to use the FCC to pressure Disney/ABC to sideline host Jimmy Kimmel.
At the memorial, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who has a history of supporting white supremacy, continued the crusade.
Miller falsely claimed that the political left supported Kirk’s killing, adding, “You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing.”
The rally was billed as a memorial to a slain political figure, but ultimately it was a full-blown political rally, another moment in which the right decided to lie about who Kirk was while using the moment to push their censorious political agenda.
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