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Charlie Kirk memorial: JD Vance speaks as tens of thousands attend service – latest updates
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 September 2025, 21:48
Vice president JD Vance just took the stage, hailing Charlie Kirk as someone who “transformed the face of conservatism in our own time.”Making multiple references to conservative talking points including anti-abortion sentiments and religiously-guided family values, Vance said:
“Charlie Kirk brought many truths in his life… He brought the truth that marriage and family were the highest callings, far more important than any job or educational credential. He brought the truth that our nation would fade unless it brought order to its neighborhoods and prosperity to its people. He brought the truth that life was precious and we must fight to protect it at all stages and at all times.”
In his concluding remarks, JD Vance said:
“For Charlie, we will speak the truth every single day. For Charlie, we will rebuild this United States of America to greatness. For Charlie, we will never shrink, we will never cower, and we will never falter, even when staring down the barrel of a gun. For Charlie, we will remember that it is better to stand on our feet, defending the United States of America and defending the truth than it is to die on our knees.”
He went on to say:
“My friends, for Charlie, we must remember that he is a hero to the United States of America, and he is a martyr for the Christian faith. May our heavenly father give us the courage to live as Charlie lived. That is what we must do. For Charlie, you ran a good race, my friend. I love you. We’ve got it from here. Thank you.”
JD Vance went on to add:
“He was taken from us by those who despise the virtues that actually made our civilization great to begin with, dialogue, truth-seeking, family and faith. In the wake of his death, we have seen some of the very worst parts of humanity. We have watched people slander him. We have watched people justify his murder and celebrate his death. I know that this makes you angry, just as it has made me angry, but it is easy in these moments to see only the worst of our fellow man.
I found myself wishing that I could pick up the phone and talk to my friend and ask him for his advice and his counsel, to ask him how to respond to such hate and the souls from which that hate springs…
I think he would encourage me to be honest, that evil still walks among us, not to ignore it for the sake of a fake kumbaya moment, but to address it head on and honestly as the sickness that it is.”
Vice president JD Vance just took the stage, hailing Charlie Kirk as someone who “transformed the face of conservatism in our own time.”Making multiple references to conservative talking points including anti-abortion sentiments and religiously-guided family values, Vance said:
“Charlie Kirk brought many truths in his life… He brought the truth that marriage and family were the highest callings, far more important than any job or educational credential. He brought the truth that our nation would fade unless it brought order to its neighborhoods and prosperity to its people. He brought the truth that life was precious and we must fight to protect it at all stages and at all times.”
Donald Trump Jr just delivered an explicitly political tribute to Charlie Kirk, kicking off with an impersonation of his father before referencing Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton.Trump Jr said:
“To say Charlie knew more about the Bible than me is an understatement, folks. It’s like saying Donald Trump knows more about being president than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. No kidding…
Charlie embodied something at the very core of our movement. When people disagree with us, we don’t silence them, we don’t destroy them, and we certainly don’t sink to violence. We don’t burn down their businesses. We don’t scream at their children at Disneyland. No, we debate. We stand tall and we win with our ideas.”
Trump Jr’s comments come as dozens of workers across the country, ranging from journalists to popular late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel, have been penalized as employers and public officials crack down on remarks that they regard as “inappropriate” towards Kirk.Earlier this week, US attorney general Pam Bondi faced backlash across the political spectrum, including from rightwing communities, after she vowed to target “hate speech” following Kirk’s killing.Bondi later walked back on her remarks, saying: “My intention was to speak about threats of violence that individuals incite against others.”Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr just delivered a tribute to Charlie Kirk, saying:
“He understood democracy’s great advantage was that our policies were formed by ideas that triumphed in a marketplace of debate and conversation.
He thought that conversation was the only way to heal our country, and this was important, particularly important during a technological age when we are all hooked into social rhythms, social algorithms that are hacked into reptilian cords of our brain and amplify our impulses for tribalism and for division.”
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth just addressed the crowd in a highly religiously charged address filled with references to war and religious crusade.Hegseth called Charlie Kirk “a true believer for the cause of freedom, for the power of young people, belief in our republic and our founding principles in America first and make America great again.”He also pointed to what Kirk saw as a “spiritual war,” saying:
“You see, we always did need less government. But what, Charlie understood and infused into his movement, is we also needed a lot more God… On this Sunday morning, I’d like to think we’re all in Charlie’s church.
He went on to add:
“Charlie waged war, not with a weapon, but with a tent, a microphone, his mind and the truth and the gates of hell could not prevail against him… Charlie Kirk was a citizen who had the biblical heart of a soldier of the faith, who put on every single day the full armor of God with a smile as the Scriptures tell all Christ followers to do. Charlie Kirk a warrior for country, a warrior for Christ. He ran the race. He finished the fight.”
