U.S. soldiers stand next to the portrait of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk during his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Arizona on Sunday.Carlos Barria/Reuters
A billionaire playboy-entrepreneur descending on a gilded escalator with convulsive change on his mind. An impeached President expressing his rage. A mob empowered by a provocative speech surging past security barriers at the Capitol. A former chief executive glaring from a mug shot. An inaugural address promising punishing tariffs and changing long-established geographical names.
To these indelible images of the era – the 21st-century analogues of Franklin Roosevelt with Winston Churchill at Placentia Bay, the hatless John F. Kennedy bidding Americans to ask what they could do for their country, the subdued Ronald Reagan salving the country’s sadness after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle – will we add the sight of a grieving widow dabbing tears and promising redemption?
The early indications are that the sight of Erika Kirk – with her profession of faith, her dedication to her late husband’s movement, her mastery of the language of the MAGA insurgency, all wrapped in boundless sorrow – will not soon vanish from America’s field of vision and bank of memory. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy clutching the American flag that draped her martyred husband’s coffin has a widow’s anguish so imprinted itself on the country’s retina.
The assassination of Mrs. Kennedy’s husband prompted his harrowed successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, to stand before a joint session of Congress and, in a reference to the slain president’s ambitious set of priorities and his injunction to “Let us begin,” told the still-shocked lawmakers, “Let us continue.”
Mrs. Kirk, now crowned the new CEO of Turning Point USA, was issuing the same brave let-us-continue pledge.
Charlie Kirk’s videos thrived on controversy as he used the manosphere playbook to reshape politics
How Charlie Kirk’s movement continues – how it grows in the wake of the shooting of its founder, what its impact is on American life and political culture – is the question of the age, along with who succeeds Donald Trump as the Republican champion.
Was the departure of a noticeable part of the crowd after Mrs. Kirk’s remarks – but before Mr. Trump’s speech – a subtle signal of the passing of a torch, if not to the widow then perhaps to another conservative warrior? Did those departures connote that there remained, in the words of John McCrae in his poem In Flanders Fields, grave determination to “take up the quarrel with the foe,” but in another way, with another leader?
It is too early to measure the effect Mrs. Kirk will have on the Turning Point USA movement, but it is clear that, unlike many American women who follow their husbands into high office, she will not be a cipher in the model of Lurleen Wallace, who in 1967 became governor of Alabama because her husband, the devout segregationist George Wallace, was not permitted to serve consecutive terms.
Mrs. Kirk will more likely resemble Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who succeeded her late husband on Capitol Hill. She is remembered for being an early critic of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and for her 1950 “Declaration of Conscience,” while her husband, Clyde Smith, is remembered by almost nobody.
One of the unknowns of the days ahead is whether the Trump administration will press forward with its vow to punish those who did not display sufficient respect for Mr. Kirk and, more widely, make an example of the political and legal opponents of the President. That impulse has already raised concerns among Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who worries that such an offensive could be the predicate for an anti-conservative purge when the Democrats next take power.
At the heart of the Trump demand for punishment and prosecution of liberals is his claim that the spike in American political violence was caused by members of “the radical left” whose “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
U.S. President Donald Trump hailed slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk as a 'martyr for American freedom' on Sunday and vowed at his memorial service to carry on his work, while again accusing what he called the 'radical left' for Kirk's murder.
Reuters
Research funded by the federal government and watchdog organizations on extremist actions has concluded that most political violence comes from people on the right, not the left. “Right-wing attacks not only occur more frequently … they also result in significantly higher numbers of deaths compared to incidents linked to other political movements,” said Arthur Jipson, a University of Dayton sociology and criminology professor who has published peer-reviewed academic journal articles on the topic.
There is a widespread belief that the growth of incendiary public language and violent political action are expressions of deep unease among Americans of all political views.
“In politics as in families,” the Brookings Institution political theorist William Galston wrote in Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, published only eight days before Mr. Kirk’s murder, “passionate eruptions are usually a sign that some aspect of the status quo needs to change, including the attitudes and assumptions that guide our understanding.”
The Kirk funeral rite – a five-hour struggle for the mind and memories of the country that was suffused with religious language and imagery – was unusually revelatory.
Mr. Trump’s remarks, for example, were a combination of rambling reminiscences and a reprise of worn grievances, including his false claim that he won the 2020 election. But while Mr. Kirk – not a supple troubadour of flabby ideology but rather a balladeer for engagement with conflicting ideas – pledged tolerance for his foes, Mr. Trump displayed no such magnanimity.
“He did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Kirk. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”
In his farewell address the day he resigned the presidency in disgrace, Richard Nixon – the president often compared to Mr. Trump because of the impeachment threat he faced and his vilification of his opponents – told the White House staff, “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”