Eulogies with Erasers: Why I Won’t Lie at Charlie Kirk’s Funeral

As King Trump bangs the war drums on Americans of color, here’s the script I’m handed: hush my voice, cork my rage, pin a tasteful black ribbon, and pretend Charlie Kirk’s “greatest hits” were just off-key karaoke – no harm, no foul. Never mind that the 22-year-old in cuffs didn’t emerge from the boogeyman “American of color” the blame-shifters love to conjure, but from a star-spangled MAGA/Mormon living room in Utah – think framed Constitution over the mantle and cable news on autoplay. And I’m supposed to sip this sanctimony like communion and call it healing?

Unbelievable. They demand it be “The Darkest Day” – Mourning, mythmaking, and least we forget the receipts MAGA wants buried.

I’m supposed to call it “the darkest day,” nod solemnly while the tribute videos roll, and politely forget the man’s own words about me, my family, and whole communities he smeared for sport. And if I don’t? If I dare to say, “Hold up – this guy built a brand ridiculing us”? Then I’m the problem. I’m “divisive.” Meanwhile, a chorus of public figures eulogizes Kirk like he was a civil-rights saint in a quarter-zip. Spare me.

MAGA would want you to done all Black on the day Kirk is laid to rest, close the doors of your business, keep your kids at home. Stockholm Syndrome dipped in chocolate. “Boss, is we gonna be allright?”

Yes, political violence is wrong. Period. But mourning doesn’t require amnesia. Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, during a campus event at Utah Valley University; a 22-year-old suspect was later arrested after allegedly confessing. Those are the facts. They do not erase the other facts: for years he mainstreamed a politics that denigrated Black people, women, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ folks – anyone who didn’t fit his sanctified demographic.

Both truths can live in the same sentence. They must.

Start with race, since that’s the arena where he so often shadowboxed his straw men. Kirk said out loud what a million trolls type in the dark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He also mused about “moronic Black” women in customer service and claimed “prowling Blacks” roam cities for kicks targeting white people. This wasn’t accidental static – it was his 1959 American Bandstand Top Ten playlist. And it landed, because it’s built on the familiar hook: Black competence is suspicious; Black presence is threat. That’s not debate. That’s defamation dressed in talk-radio chea-ass cologne.

Women didn’t fare better under the Kirk doctrine. He told Taylor Swift – yes, that Taylor – to “reject feminism” and “submit” to her husband. He demanded “Nuremberg-style” trials for gender-affirming physicians, a sentiment with all the historical literacy of a meme and all the compassion of a boot. Calling to prosecute doctors for practicing widely accepted standards of care isn’t “free speech.” It’s a sinister blueprint. A threat. And it’s perfectly consistent with his culture-war ethic: punish women for autonomy, punish trans people for existence, call it “saving civilization.”

Gun violence? Kirk treated it like a cover charge: tragic, sure, but “worth it.” He argued the Second Amendment is such a sacred idol that we should accept “some gun deaths every single year” as the price of admission to liberty. If you hear the echo of America’s cruelest logic – “some lives must be sacrificed for our freedoms” – that’s because his rhetoric dragged it back into polite company. He made grief sound like patriotism.

Immigrants? He yearned-for the era when America slammed the door for 40 years, bragging that the nation was at its “peak” with the foreign-born share at its lowest. He couched it in biblical tones (couldn’t find “Christ-like compassion” for longtime immigrants who don’t speak English), then nodded toward “the great replacement” conspiracy – recasting demographic change as an attack on white people. It wasn’t just a dog whistle; it was a marching band. And when he said “large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America,” he handed a permission slip to every bigot who thinks a mosque equals a menace.

Religion and state? “There is no separation,” he declared – just a “made-up fiction.” You can’t get much clearer than that. That’s not small-government conservatism; that’s a theocratic wish list with a podcast.

Make America Medieval Again…

So here’s the moral funhouse I’m asked to enter: forget the record, canonize the personality. The tributes pour in. Tim Tebow posts that “evil is real,” while Demi-Leigh Tebow praises his “legacy.” Pat McAfee calls it a “public execution” and wonders aloud what it says about America’s soul. Add five more to the choir: Donald Trump thunders for the death penalty and pins blame on the “vicious” left; Elon Musk frames the killing as left-fostered violence and a symptom of “radicalized” higher ed; Ivanka Trump remembers a “highly principled” “good man”; Ben Shapiro calls the moment “deeply terrifying” and mourns his friend; Candace Owens breaks down on camera, calling him her “best friend and brother.”

I understand their grief. But I also understand their platforms. When you praise a man whose business model was demonizing entire groups, you’re not just mourning – you’re laundering. You’re baptizing his words in the holy water of post-tragedy unity and then asking the rest of us to drink. No, thanks.