Secretary of state Marco Rubio was the next speaker, following suit from previous speakers and comparing Charlie Kirk to historical figures including Jesus.Addressing the crowd, Rubio said:
“Here was this voice that inspired a movement in which young Americans were told that is not true. The highest calling we are called to is to be in a successful marriage and to raise productive children. The…movement that taught them that ours was not a great country, but the greatest, most exceptional nation that has ever existed in the history of all of mankind, and that it’s worth fighting for…
God took on the form of a man and came down and lived among us, and he suffered like men, and he died like a man, but on the third day, he rose unlike any mortal man, and then, and to prove any doubters wrong, he ate with his disciples so they could see and they touched his wounds… And when he returns, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and we will all be together, and we are going to have a great reunion there again with Charlie and all the people we love.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has just addressed the crowd in what was a markedly political speech.
Gabbard, who was an opponent of same-sex marriage at the start of her career, said: “Charlie, he chose our schools as his arena because he knows that they are meant to teach, to train our young people to think critically, to debate ideas, to test their strength through a clash of reason. But too often, these schools silence debate, saying words are violence and dissenting voices are hush and those who speak of God, those who speak the truth, simple, objective truths like there are only two genders in these schools, they are told you have no voice.”
Gabbard, who spoke of schools but made no mention of the slew of mass school shootings that occur each year in the US, went on to add:
“History shows this dark pattern that when ideas cannot withstand scrutiny, whether it’s the ideology of so called religious fanatics or political fanatics, they’re …terrified that their weak ideas will be exposed for what they are… They kill and terrorize their opponents, hoping to silence them. But in this evil that we have experienced that Charlie face, their flawed ideology is exposed. Because by trying to silence Charlie, his voice is now louder than ever.”
Tucker Carlson, political commentator and former Fox host, has just spoken at State Farm stadium.In a religiously charged and charismatic speech, Carlson said:
“Charlie was a political person who was deeply interested in coalition-building and in getting the right people in office, because he knew that vast improvements are possible politically, but he also knew that politics is not the final answer. It can’t answer the deepest questions, actually, that the only real solution is Jesus.
Politics at its core is a process of critiquing other people and getting them to change. Christianity, the gospel message, the message of Jesus begins with repentance …
This gathering and God’s presence, God’s very obvious presence in this room, the presence of Jesus, is a reminder of what we’ve known for 2,000 years, which is any attempt to extinguish the light causes it to burn brighter.”
Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, just addressed the crowd.In an incendiary speech, Miller said:
“You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal. You have immortalized Charlie Kirk, and now millions will carry on his legacy.”
Miller, speaking as if Kirk’s killing had been incited by “our enemies”, went on to add:
“We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened … We we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.”
Prosecutors have said that they suspect 22-year old Tyler Robinson killed Kirk because he personally had become sick of what he perceived to be Kirk’s “hatred”.But, citing three sources familiar with the investigation into Kirk’s killing, NBC reported on Saturday that federal authorities have not found any link between Robinson and leftwing groups, on which the Trump administration has threatened to crack down after the deadly shooting.Millers comments came days after he threatened a crackdown on what he called a “vast domestic terror movement” without providing evidence. Miller said the administration would use the federal government to achieve this goal.“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, [Department of] Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.at the State Farm stadium in Glendale, ArizonaAn ear-splitting roar just broke out as the camera showed Donald Trump for the first time. The president flew from the White House to Glendale on Sunday morning for the service.From a box on an upper level of the arena, Trump, wearing a red tie, pumped his fist.“We’re going to celebrate the life of a great man today,” Trump told reporters before departing Washington earlier today. He said he was braced for a “tough day.”Charlie Kirk’s memorial service kicked off with religious tributes made by his colleagues and friends who recounted their memories of the slain 31-year old who founded the conservative advocacy organization Turning Point USA.The tributes then slowly made way for more political messaging with very few calls of unity.Addressing the crowd was Ben Carson, a former Republican presidential candidate and Trump’s transporation secretary during his first term.In a politically charged address, Carson made references to 1950s communism and alleged progressive attempts to gain control of media outlets and Hollywood.Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna, compared Kirk to Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights icon who Kirk once called “awful” and Kirk claimed “said one good thing he actually didn’t believe”.Addressing the crowd, Luna said that Kirk “altered the trajectory of our modern fight against cultural decay and ideological tyranny”.Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.The state-dictated reference to Kirk as a civil rights leader echoes the widespread effort on the right to cast the founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA as a figure equivalent to Martin Luther King Jr, a man Kirk once called “awful”.After everyone from a Georgia representative to a deputy chief of the New York police department made the comparison with MLK, the slain civil rights leader’s son, Martin Luther King III, took time this week to reject it, noting that Kirk had accused prominent Black women of lacking “the brain processing power to be taken seriously”, while his father “was about bringing people together”.“When you’re doing that, it’s a disservice to unification,” King told a reporter in Virginia. Kirk, he said, “certainly was a force in this society and a significant force, but I just disagree with the position that his force was about inclusiveness. When you denigrate Black women and say that somebody is in a position just because of the color of their skin, that’s gravely false.” More
