Eulogies for Civil War

How the authoritarian right is trying to turn Charlie Kirk’s murder into a rallying cry for vengeance.

Good morning! America doesn’t really do funerals anymore, it does stadium revivals. What was billed as a memorial for Charlie Kirk turned into a spectacle at State Farm Stadium in Glendale: part state funeral, part religious revival, part MAGA mega-rally. Security was presidential, the crowd swelled past 100,000 with an overflow arena, and if you squinted hard enough at the dais you could spot what looked like the entire Trump cabinet nodding in reverence. The Christian Science Monitor tried to describe it in the gentle tones of civic ritual, but in reality this was the emotional apex of a long con: grief packaged as grievance, martyrdom merchandised by the yard, and campaign strategy disguised as hymn.

Erika Kirk, to her credit, reached for grace. Her voice trembling, she said she had forgiven her husband’s killer, because forgiveness was the Christian thing to do. Then Donald Trump took the mic and spat it out like spoiled milk: “That’s where I disagree with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.” The widow preached love, the president counter-programmed with bile, and the crowd roared approval.

Trump wasn’t finished. He reminded the stadium that Kirk “did not hate his opponents,” but then added with a grin: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie… I can’t stand my opponent.” He even tried a half-joke about Charlie looking down from heaven, angry at him for hating so openly. And just to make sure the point landed, he pivoted back to his greatest hits: the “fake news media,” the “radical left lunatics,” and the insistence that “they cheated like dogs” in 2024. This was supposed to be the solemn part of the service, but in Trump’s hands it turned into just another rally, one where even the widow’s appeal to love was drowned out by grievance and applause lines.

Enter Stephen Miller, auditioning for the Book of Revelation. “We are the storm,” he thundered, promising vengeance on enemies he declared were “nothing” and warning of the dragon awakened by Kirk’s assassination. It was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s warning in real time: do not ignore the man’s words, because they were words of cruelty and supremacy. As Coates put it in Vanity Fair, Kirk “revel[ed] in open bigotry,” trafficking in slurs and folding every conspiracy into his sermon until “the American way of life” became a euphemism for Christendom and the exclusion of everyone else.

Coates dug up the receipts: the “freaks” and “trannies,” the “Mohammedan” threat, the Haitians “hunting you down at night.” Kirk smeared Yusef Salaam of the exonerated Central Park Five as a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape,” and warned that immigrants were “coming for your daughter next.” And yet, Coates argued, the political class was already busy sanitizing him into a “bridge-builder”, proof, he wrote, that “if you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?”

The answer stood on stage in Glendale: everything. The project wasn’t to soften Kirk’s vitriol but to weaponize it, to baptize his bile under stadium lights and rebrand it as holy war.

And just to be sure no one mistook this for actual mourning, the cameras caught Donald Trump shaking hands with Elon Musk, flanked by Dana White and Eric Trump, like the lineup for Survivor: Swamp Edition, outwit, outplay, out-grift. Musk doesn’t care about Kirk any more than Trump does, he cares about shoring up billions for XAI, which is reportedly burning cash at a billion a month. Trump cares about dismantling oversight so bribery investigations vanish, turning every handshake into a government contract. Put the two together at what was supposed to be a funeral and you get the real gospel: follow the money, not the hymns.

Max at UNFTR nailed the demographic math: seventy thousand white people, plus one Ben Carson, a Where’s Waldo of tokenism. It looked less like America and more like a country-club convention blessed with Lee Greenwood on repeat. The crowd was promised “unity,” but what they delivered was uniformity, a sea of white faces and red caps canonizing a man who once claimed Haitians were “coming for your daughters next.” A diverse movement this was not; it was the Lost Cause with better lighting and a jumbotron.

The pundits will keep polishing Kirk into marble, praising his “civility” and “debate style.” But what happened in Glendale was not civility, it was spectacle. Trump played the grieving patriarch selling policy through tears, Miller the zealot-in-chief declaring war, Musk the billionaire cameo angling for contracts. Coates gave us the words to understand it: this was mythmaking, not mourning.

And after all that stadium sanctimony, let’s close with something that actually deserves applause. In Chicago this weekend, 300 swimmers plunged into the river for the first organized open-water swim in nearly a century. For two hours the water was filled not with barges but with buoys and joy, the air not with grievance but laughter. The city pledged $150,000 to ALS research and youth swim lessons, and the swimmers marveled that they could actually see their own hands in the water. “Swimmable cities are livable cities,” said one advocate. In Glendale, a movement tried to sanctify death. In Chicago, ordinary people reclaimed a river and made it swimmable again. Between the dragon’s breath of Stephen Miller and the cool current of the Chicago River, I know which revival I’d rather attend.

A young man is dead, his family is shattered, and instead of reckoning with the poison he spread, an entire movement has chosen to alchemize his death into a weapon. The widow preached forgiveness, the president vowed hatred, the zealot conjured dragons, and the billionaire clasped hands for contracts. That is not mourning, it is mobilization.

The temptation will be to avert our eyes, to let the spectacle pass as just another weekend on the American circus tour. But Ta-Nehisi Coates had it right: ignore the words, ignore the venom, and you invite history to repeat itself. What was once a eulogy has already been remade into a call to arms. The authoritarians are telling us plainly what they want: to turn Kirk’s assassination into a rallying cry for civil war, with stadium lights and hymnals as camouflage.

We can grieve a murder without glorifying a movement. We can mourn a life without sanctifying his lies. The worst thing we could do now is confuse vengeance for virtue and let one man’s death become the spark for a bonfire of democracy.