The MAGA Cult and the Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. Who Benefits Most from His Murder?

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The Evangelical movement, and the Catholic Hierarchy has a long history as a major partner in US governmental affairs and formulation of US imperial policy

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

9-18-25

 

Here in the US, a trade mark of conservative politics has been the need for "small government". Too much government interference smacks of communism is the mantra and the Democrats have gone along with this plan, albeit with a softer tone. "Getting smaller with Al" read a Business Week article on an interview with Al Gore in the mid 1990's where he boasted about cuts in government layoffs to show the US ruling class how his party was better for them than the Republicans.

Yet now it is the conservatives and far right wing elements that are pushing for more censorship, and there is more government interference in public life in the US than at another other time in the 52 years I have been here. 

The assassination of the right-wing bigot and Maga youth recruiter Charlie Kirk has changed the landscape drastically. Not only has the murder made all of us less safe, the present right wing, Christian Nationalist Trump regime is using it to elevate Kirk to martyrdom status. Those that criticised the "woke", "cancel culture" era are now taking revenge on opponents with increased enthusiasm and some extreme cancelling  of their own. 

What is happening is not new. When Eisenhower supported the American Legion's "Back to God" campaign in the 1950’s, he said in his televised address that, “Without God there can be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.". He was referring to the Christian god of course.

 

This led to the US Congress passing a bill that added, “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and making “In God We Trust” the nation’s motto adding it to the currency. And fuelled the era we know as McCarthyism.

 

McCarthyism can be defined as “the practice of making public accusations of disloyalty or subversion with little to no evidence.”, thus creating an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. The fear of foreigners or any critical thinking or challenges to the policies of the state, was directed at liberals and leftists in the media, art, playwrights, politics and expelling hundreds of thousands of radical militant trade unionists accusing them of being communists.

 

It always fascinated me when I met Americans from the US air base that was close to our village and they told me that at school they had drills where they would have to get under their desks in the event of nuclear war. They built bunkers in their back yards and so on. I couldn’t relate to that at all.

 

I would like to think the decade in which I grew up changed that. The 1960's saw revolutions and uprisings throughout the former colonial world that expelled British Colonialism (another one of Charlie Kirks favorite institutions), and French colonialism. In the US, the Black Revolt exploded as black Americans fought back against the horrific Jim Crow regime in the South threatening the image of the US throughout the world as the cradle of democracy as the uprising was met with violence from racist cops and the KKK. The women's movement, the French General Strike, the opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia and revolutionary movements in art and culture changed the way so many of us thought.

 

We are witnessing the return of McCarthyism today.  It’s always been here, the extreme right has always been here. It is a very violent country and always has been since its founding; that is the norm for settler states like the US and Israel. Over the past decades, from the Michigan Militia movement and the Oklahoma bombing to Rush Limbaugh and the Trayvon Martin murder, we have watched the rise of the extreme right and in particular White Christian Nationalism. 

 

Charlie Kirk was a supporter of the racist Great Replacement Theory and endorsed the  “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theology promoted by charismatic leaders that calls on Christians to take dominion over key spheres of society: government, education, media, family, business, arts, and religion. Specifically, the Evangelical movement is the Christians he is talking about. To many in the Evangelical movement, Catholics are not even Christians and the reader can go check out Kirk’s own words to discover what he thought of Muslims.

 

So it’s no surprise he opposed the separation of church and state and in that, and many other views, he was honest in expressing it as organized religion and its officials have been an integral component of the state whether a capitalist, feudal or slave, state. The Catholic Church, once the religion of the European feudal aristocracy until the rise of the capitalist class in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and the reformation that followed, was more than a junior partner in the colonial expansion that capitalist development wreaked on the peoples of the world. The non-Christian world was populated with lesser beings that were inferior, barring the Irish though who were Catholics but inferior anyway.

 

That the US body politic can mourn at the state level, the death of a hateful racist, misogynist, homophobic hit man as it sends more weapons to murder more children and innocents in Palestine speaks volumes about the rot that permeates that institution.

  

And the portrayal of Charlie Kirk as some sort of champion of free speech and human rights by the mass media, members of Congress and religious figures is beyond nauseating. “Pray now for America” the Republican commentator Peggy Noonan wrote in her opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in response to the killing..

 

Noonan says of Kirk, that he was, “….a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet people where they are.” My added emphasis.

 

But it’s hard to find any “good cheer” in Charlie Kirk’s hateful speech especially when it comes to non-white Americans,  “…..many of his political statements — on gender, race, immigration — amounted to hate speech.”, one Vietnamese American told the New York Times.

 

In her piece, Peggy Noonan  turned to a member of the Catholic hierarchy for advice; a priest named Gerald Murray.  Noonan wrote, that the priest said Charlie Kirk, "...wanted to share the eternal truths that make life meaningful and joyous. He did so by reasoned argument and dialogue. His example should inspire us to pick up the baton that fell from his hand.’”

 

What was this priest thinking was my first reaction?  But on further investigation, Father Murray is a supporter of Trump's immigration policy and a canon lawyer, Canon law is for Catholicism sort of like Sharia Law is for Islam. He has this to say about immigration and undocumented workers:

“The arrest and deportation of those who enter a country illegally and thus have no valid claim to be allowed to remain there is simply the due enforcement of law, whether by the United States or the Vatican City State.”

 

What position would Murray have taken on the occupations of eating establishments in the US Apartheid South during the Civil Rights movement I wonder; they were breaking the law.

 

And it seems the honourable father is completely ignorant of the US role in Central and South America that is the reason so many people from that region are forced to flee north. The crushing of the Jesuit liberation theology including murdering nuns and the loved Archbishop Romero provides some insight there.

 

Kirk, like many neo-fascist elements, championed our First Amendment that protects the right to free speech as well as freedom of religion, the right to assembly and to protest. But their support of free speech rights has a goal and that is to facilitate the building of a movement on the ground that can take political power and ultimately deny the rest of us the right to free speech. Another look at the rise of Nazism after the party’s 1932 election victory is in order.

 

The way to undermine this divisive strategy is to reject this assault, strengthen  class consciousness, and embrace our class solidarity and kinship with all workers beyond national borders. This is the only way forward for working people and the future for our children.

 

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die the way he did and working class people must condemn the killer and the methods of political assassination that have been so prevalent in US political history. It has given the neo-fascist and the Right wing Christian Nationalists a reason to increase surveillance, go after opponents and we will see more and more of this.

 

It’s impossible to know exactly who was behind this murder and conspiracies abound. This is the norm in the US as people have no idea who or what institution they can trust any more which is why religious forces can seem to offer the only way out.

 

But as the Trump menagerie blames socialists, anarchists, liberals (Democrats are now terrorists according to some MAGA) and anyone that criticises MAGA policies while others blame Israel; we can ask ourselves one question:

 

Who or what forces benefit from the assassination of Charlie Kirk? Certainly not leftists.

 

The answer is easy there and that is the extreme right, neo Nazi elements and Christian Nationalists. Most importantly, Donald Trump and the MAGA cult itself.