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Trump drive to pursue critics puts US on path to dictatorship, Democrats warn
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 September 2025, 19:23
Top Democratic leaders on Sunday warned that Donald Trump’s drive to go after his political opponents is putting the US on a path to becoming a dictatorship and a “banana republic” just eight months into his second presidency.The warnings came a day after Trump’s public call for the justice department to take action against perceived enemies – and after ABC yanked its late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel off the air in the wake of a threat from regulators at the Federal Communications Commission who are loyal to the president. Such behaviors, along with others since his return to the Oval Office in January, has prompted many who are not fiercely aligned with him to describe him as an authoritarian.Turning the justice department “into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they’re guilty or not … is the path to a dictatorship,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN. “That’s what dictatorships do.”Schumer’s fellow Democratic senator Chris Murphy, meanwhile, suggested the US was already becoming a “banana republic”.“The president of the United States is now employing the full power of the federal government, the FCC the department of justice, in order to punish, lock up, take down off the air all of his political enemies,” Murphy said on ABC.ABC indefinitely took Kimmel’s show off the air after he criticized the Trump administration’s response to the 10 September shooting death of far-right political organizer Charlie Kirk – which in turn prompted FCC chairperson Brendan Carr to threaten to revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC stations.“This is one of the most dangerous moments America has ever faced,” Murphy said. “We are quickly turning into a banana republic.”In a social media post Saturday addressing “Pam” – evidently attorney general Pam Bondi – Trump fumed over the lack of legal action against US senator Adam Schiff of California and New York attorney general Letitia James, both Democrats.Schiff and James are among a handful of people who have been accused by a close Trump ally, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, of falsifying documents on mortgage applications.“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump said.On Friday, the federal prosecutor who was overseeing the probe into James resigned, after the attorney – Erik Siebert – reportedly insisted there was insufficient evidence to charge her with mortgage fraud.Siebert, US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, reportedly told staff of his resignation via an email on Friday. Trump claimed Saturday on social media that he fired Siebert.Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whom Trump defeated to win his first presidency, echoed Schumer’s criticism. She called Trump’s moves a “very dangerous turn in our politics”.“What we’re hearing now from the White House and their supporters (is) that this may, you know, lead to even further political action, legal action, prosecutorial action, intimidation of all kinds,” Clinton said on CNN.Outgoing Republican congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, in response to a question about the Trump administration and Kimmel, separately told CNN that “there have been some wrong statements made, to say the least”.“To threaten media and say you’re going to pull their license – that’s not what America’s about,” said Bacon, who has decided against running for re-election in the 2026 midterms. “And we do have a freedom of speech, freedom of the press. And we should defend that.”Schiff and James have separately clashed with Trump, leading investigations that the Republican president alleges were political witch-hunts.During Trump’s first presidency, Schiff – then a member of the US House – led the prosecution at Trump’s first of two impeachment trials, which was based on allegations he pressured Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election. Schiff also served on a select House committee which investigated the January 6 attack on Congress carried out a pro-Trump mob which wanted to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.In between Trump’s presidencies, James brought a major civil fraud case against him, alleging he and his company had unlawfully inflated his wealth and manipulated the value of properties to obtain favorable bank loans or insurance terms.A state judge ordered Trump to pay $464m in that suit, but a higher court later removed the financial penalty while upholding the underlying judgment. More
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The US right claimed free speech was sacred – until the Charlie Kirk killing
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 September 2025, 05:00
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in US Politics
Trump picks his former lawyer to be top prosecutor, as he pushes Bondi to investigate foes
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 September 2025, 05:00
