The Right Wing Desperately Wants to Make Charlie Kirk Its MLK

Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Glendale Ariz on Aug Photo Rebecca Noble Getty Images They keep carving out calendar space for Charlie Kirk days of remembrance resolutions flag orders demanding the hush and reverence reserved for real moral eyewitnesses Congress moved to mark in the current era as a National Day of Remembrance the White House ordered flags at half-staff after his death towns are issuing local proclamations like it s a civic sacrament Every single American should take a long hard look at the twisted soul and dark spirit of anyone who would want to kill a young man as good as Charlie Kirk President Donald Trump commented at Kirk s funeral last month You can feel the script they want you to read grief scene candles a lesson about free speech under attack a martyr who stood bravely before the mob It s not subtle It s a bitter truth that America s newest national days of celebration have honored Black and Brown activists including Cesar Chavez and Dr Martin Luther King Jr only after their deaths These are activists who expanded civic liberties and legal protections to the far-reaching corners of American citizenry with the latter being violently killed for his vocal outrage against the inhumane conditions of this country The goal of the far right Christian nationalists and white supremacists in this moment is clear to fix Kirk in the community imagination where Dr King once stood But the point isn t to honor a tradition of justice it s to replace it entirely Martin Luther Kirk and White Victimhood To build a white martyr you first have to dismantle the Black one Before conservatives could sell the story of Charlie Kirk as a civil rights figure they had to burn down Martin Luther King Jr s hard-won moral framework During his life Kirk took up that demolition as a personal crusade calling King awful dismissing him as not a good person and branding the Civil Rights Act a huge mistake So how do you go from tearing down King to demanding King-sized memorials By flipping the script Take the language of Black struggle state violence moral witness inhabitants testimony and repurpose it Cast the critic as the censor Rebrand accountability as persecution Where Black organizers built the politics of survival the conservative movement built the politics of inversion White people have come to see victimhood as a kind of currency something you can accumulate pact and spend politically White people have come to see victimhood as a kind of currency something you can accumulate transaction and spend politically When people of color gained traction by naming real structural harm the response wasn t repentance it was appropriation Scholars call this victimhood discourse In The Plausible Deniability Playbook sociologists show how white-victim suggests circulate online to legitimize grievance under the veneer of free speech and cancel lifestyle A Journal of Experimental Social Psychology investigation identified dominant-group members more likely to claim digressive victimhood responding to accusations of bias by framing themselves as the real casualties Victimhood becomes moral capital politicking fuel and a way to block critique You hear it on talk radio We re silenced now You see it in legal briefs I was discriminated against for being white You see it online endless posts about woke mobs and cancel heritage This isn t random whining It s victimhood reimagined as land grab Related How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians It s also not a new tactic White racist hegemony has been selling the notion that they are the underdog rebels since concocting the pseudo-historical myth of the Confederate Lost Cause in the ashes of post-war Reconstruction That s why the sanctification of Kirk matters The memorials aren t sentiment they re staging A movement that treats scrutiny as blasphemy is a movement preparing to outlaw scrutiny If critique of Kirk becomes sacrilege then critiquing the institutions he attacked diversity equity and inclusion programs voting protections race-conscious remedies becomes sacrilege too The martyr narrative isn t ornament it s the capstone of inversion now codified through courtrooms plan and holidays Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent Martyr-Making Machine After Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University political leaders rushed to hit the familiar notes unity civility calm Fair enough no one should celebrate political murder But within days there were national resolutions campus tours under banners of inheritance even a congressional push to mint a commemorative coin Turning Point USA Kirk s conservative nonprofit is already packaging the legend The grief is real for his family The project built on top of it is too In giving Kirk the same exaltation as King we almost forget how King was literally killed by a white racist not by fate Statues half-staff flags and designated days are tools once used to honor people who fought state violence Now they ve been repurposed to canonize a man who called that struggle a con And in giving Kirk the same exaltation as King we almost forget how King was