Dustin and Maddie Fleming drove 13 hours through the Texas desert with their two young children to reach Glendale, Arizona, for the memorial of one of their heroes. Here, in State Farm Stadium, a venue that usually hosts football games, the Flemings will join an expected crowd of more than 60,000 at dawn on Sunday to remember Charlie Kirk, the conservative political activist who was murdered earlier this month.
They will be joined by President Trump, the vice-president JD Vance and almost the entire senior echelon of the administration. Many of them were personal friends of Kirk. Security is expected to be at “presidential level”, meaning the Secret Service will search people coming into the stadium and attempt to secure the area around it.
For the Maga movement, the funeral will be the biggest event since Trump’s inauguration — an extraordinary moment at a time when the country is facing a deepening ideological rift, and fears of escalating repression and violence are rising.
For Kirk’s supporters, many of whom saw him as a religious as well as a political leader, it is a chance to honour his life. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, told The Sunday Times the memorial would be a “Maga state funeral”.
Republicans and Christians have mourned for days at the Arizona headquarters of Kirk’s organisation, Turning Point
CASSIDY ARAIZA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
CASSIDY ARAIZA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Last week as mourners arrived in Glendale ahead of the memorial they congregated outside the headquarters of Kirk’s organisation, Turning Point, where his followers have left candles, flowers and balloons.
“I think this is an important stage in history in America,” Dustin Fleming, 46, said outside Turning Point. “Not only that but a religious point in history.”
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Among the mourners was Preston Henry, 18, a student at Arizona State University, who said Kirk had become a “martyr” on campus. “Honestly, I think it worked sort of against the people that killed him,” he said.
Preston Henry is a student at Arizona State
CASSIDY ARAIZA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Balloons and flowers outside the Turning Point building
CASSIDY ARAIZA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Kirk’s memorial service will start at 8am local time. The morning will begin with three hours of sermons and prayer. Kirk’s wife, Erika, and her family, who are from Arizona, are devout Catholics, but the day will have a distinctly evangelical Protestant flavour because of Kirk’s own denomination, with music and exultant worship.
While the prayers are ongoing, Trump and a group of senior officials including Vance, the secretary of state Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son and a close friend of Kirk’s, will fly from the White House to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, a 20-minute drive from the stadium.
At 11am, a “celebration of Charlie Kirk’s life” will begin, with speeches from his wife and key friends in the White House. The president is set to be among the first to speak, and will leave soon after.
The service is about more than one man’s killing. Ten days after Kirk was targeted by a sniper while speaking at a university in Utah, shock has turned to fury as the Trump administration seeks to take action not only against a friend’s alleged killer, but also the “radical left” they say drove him to murder. Law enforcement believes the shooter was at least partly influenced by leftist ideology. In a message to his partner, who was transgender, the man accused of the shooting, Tyler Robinson, wrote: “I had enough of his hatred.”
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To the White House, the murder was part of a continuum of violence against conservatives that included the attempted assassination of Trump in July last year. Those around the president see Kirk’s killing as a direct threat — a message that they could be next.
“This is not a ‘both sides’ problem,” said Vance, while hosting an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show podcast recorded in the White House last week. “People on the left are much more likely to defend and celebrate political violence.”
That is not borne out by the many studies — rubbished by conservatives — that show in the US attacks by far-right groups outnumber those committed by any others.
JD Vance on The Charlie Kirk Show
DOUG MILLS
Vance’s spot on the podcast was partly a battle cry — he urged Americans to “put on the full armour of God”. Appearing alongside Vance was Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is leading the charge against “radical left” ideology.
What does Miller mean by radical left? He and other conservatives point to the fact that some of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests descended into violence and riots instigated by radical left-wing agitators. These networks, they believe, then distilled into the pro-Palestinian movement on university campuses, and now protest against immigration enforcement actions.
Miller said that the day before his death, Kirk had told him the government needed an “organised strategy to go after the left-wing organisations that are promoting violence in this country”.
“I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out,” Miller said on the podcast. “The people ask me what emotions I’m feeling right now … there’s incredible sadness, but there’s incredible anger.”
Many on the left view this as a dangerous power grab. Madeline Peltz, a journalist and author of a forthcoming book on the conservative youth movement, said: “You have the right trying to turn Kirk into this white Martin Luther King character, you have witch hunts against people who have criticised him, and it’s just incredibly frightening. This gives them the permission structure to move forward with an illiberal agenda they were already working on, but on an accelerated timeline.”
America’s divisions have rarely been more stark. Political leaders were last week united only in their understanding of the importance of this moment. Barack Obama described it as an “inflection point”.
Bannon, who has spent the week calling for “war” against the radical left, said the former president was right. “We think we’re winning because we’re going up the escalatory ladder the quickest,” he said. “I think you start seeing bank accounts frozen. I think you start seeing raids. I think you start turfing people out — bankers, financiers, NGOs, politicians, media types.”
Both sides feel under attack: the right by Kirk’s shooter, who murdered one of their own for holding the same beliefs they do, and by those celebrating his death. And the left, by the administration’s promised crackdown.
Some leading conservatives have attempted to calm the situation. Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff for former president George W Bush, issued a warning in the Wall Street Journal last week that using Kirk’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals “will further divide and embitter our country”.
But appeals for de-escalation have no support within Trump’s circles. Vance last week encouraged listeners to call the employers of anyone who celebrated Kirk’s murder and report them. In recent days, teachers, soldiers and professors have been fired or disciplined for posting on social media about his death. Some of them had praised the shooter. Others had made jokes or flippant comments.
Kirk with his wife, Erika, at Trump’s inauguration
The right has attempted to rebrand this as “consequences culture” to distinguish it from the “cancel culture” of the left they have spent years deriding.
After the late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for insinuating that Kirk’s shooter was part of the Maga movement, Trump told reporters that networks who broadcast criticism of him could lose their licences. The next day, Kimmel’s show was taken off-air.
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“The domination of all these institutions by the left is coming to an end,” said one conservative media executive.
His views reflect those of the administration and much of the conservative movement: when Democrats were in charge, law enforcement agencies launched investigations against far-right groups, and social media companies banned Trump from their platforms. Now it is their turn to wield that power.
One key part of the administration’s strategy to crush the “radical left” is the designation of Antifa, a highly decentralised anti-fascist movement at times associated with violence, as a terrorist organisation. On Truth Social, Trump called Antifa a “sick, dangerous, radical-left disaster”.
Adon Bermudez-Bay, a self-described “radical left” activist in North Carolina who is a member of the Black Panthers and has links to Antifa, told me that Kirk’s death was being used as an excuse by the White House to launch a long-planned crackdown on left-wing organisations.
He said: “We were seen as a threat anyways. This is just adding fuel to that fire.”
Back in Arizona, Kirk’s memorial is expected to serve as a major recruitment drive for Maga youth. His death has become a rallying cry. Outside Turning Point, Marlo Vasta, 18, says she did not really listen to Kirk before last week but after his death, she started seeing the late activist’s social media content appearing on her feed.
Marlo Vasta
CASSIDY ARAIZA FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
“My brother and my dad listened to Charlie Kirk a lot — I didn’t really,” said Vasta. “But I ended up getting his reels after his death, and I feel like I should have listened to him sooner.”