Donald Trump said he was appointing his former lawyer Lindsey Halligan to be US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia after an extraordinary outburst in which he overtly put pressure on his attorney general to more aggressively pursue senior public officials he regards as his political enemies.“Pam Bondi is doing a GREAT job as attorney general of the United States. She is very careful, very smart, loves our country, but needs a tough prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, like my recommendation, Lindsey Halligan, to get things moving,” Trump wrote on Truth Social post, announcing his decision.In an earlier online outburst that read as much like a direct message to Bondi as a public post, Trump demanded she appoint Halligan – his special assistant and a onetime beauty queen – to replace Erik Siebert, a former police officer and experienced prosecutor and US attorney who resigned after finding no grounds for prosecuting the New York attorney general, Letitia James.“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW,” Trump wrote.Halligan was among the lawyers who represented Trump in civil litigation after his Mar-a-Lago resort was raided in a search for classified documents.It was not immediately clear if Halligan would serve in the role on an interim basis before a confirmation vote by the US Senate.Prior to the announcement of Halligan’s appointment, Mary “Maggie” Cleary, a US justice department lawyer who once said Joe Biden’s presidential administration targeted her for being conservative, told colleagues she had been unexpectedly tapped for the post, according to an email seen by Reuters.Trump administration officials previously told Siebert that the president was frustrated his office had not yet brought criminal mortgage fraud charges against James, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The office is also involved in an investigation targeting James Comey, a former FBI director who like the New York attorney general is regarded as an enemy by Trump. That investigation is tied to the bureau’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.Regarding both officials, Siebert had previously said he did not believe the evidence was strong enough to bring charges, the sources told Reuters. More
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in US Politics
Trump news at a glance: fears president will seize on Kirk’s murder for campaign of vengeance
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 September 2025, 01:58
On Sunday the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk is set to be hailed by Donald Trump as a martyr of the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.But Kirk’s memorial service at a football stadium in Arizona could, critics fear, be exploited by the US president to turn collective grief into a campaign of vengeance against his political opponents.Trump has spent the past 10 days escalating threats against what he calls the “radical left” after the fatal shooting of Kirk, 31, on a university campus in Utah.The White House is considering classifying some groups as domestic terrorists and revoking tax-exempt status for certain non-profits, even though there is no evidence linking these groups to the killing.How Trump is capitalizing on Charlie Kirk’s killingTrump and his allies have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party, branding it an extremist organisation despite it having roundly condemned the attack on Charlie Kirk.Officials insist their focus is preventing violence, but critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes and an erosion of free speech. They warn his administration is trying to harness outrage over Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.“Political violence is very often used as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties and on opponents – this is page one of the autocrats’ playbook,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University.Read the full storyTrump’s reported pause on Taiwan weapons aid sparks fears he is using island for China trade dealDonald Trump’s reported pause on US$400m in weapons aid to Taiwan has fuelled fears he is using US support of the island to negotiate with China.Trump’s pause on weapons provisions, if confirmed, included orders for lethal munitions and autonomous drones, but could still be reversed, the Washington Post reported on Friday.It came amid US efforts to negotiate a trade deal with China and before Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, spoke on the phone on Friday. Trump said they had made “productive” progress on a range of issues. But analysts said respective readouts of the call did not mention Taiwan.Read the full storyTulsi Gabbard did not alert White House before revoking 37 security clearancesTulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, did not inform the White House that her office was revoking the security clearances of 37 people – including top deputies to the CIA director, John Ratcliffe – before it happened last month, according to three people familiar with the matter.The move meant the White House did not having an opportunity to closely vet the list before it became public and there appeared to be no paper trail from the president directing the effort, the people said.Officials only realized after the fact that Gabbard had managed to pull the security clearances of career CIA officials. Several of Trump’s top advisers view the episode as a serious blunder that comes as Trump is sceptical of the intelligence community.Read the full storyWhy is Trump so obsessed with Jimmy Kimmel and US late-night TV shows?Since ABC made the decision to indefinitely suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel from his late-night talkshow after on-air remarks about the killing of Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump has encouraged further action against other late-night hosts.Most presidents have accepted the relentless punchlines on the Tonight Show as part of the job since the show became hugely popular in the 1960s under comedian Johnny Carson.But Trump is a different political animal. He has singled out Kimmel, who has kept the Maga movement in his crosshairs since candidate Trump backed out of a scheduled 2015 appearance at the last minute.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
A man armed with a gun and a knife was arrested on Saturday after he allegedly pretended to be a member of law enforcement outside State Farm Stadium near Phoenix a day before Charlie Kirk’s planned memorial service at that venue.
The FBI reportedly recorded Donald Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents posing as business contractors last year.
The US military has issued new media restrictions demanding that journalists pledge not to gather any information that has not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.