authentically killed a truth bleached out of his official sainthood He was murdered by a white racist not by fate James Earl Ray a segregationist was convicted of the assassination congressional records document his ties to extremist networks King s assassination was born of white violence The motivation behind Kirk s killing by contrast remains publicly murky The contrast matters King s legacy was forged through hidden networks church circuits grassroots coalitions local organizers whose very lives were threatened by proximity His killing by white violence is central to the story In Kirk s affair the violence that consumed him is being rebranded before we even know what kind of violence it was To obfuscate that mystery is to prematurely end what should be a masses process of learning the truth But in the quest to construct a white supremacist-rights figurehead that step is inconsequential Make the martyr first ask questions later The Anti-Civil Rights Civil Rights Movement This is the new tactic of nationalist white supremacy Don t just say we re the real casualties Appeal to a judge or Congress to enshrine it In the s the backlash to Black Lives Matter calcified into a media diet of grievance By boosting notions of victimhood had become big business and Kirk was one of a large number of beneficiaries Now that same capacity is migrating into courtrooms lawsuits that recode DEI as anti-white briefs that position white plaintiffs as a new protected class Reuters in recent weeks communicated a conservative group dropping its claim that a law review discriminated against heterosexual white males Related Black People Knew This Would Happen The Supreme Court s Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard decision struck down race-conscious admissions ruling that even limited use of race to ensure diversity violated the Equal Protection Clause Gutting affirmative action handed the conservative legal movement a new playbook for recentering whiteness as grievance Within days America First Legal founded by Stephen Miller sent warning letters to more than law schools claiming that after the ruling diversity programs were discriminatory to white students Miller s architecture and allies like Faculty Alumni and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences have since filed suits against university law reviews and DEI programs arguing that equity is code for anti-white bias What began as backlash to affirmative action has evolved into a coordinated legal campaign to weaponize white victimhood turning civil rights law itself into a shield for whiteness The same movement that mocked systemic racism now insists systems are rigged against them White Americans have perpetually feared white dispossession the idea that any step toward racial equity means a loss of power status or safety for white people It s constantly been the ghost in America s machine and the panic in the aftermath of every civil rights gain Jim Crow sold it Massive Resistance sold it Fox News sells it nightly The modern twist is that the old dispossession story now relies on borrowed language The same movement that mocked systemic racism now insists systems are rigged against them The same crowd that sneered at lived experience delivers solemn monologues about being silenced and erased And because the region for pain is profitable there s reliably room for more books speaking tours podcasts and congressional pageantry Flags standing at half-mast and days of remembrance use state power to validate the brand You don t have to win every court affair or pass every bill if you can win the calendar or Facebook post What They Can t Take Here s the part the mirror can t capture Black progress never sprang from victimhood alone It came from resilience under pressure from coalitions that refused to let one population s win be another s loss from the hard administrative work of remaking schools juries housing codes and police practice brick by bureaucratic brick You can hijack our language you can cosplay with our symbols you can even pass a resolution declaring a day in your hero s honor But you can t counterfeit the practice that built freedom Black progress never sprang from victimhood alone It came from resilience under pressure We don t owe reverence to a man who called MLK awful and sneered at the Civil Rights Act of We owe reverence to the people who kept going when the cameras left who held neighborhoods together under raids and budget cuts and who fought to liberate all Americans not just their own That is where moral authority lives It isn t bestowed by a proclamation What white America mistakes for victimhood or even martyrdom has never been our power Our power is invention under pressure the ability to build new worlds out of ruin Every time they copy our rallying cry we change the language Every time they hijack our symbols we make new ones It s that existentially driven backed-in-the-corner cultural grit that creates the next revolutionary movement and that is something the far-right white can emulate and try to steal but can never comfortably or confidently embody The post The Right Wing Desperately Wants to Make Charlie Kirk Its MLK appeared first on The Intercept