The Torn Germany: When the Death of a Hate Preacher Becomes Canonization

It is September 11, 2025, and Germany is experiencing a moment that could not be more painful in its hypocrisy. The Junge Union mourns Charlie Kirk with a black-and-white Facebook post, a man who called for homosexuals to be "stoned to death." The CDU speaks of a "terrible crime" and calls for open discourse - for a man who called Martin Luther King Jr. a "terrible person" and claimed that Black politicians had "stolen the seats of whites." And Beatrix von Storch shouts "Santo Subito!" and calls for candles in front of the US Embassy - for an arsonist who made a million-dollar business out of contempt for human beings.

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The shot that struck Charlie Kirk on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University echoed all the way to Berlin. This murder was despicable and perfidious, excusable by nothing - political violence is never an answer, no matter whom it targets. But what arrives here is not only the tragedy of a senseless death but the grotesque distortion of reality. Kirk was no martyr of free speech. He was an architect of hate, who praised British colonialism because it had "made the world decent," who let George Floyd deserve his death while glorifying the Capitol rioters as innocent. He demanded that women were "by nature under the control of their husbands," propagated the racist conspiracy theory of the "Great Replacement," and declared that deaths by firearms were acceptable to preserve the Second Amendment.

This litany of hate was not the product of leaked recordings or private conversations. Kirk proclaimed these views proudly and publicly, before millions of followers, on university campuses across the country. He turned division into a career, demonization into a business model. And now, after a bullet struck him - ironically while he was talking about mass shootings - German conservatives and right-wingers are turning him into a saint.

The Perfidious Arithmetic of Hypocrisy

Where was the Junge Union when in June 2025 Democratic Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered by a Trump supporter in their own home? Where were the Instagram posts, the condolences, the calls for dialogue? Silence. Absolute silence. No "RIP," no black-and-white image, no thoughts with the family. The murder of two people who actually stood for democratic values was apparently not worth a single line.

The list of right-wing violence is long and bloody: the attack on Paul Pelosi, the planned kidnapping of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the pipe bombs sent to the homes of Obama, Biden, and Clinton, the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. And time and again: silence from those who now mourn Kirk. This selective outrage unmasks itself. It is not about violence, not about human life, not about democracy. It is about tribal belonging, about glorifying one's own side at any cost.

Carsten Linnemann says that a democracy "must endure tough confrontations" but "never violence." Correct. But it was Kirk himself who relativized violence, who wanted the attacker of Paul Pelosi to be out on bail, who defended the Capitol rioters. He sowed the wind and America reaps the storm. His death is tragic, no question. Two children grow up without a father, a woman must go on without a husband. But to turn this human tragedy into a cult of martyrdom, to turn a hate preacher into a saint - that is the real degeneration.

The German Gaze into the American Abyss

What does it say about the state of German democracy when its supposed defenders mourn a man who wanted to abolish freedom of religion? Who claimed that Muslims only came to America to destabilize Western civilization? Who called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a "huge mistake"? Beatrix von Storch's religious ecstasy - a Protestant calling on the Pope to canonize an evangelical hate preacher - is not only theologically absurd but politically revealing. The AfD is instrumentalizing Kirk's death with a shamelessness that is remarkable even by its standards. They, who themselves play with rhetoric that Kirk would have been familiar with, now style him as a martyr of truth. But Kirk was no truth-teller, he was a liar who wanted to cure COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine, who called vaccine mandates "medical apartheid," who claimed that most people were afraid of Black pilots.

Trump stages the transport of Kirk's body like a state funeral, JD Vance stands on the tarmac, Air Force Two becomes a bier. The NFL holds moments of silence as if a national hero had fallen. But Kirk was no hero. He was a divider who tore America apart, who made capital out of hate, who radicalized young people and taught them that compromise was weakness and the political opponent the enemy.

The real tragedy is not only Kirk's death but what he symbolizes: an America that has become so deeply divided that political violence becomes normal. An America in which the spiral of vengeance spins ever faster. And a Germany that applauds from a safe distance when the wrong heroes are celebrated. Kirk never understood that behind every political ideology stand human beings - vulnerable, fallible, human. He saw only enemies, threats, targets. His death should remind America and Germany that this path leads in only one direction: into darkness. But instead they make an arsonist a saint, a hate preacher a martyr. That is the real tragedy - not the death of a man but the glorification of what he stood for.