Immigrant advocacy organizations and activists are bracing for a crackdown from the federal government after threats from the Trump administration to root out and criminally prosecute non-profit groups it believes are sympathetic to “leftwing” politics.
California will be the first state to ban most law enforcement officers, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces while conducting official business under a bill signed by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 19 September 2025. More
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Trump border czar Tom Homan reportedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 September 2025, 23:50
The FBI reportedly recorded Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover agents who were posing as business contractors last year.A new report from MSNBC on Saturday reveals that the agents recorded Homan, six weeks before the 2024 election, allegedly promising to assist in securing government contracts across the border security industry during Trump’s second term.Six sources familiar with the matter told MSNBC that the FBI and justice department – then run by Joe Biden’s administration – had intended to hold off and assess whether Homan would follow through on his alleged promises after he was appointed as Trump’s border czar. However, the investigation stalled after Trump took office, and in recent weeks, officials appointed by Trump decided to close the case, according to MSNBC.According to the sources, a justice department official who was appointed by Trump called the case a “deep state” investigation.In a separate statement to MSNBC, the FBI director, Kash Patel, and the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said: “This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and justice department prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”They added: “The Department’s resources must remain focused on real threats to the American people, not baseless investigations. As a result, the investigation has been closed.”The White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, told MSNBC the investigation was “blatantly political”. Jackson added that it was “yet another example of how the Biden Department of Justice was using its resources to target President Trump’s allies rather than investigate real criminals and the millions of illegal aliens who flooded our country”.Homan was captured on video accepting $50,000 in cash at a meeting spot in Texas on 20 September 2024, according to an internal summary of the case reviewed by MSNBC and sources who spoke to the outlet.Four sources familiar with the matter told MSNBC that multiple federal officials believed they had a solid criminal case against Homan for conspiracy to commit bribery. However, since Homan was not a public official at the time he accepted the money and Trump had not yet become president, his actions did not meet the criteria for a standard bribery charge.Officials eventually decided to continue monitoring Homan once he joined Trump’s second presidential administration. MSNBC reports that officials had been looking at four potential criminal charges including conspiracy, bribery and two kinds of fraud, before Trump’s new justice department shut down the investigation.Homan, who was previously the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during Trump’s first term, was appointed by Trump to run what he has described as the “biggest deportation” project the US has ever seen. Prior to his appointment as border czar, Homan was a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the Washington DC-based thinktank behind Project 2025.After the MSNBC report was published, Adam Schiff, a California Democratic senator and a former federal prosecutor, wrote on social media: “Border Czar Tom Homan was caught by the FBI accepting bribes – on camera – to deliver government contracts in exchange for $50,000 in cash. Pam Bondi knew. Kash Patel knew. Emil Bove knew. And they made the investigation go away. A corrupt attempt to conceal brazen graft.”In an angry outburst on his social media platform on Saturday night, Trump appeared to direct his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to appoint a White House aide, Lindsey Halligan, interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, so that she could seek criminal charges against Schiff and another of the president’s political rivals, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Trump has demanded that both Schiff and James be prosecuted on mortgage fraud claims both deny.On Friday, the prosecutor who was serving as the district’s interim US attorney, Erik Siebert, was forced out, reportedly for refusing to bring charges against James, due to a lack of evidence. Trump insisted on Saturday that he had fired Siebert for political reasons. Late Saturday, Trump announced that he would nominate Halligan, his former personal lawyer and a one-time contestant in the Miss Colorado USA beauty pageant now serving as a special assistant to the president, to replace Siebert. More
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How Trump is seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing for a campaign of vengeance
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 September 2025, 15:29
They will gather to mourn one of their own. On Sunday the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk is set to be hailed by Donald Trump as a martyr of the Make America great again (Maga) movement.But Kirk’s memorial service at a 63,000-seat football stadium in Arizona could, critics fear, be exploited by the US president to serve a darker purpose: turning collective grief into a campaign of vengeance against America’s enemy within.Trump has spent the past 10 days escalating threats against what he calls the “radical left” after the fatal shooting of Kirk, 31, on a university campus in Utah.The White House is considering classifying some groups as domestic terrorists and revoking tax-exempt status for certain non-profits, even though there is no evidence linking these groups to the killing.Trump and his allies have also sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party, branding it an extremist organisation despite it having roundly condemned the attack on Kirk.Although officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes and an erosion of free speech rights. They warn that, in an echo of authoritarian governments around the world, his administration is trying to harness outrage over Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.“Political violence is very often used as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties and on opponents – this is page one of the autocrats’ playbook,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of the book How Democracies Die.