Mourning a Martyr, Forgetting the Man
By Nizar Masri
On Sept. 17, community members gathered at Chaffey College’s Rancho Cucamonga campus for a candlelight vigil to honor Charlie Kirk's legacy. While being a controversial right-wing political commentator, Kirk was assassinated a week prior at Utah Valley University. I attended the vigil hoping that I could see what his legacy truly meant for those who admired him.
Many of the attendees said they had heard about the event from the San Bernadino Patriots and the Mountain View Republican Club. Participants donned patriotic attire and waved flags with Christian slogans and Bible verses. Among the crowd of about 200 people, roughly a dozen of them were students.
One speaker likened Kirk to Jesus Christ, and there were multiple suggestions that his life was sacrificed for the good of humanity. The air around his name was reverent and deeply spiritual.
That night in front of the administration building, Kirk was absolved of all his sins and immortalized as a martyr, or as 21-year-old Chaffey student Abigail Brady voiced, he would be revered "for generations to come.”
I was captivated by Brady’s zeal, so I pulled her aside,
“He loved America, and he loved that people got the chance to stand for what they believe in no matter what side you’re on,” Brady said, “I believe in his opinion to share his own opinion.”
I might have been satisfied with that explanation, except Brady's speech suggested deeper allegiance: she said she was a huge fan who watched all his videos. I was intrigued as to which of his beliefs she and other vigil-goers were celebrating, but I didn't get a specific answer from Brady. Was I supposed to accept that their grief honored nothing more than a man who had merely expressed himself?
When I asked Lorraine Barraza, a member of the Mountain View Republican Club, to elaborate on her group's purpose it was described as:
"...a political lobbyist group that vets candidates for public office or school board positions to see if they have the same morals and ethics we do."
I questioned if Kirk's incendiary comments about women and people of color reflected those morals. Barraza said she had "never heard him make fun of any of those things." I pressed further but she was insistent, she claimed to have never seen any of that provocative rhetoric on Kirk's show.
Kirk often framed equitable policies and institutions as hostile to white Americans.
On his show he said the Civil Rights Act:
"...created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon."
Why, among the many victims of gun violence, was his life singled out for commemoration? I listened intently to every speaker—ranging from 10 to 65 years old—trying to gleam any information I could about why they had all gathered to honor Kirk that night. It was evident that the vigil-goers had gathered to honor the legacy of a man they were either unfamiliar with or whose beliefs they were unwilling to face.
There were many holes in the retelling of his story. Kirk advocated for public execution, supported the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, repeatedly denigrated minorities and condemned empathy as weakness. However, this did not stop the vigil speakers from framing him as a Christ-like figure.
Charlie Kirk profited from stoking the flames of division. Murder is abhorrent and tragic, but death alone does not confer nobility. While his death was heinous, Kirk ultimately fell victim to the political polarization that he intentionally fostered.