Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 23, 2024. 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 witnesses. Congress moved to mark today 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 said 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 public 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, public 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, trade, and spend politically.

White people have come to see victimhood as a kind of currency — something you can accumulate, trade, 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 claims circulate online to legitimize grievance under the veneer of free speech and cancel culture. A Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study found dominant-group members more likely to claim “digressive victimhood”: responding to accusations of bias by framing themselves as the real victims. 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 culture.” This isn’t random whining. It’s victimhood reimagined as land grab.

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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, policy, and holidays.

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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 actually 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 actually 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 case, 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 public 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 victims.” Appeal to a judge or Congress to enshrine it.

In the 2010s, the backlash to Black Lives Matter calcified into a media diet of grievance. By 2020, boosting notions of “victimhood” had become big business, and Kirk was one of many beneficiaries. Now that same energy is migrating into courtrooms: lawsuits that recode DEI as “anti-white,” briefs that position white plaintiffs as a new protected class. Reuters recently reported a conservative group dropping its claim that a law review discriminated against “heterosexual white males.”

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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 200 law schools, claiming that, after the ruling, diversity programs were discriminatory to white students. Miller’s network 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 always feared white dispossession — the idea that any step toward racial equity means a loss of power, status, or safety for white people. It’s always 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 market for pain is profitable, there’s always 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 case 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 community’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 1964. 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.

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