“I’m a Latin Americanist by training and the language we’ve heard lately reminds me a lot of the outsized response of military dictators in South America in the 1970s and that was a response to much higher levels of political violence than we see in the United States.”Levitsky added: “One is hard pressed to find an authoritarian government that did not take advantage of either a terrorist attack or a political assassination – an episode of political violence – to further crack down on civil liberties. This is mainstream authoritarian stuff.”Emotions are bound to be raw at Sunday’s tribute to Kirk, a close ally of Trump and personal friend of his son Donald Trump Jr, and a key figure in mobilising support for the president on university campuses. Authorities said they believe the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, acted alone and they charged him with murder on Tuesday.However, administration officials have repeatedly made sweeping statements about the need for broader investigations and punishments related to Kirk’s death. Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser, claimed without evidence that there was an “organised campaign that led to this assassination”.Miller’s comments came during a conversation with JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s talkshow from his ceremonial office in the White House on Monday.Miller said he was feeling “focused, righteous anger,” and “we are going to channel all of the anger” by working to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” by using “every resource we have.”The vice-president blamed “crazies on the far left” for saying the White House would “go after constitutionally protected speech”. Instead, he said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”View image in fullscreenAsked for examples, the White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured, as well as the distribution of goggles and face masks during protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, blamed “leftwing radicals” for the shooting and said “they will be held accountable”. She warned: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the aisle.”Her comments sparked a backlash across the political spectrum, since even hate speech is generally considered to be protected under the first amendment to the constitution. Bondi tried to clean up her remarks, writing on social media that they would focus on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence”.But Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What you’re hearing from Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi is an unambiguous intention to use this tragedy as a pretext to crack down on dissent and criticism.“This is almost a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: to use a crisis to declare an emergency, to identify enemies and then to use that as an excuse to use state power as a cudgel against political opponents.”Already Trump has declared that he is designating the antifa movement a terrorist organisation while the Heritage Foundation thinktank and the Oversight Project, the authors of the influential Project 2025 blueprint, released a memo designating transgender people as “violent extremists”.Conflating such so-called threats with the Democratic party would be a leap but it is one that Miller and company seem willing to make, in what Levitsky regards as another typical authoritarian manoeuvre. “There’s almost always a rhetorical slip of the hand in which you link extremists who may be real or imagined or exaggerated to your mainstream opposition,” he said.“It’s far from clear that the guy who perpetrated this assassination belongs to any far-left movement; it seems pretty clear he did not. It’s very difficult to imagine that the far left, which in the United States is incredibly weak, poses a threat.”He added: “This is being used – and this is what authoritarians have done in many places – as a pretext to go after the Democratic party, which uniformly to a person repudiated this assassination and is in no way linked to it, and to go after what might be called opposition civil society.”Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, drew a comparison with the June killing of Democrat Melissa Hortman, a former speaker of the Minnesota state house, and her husband. “The Democrats didn’t run around blaming the Republican party or the conservative philosophy,” he said. “We didn’t engage in a series of guilt by association tactics.”Raskin also reacted to recent comments in which Miller described Democrats as “a domestic, extremist organisation”. “What is his basis for that? That is out of an authoritarian how-to guide. Authoritarians like to describe anyone who does not accept their rule over society as a terrorist. That’s a Putin move; that’s a Pinochet move.”Since taking office Trump has mobilised the federal government to pressure law firms, universities and other independent institutions. The White House has reportedly pointed to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as further potential subjects of scrutiny.More than a hundred non-profit leaders, representing organisations including the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation, released a joint letter saying “we reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms”.After years of railing against censorship and “cancel culture”, Trump and his allies are now policing their opponents’ speech. People deemed to have celebrated Kirk’s death have been portrayed as complicit in the surge of political violence, with dozens fired, suspended or disciplined by employers over “inappropriate” comments.This week, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by the ABC network over comments he made about Kirk following pressure from the Trump administration. Trump suggested regulators should consider revoking licences for networks that “give me only bad publicity”.Trump also brought a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and four of its journalists in what the newspaper described as a meritless attempt to discourage independent reporting. On Friday a judge tossed out the action but allowed Trump to refile and amend it within 28 days.Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, observed: “The irony is that Charlie Kirk justified much of his rhetoric as free speech and denied that there was such a thing as hate speech so that all the speech was justifiable. They’re willing to completely do a 180, completely turn that entire position on its head by adopting a position that they had claimed to reject.