The Canonization in Silver – Republicans Want to Immortalize Charlie Kirk on the US Dollar

It sounds like a parody, but it is reality: Two Republican members of Congress, Abe Hamadeh from Arizona and August Pfluger from Texas, have introduced legislation in Congress that calls for the minting of 400,000 silver dollar coins with the portrait of Charlie Kirk. Adorned with the biblical motto “Well done, good and faithful servant,” this coin is intended to place the late founder of Turning Point USA among those men who have become symbols of the nation through American currency - presidents, founding fathers, icons of democracy. The proposal, as we have learned, is so far only a suggestion. But even the mere submission shows the importance the Republican Party attaches to Kirk. Pfluger declared that Kirk was a “conservative titan” whose influence on millions of Americans deserved lasting recognition. Hamadeh went even further, calling him an “American treasure” who sacrificed his life to free young people from the “pernicious grip of the left.” Such words sound less like sober recognition and more like cult-like veneration.

Kirk, who fell victim to an assassination in September, is thus to be posthumously elevated to a dimension otherwise reserved for great founding figures. The Republicans are trying to turn his death into political capital - and not in the form of a resolution or a memorial day, but in the shape of hard currency. Anyone who pays with one of these silver dollars in the future would inevitably also carry a message forward: Charlie Kirk belongs in the canon of the “greatest Americans.” But the symbolism is explosive. Never before has such a young figure been immortalized on coins, and never one so polarizing. Kirk stood for an aggressive form of culture war that branded universities as “breeding grounds of the left” and denied political opponents the status of legitimate discourse partners. To now place him on the same level as Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln means nothing less than declaring the culture war itself to be national heritage.

That this is not a law but a proposal does not change its effect. It shows how deeply parts of the Republican Party are immersing themselves in a martyr cult that exploits the death of an activist to gild their own ideology. A coin is more than metal - it is an everyday object, a symbol of national identity. Whoever occupies it writes history. The initiative by Hamadeh and Pfluger is therefore less a commemoration than a political declaration of war. It is the attempt to turn a party soldier into a national monument - and thus further blur the boundaries between state and ideology.