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

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