“This is the party that before 2024 had insisted that they were the defenders of free speech. JD Vance went to Europe to lecture the Europeans on free speech. And now what are they doing? They are justifying and leading a state-sponsored cancel culture.”Trump’s concerns about political violence are selective. He described people who rioted at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 as “hostages” and “patriots” and pardoned 1,500 of them on his first day back in the Oval Office. He also mocked House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi after an attack on her husband.View image in fullscreenWhen Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored attacks on Democrats. Asked on Monday about the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman over the summer, Trump said, “I’m not familiar” with the case.A recent study of political violence by the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank, found that rightwing extremists have killed six times more people than their far left counterparts over the past half century.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, observed: “They expect the Democrats and people who don’t agree with Maga’s worldview to take the high road, that somehow the onus is on that side to be the better angel, but it’s not expected of them.“Donald Trump can go out and call his political opponents scum and say that he doesn’t care about their wellbeing. But if these people point out the vile and controversial positions of someone like Charlie Kirk or those within their own administration, like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, then they’re domestic terrorists.”Yet still Trump has unwavering support from Republicans in Congress. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and others proposed legislation that would enable the justice department to use racketeering laws, originally envisioned to combat organised crime, to prosecute violent protesters and the groups that support them.Congressman Chip Roy of Texas wants the House to create a special committee to investigate the non-profit groups, saying: “We must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us.”Rightwing commentators have also cheered on the clampdown. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a long record of bigoted comments, said “let’s shut the left down” and acknowledged that she wants Trump “to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is”.Some analysts believe that Trump is fulfilling that ambition. Steve Schmidt, a political strategist, said there has never before been a crime committed in the US where the president and his allies have “used the occasion to demand a consolidation of political power for themselves and collective punishment against their opposition, who have been named as co-conspirators in a crime for which they had no involvement”.Schmidt noted state demands that flags be lowered and tributes enforced: “What you’re witnessing is a propaganda campaign that is ruthless, brutal and cold, right down to the use of the highly choreographed videography and photographs from the open casket. It’s obscene.” More
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‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 September 2025, 15:00
Christian nationalists in the US are positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement, one that has grown in popularity and whose rise was intertwined with Kirk’s own political ascent.After Kirk’s killing, his widow, Erika Kirk, wrote on social media that the “world is evil”, but God “so good.” The “sound of this widow weeping [echoes] throughout this world like a battle cry,” she said. “They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”While Erika Kirk’s private sorrow is no doubt very real, her public remarks are telling, said Jeff Sharlet, the author of several books on Christian nationalism and the far right. “That’s holy war, that’s accelerationism, and it’s incredibly powerful,” he said, particularly in the emotional context of a grieving widow.Sharlet noted that although Kirk was best known for his non-religious political organizing, conservative eulogizing has overwhelmingly emphasized that he was a man of faith. Some people have gone further, and characterized Kirk’s death as martyrdom for conservative Christian values.“We know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” Sean Feucht, a pastor who worked with Kirk and is known for his Christian nationalist views, said in an emotional video on social media. “The devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up … We need to be more bold.”Matt Tuggle, a megachurch pastor, posted a video of Kirk’s death with the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”The rise of Trump-era Christian nationalismKirk’s meteoric career as a pundit and far-right activist was in some ways a microcosm of the rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism. Kirk started as a publicly secular young Republican in the Alex P Keaton mold but came to embrace a strident Christian culture war, speaking of a “spiritual battle … coming to the West” that would pit “Christendom” and “the American way of life” against leftism and Islam.Similarly, Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded in 2012, started as a pro-free market organization downstream of the late-2000s Tea Party movement against “big government”, but by the time of his death he had leaned into ideas associated with the Christian right. The organization may have done so because it spotted an opportunity.Shortly before Donald Trump won his first election to the presidency, the mainstream Christian right was demoralized and open to more extreme and anti-democratic ideas, noted Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christianity and the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.View image in fullscreenChristian nationalism is the belief that the US is and should be an explicitly Christian nation. Experts tend to view the ideology as existing on a continuum that ranges from relatively mainstream cultural conservatism to extreme religious supremacy. Defining it is difficult because Christian nationalism is less an organized movement than a tendency or way of thinking, Taylor and others said.For many years, the Christian right was dominated by groups such as the Moral Majority, which emphasized the idea of organizing Christian voters to democratically achieve conservative outcomes, as well as efforts to train and elevate conservative jurists to influence the federal judiciary.Yet two electoral victories by Barack Obama and the US supreme court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, left Christian conservatives feeling that all their efforts were for nothing. Because of changing demographics and the ongoing secularization of society, the number of Americans who identified as Christian was also dropping – meaning that majoritarian democracy was no longer a reliable political tool for the Christian right.