And it’s not just celebrity elegies. We’ve already seen officials and allies implying that if you don’t mourn “properly,” there may be consequences – talk of visa scrutiny for foreigners, public shame-lists, professional retaliation, the whole “salute or else” routine. That’s not mourning; that’s political muscle wrapped in grief’s clothing. It turns a funeral into a loyalty test. Again: two things can be true. Killing a controversial figure is a tragedy. So is using his death to bully dissent and silence critique.

For Americans of color – and for women of every color – what are we supposed to do with all this? We are told to “come together,” but only if “together” means swallowing the insults that were hurled at us yesterday and will be repurposed tomorrow. “Unity” in this script is selective amnesia: the kind that asks Black folks to forget that we were cast as prowlers, that our competence was questioned on sight; the kind that asks women to forget we were told to kneel and obey; the kind that asks Muslims to forget they were framed as a demographic invasion; the kind that asks trans people to forget they were targeted with trial metaphors. If your unity requires my silence, it’s not unity. It’s surrender.

And I know the weak-ass comeback: “But he debated! He wanted ideas to collide!” Spare me the TED Talk lighting. Performative “prove me wrong” tours aren’t debate when the predicate is your opponent’s humanity. You can’t debate whether I get to be a full citizen, then call it a marketplace of ideas. How dare you! That’s an auction block. It’s why so many of his “collisions” were really collisions – with people and policies he’d already dehumanized.

So how do we grieve ethically in this socalled civilized country, which is undeniably polarized? Try this:

We condemn political violence without rewriting the résumé. We refuse to sanctify a public record that treats swaths of Americans as bellow-the-belt punchlines. We don’t call hatred “courage,” cruelty “clarity,” or repackaged bigotry “speaking hard truths.” And we retire the soft-focus eulogies that sound like campaign ads.

We also stop pretending that praising Kirk is some neutral act. Words have baggage; platforms have consequences and repercussions. If you laud a man who framed Black qualification as inherently suspect, who sneered at women’s equality, who cast immigrants and Muslims as threats, then say plainly what you admire. Don’t hide behind euphemisms like “boldness” or “conviction.” People of color and women hear what you’re actually saying: you loved the parts where we were props – the foil, the scarecrow, the demographic problem to be solved. We’ve sat through that movie. We know how it ends.

And we draw a bright line – one that honors life without embalming lies. Yes, mourn the man. He had a family, friends, admirers. Murder is not justice; it’s just more grief. But no, do not transform his rhetoric into a baptismal font. Do not insist that those he gleefully demeaned become the pallbearers of his legacy. Do not tell us the proper way to grieve is to adopt selective memory and call it grace.

Grace without truth is just PR baby, just PR.

Because what’s happening right now – this insistence that we recode years of relentless slander as “bravery” in the name of societal healing – is how propaganda works in a democracy. It employs our better angels against us. It takes the natural human impulse to say “no one deserves to die” and stretches it into “no one deserves to be held accountable in their obituary.” And then it encases that narrative in state power and megaphone media until dissent looks like blasphemy.

Let me be explicit: insisting on full context is not “celebrating” a death. It’s a demand that the living stop lying. It’s a refusal to let the word “unity” become a caveman-like club to police speech, punish critics, and sanctify a politics that told millions of us we were less than.

Check this: A country that can hold two truths at once is a country worth saving: political murder is evil; bigotry dressed as civic virtue is, too.

So, where do Americans of color and women of all colors go from here? We go forward with a memory that refuses to be managed. We clip the tribute reels with the receipts. We say to the Tebows and McAfees: you’re free to feel grief; we’re free to quote him. We insist that “darkest day” rhetoric belongs to days like Birmingham church bombings and Uvalde shootings and Charleston prayer-circle massacres – not to the death of a man who said some lives are an acceptable cost of his rights. And we build coalitions grounded in a simple grammar/logic lesson: you can condemn the act and still condemn the ideas.

We also prepare for the MAGA backlash – the shaming, the lists, the scolding diplomats. It will come. But the counter is the same as it was yesterday: tell the truth, loudly, with dates, quotes, and unflinching clarity. Refuse the hall pass of euphemism. If you must eulogize, eulogize correctly: a skilled political entrepreneur, beloved by his base, slain in a nation where violence is too easy and certainty is cheap – who also spent his career punching down and selling hierarchies as hope.

That’s the whole story. Not because I’m bitter, but because I’m wide awake. Because I’ve flown with Black pilots who landed smoother than your politics. Because I’ve watched Black women run customer service and the country in the same afternoon. Because I know lesbian hoopers who could outwork a Marine and then send him thank-you notes for his service. Because I live in a nation where Muslims are my neighbors, my colleagues, my kid’s teachers. And because I remember what he said about all of us. I refuse to bury that with him.

Mourn if you must. But please, please…, please don’t force me to lie at the funeral.

Note: Here is a link to a piece worth reading in Vanity Fair by Ta-Nehisi Coates that discusses attempts to sanitize Kirk’s views.