“The early summer of 2015 … was a low point for them,” Taylor said. “There was this sense of, ‘What we’re doing is not working. We need someone strong. We need a fighter.’ And it just so happened that Trump kind of appeared on the scene at that moment, and I think that was, in part, the rocket fuel behind his appeal to evangelicals; he said: ‘I will speak for you. I will defend you. I will give you more power.’”Despite occasional misgivings, the Christian right soon enthusiastically aligned with Trump. But when he came into office, Trump did something new: he surrounded himself with Christian advisers from outside the traditional leadership of the Christian right. Led by Trump’s longtime adviser, the pastor Paula White-Cain, his new consiglieres tended to be megachurch preachers who had big followings in their spheres of influence but were viewed as B-list – or C-list, or D-list – figures by the conservative Christian political establishment.White-Cain “was an independent, charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor and was on her third marriage, a female preacher, and preached the prosperity gospel,” Taylor said – in other words, someone with many markers “that people in the conventional evangelical world would have either labeled heresy or just low-brow”.‘He drew the church into Maga’After this changing of the guard, there were “some pretty wild and extreme theologies” that gained access to the Trump administration and conservative centers of power, Taylor said, including a far-right movement, popular in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, that is sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR advocates for modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.The NAR leaders who “attached themselves to Trump and the Maga movement very early on,” Taylor said, “had a vision of social change, of societal conquest, that was far more aggressive than some of the old frameworks of the religious right.” That vision was exciting and politically potent to people including Kirk, who adopted theories and language associated with the NAR.The NAR has a distinctly minoritarian and anti-democratic valence. Rather than a Christian public lobbying to make government and society reflect its values, NAR ideas argue for Christians to take positions of power and push their values from the top down. A key NAR concept is something called the “seven mountains mandate” – the idea that “spiritual war” will not succeed until Christians have scaled and conquered seven summits of influence in public life, commonly identified as religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment, and business.“The seven mountains, as an ideology, is deeply ambivalent about democracy,” Taylor said. “If democracy works, and gets you to positions of power, great, but if not, well, God’s will is still for Christians to take over the seven mountains, and they need to do it by whatever means they can.”The concept of the seven mountains has existed since the 1970s but was popularized in the 2000s, according to Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career expressed reluctance at politicizing his religious views. That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the NAR, including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches.View image in fullscreenKirk’s own evolution was striking: he went from saying, in 2018, that it was important that Christians respect the separation of church and state to denying that any such separation existed in the US constitution.Kirk never used the exact phrase “seven-mountain mandate”, Boedy said, but at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 Kirk praised Trump by saying: “Finally, we have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence,” which was one of the most prominent mentions of the concept in the conservative mainstream. Kirk also attended conferences organized around the theme of the seven-mountain mandate.“‘Seven mountains’ is a kind of weird, wonky theology,” Sharlet said; Kirk “normalizes it and mainstreams it and smooths it out”.Kirk understood “the political and religious baggage that comes with the idea of Christian dominionism, of theocracy,” Boedy believes, and was trying to gently popularize Christian nationalist ideas while avoiding their more negative connotations.The “Appeal to Heaven” flags seen at the January 6 riot and elsewhere are often an NAR symbol. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has ties to NAR circles and flies an Appeal to Heaven flag at his congressional office. Ché Ahn, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a charismatic preacher, is an adherent of NAR and “seven-mountain” ideas.Kirk was an activist more interested in uniting conservative Christians than representing any one faction or denomination. Yet the NAR might be understood as one of three main currents of hardline contemporary Christian nationalism in the US, Taylor said. The other two streams are radical traditionalist Catholics and a certain aggressively “masculine” reformed Protestantism embodied in Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense.In contrast to the Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, which tend to be very white and male in their leadership and intellectually influential but not widely popular, the NAR has roots in a rapidly growing international charismatic movement that is multi-ethnic, open to women in leadership, and viscerally exciting to rank-and-file churchgoers.Yet the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism are also attractive to broad swathes of conservative Americans, including those who are not actively religious, Sharlet noted. Although the Christian nationalism of popular imagination is a strict, Handmaid’s Tale-style piety, he said he often encounters Maga conservatives who are intensely dedicated to Christian nationalist ideas despite the fact that they do not attend church.“It wasn’t so much that [Kirk] joined the church as he drew the church into Maga,” Sharlet feels. “And I think he made a kind of influencer-lifestyle Christian nationalism that was appealing, that you could adopt [as a] kind of performance without having to change your life too much.”“No civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,” Kirk declared not long before he died. But he also gestured at a broader and more potent theme: that “a civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out.” More

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‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr

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