October 10, 2025

The column WaPo didn't run

In this edition: thoughts about Charlie Kirk and the nature of Confederate monuments

One of the more fascinating assignments I landed this year was writing about the aesthetics of the Trump era for the Washington Post. But the project — which launched in February and was supposed to last for a year — has had a knife dangling over its head from the start. That same month, the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, announced that The Post’s op-ed pages would be dedicated exclusively to “defending the free market” and “personal liberties.” Critiques of Trumpian aesthetics did not fit the frame.

Every month since then, I wondered if I would have a column. Somehow I made it through August. But last week, The Post put an end to my contract. It hardly came as a surprise. The editors who commissioned the work are now gone. (Thank you, David Shipley and Mary Duenwald!) Plus, it was a very flimsily-written contract that could be cancelled by anyone at any time, no reason needed. Though I can guess the reasons.

In the past eight months, I have nonetheless managed to produce some work that I am very proud of. I wrote about Trump’s gilded lily of an office, how a Salvadoran mega prison became a photo op that recalled the era of human zoos, and how our culture has become flooded with mean boy energy — thanks, in part, to the culture and aesthetics of Silicon Valley. I also dug into the White Christian Nationalist aesthetics being deployed by the government on social media.

The paper declined to run my final column, an essay about the death of Charlie Kirk and Confederate monuments, so I am publishing it here. It’s a little out-of-date at this point, but I think it still holds some good ideas.

Hope you’ll give it a read. And thank you as always for supporting my work!

🤓

Charlie Kirk is America’s new Lost Cause

It was a soggy June day in 1914 when Woodrow Wilson helped unveil a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The monument, crafted by Virginia-born sculptor Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran, reached a height of more than 33 feet and was topped by a larger-than-life neoclassical figure of a woman representing the South. In one hand she bore an olive wreath; in the other, a plow. Below her, a bas relief depicted scenes from the region at the time of the war, interspersed with figures from Classical mythology — including  Minerva, the Roman goddess of war.

Like many Confederate memorials, the monument perpetuated the myth of the Lost Cause. It also featured cringeworthy depictions of Black people. In one scene on the relief, a Black male figure appears to follow a White man into battle; in another, a Black woman holds up a White infant to be kissed by its father. A report produced by Army National Military Cemeteries, the office that oversees Army cemeteries, once noted, “the monument offers a highly inaccurate representation of slavery, consistent with racist images of ‘faithful slaves’ and ‘mammies.’” In 2022, a commission established by what was then the Department of Defense advocated for its removal. The following year, Ezekiel’s bronze was taken apart and hauled off.

Now Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is bringing the monument back. (“It should have never been taken down by woke lemmings,” he wrote in a post on X.) He is resuscitating other discarded Confederate artifacts as well, including a large-scale portrait of Robert E. Lee in his Confederate greys that used to hang at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a painting that features a Black man guiding Lee’s horse in the background — another evocation of the faithful slave trope. Separately, the National Park Service is reinstating a monument to Albert Pike, who had a short-lived career as a brigadier general in the Confederacy, and whose bronze likeness once stood on a plinth less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol.

There are a lot of reasons not to erect monuments to a figure like Lee. For starters, he rose up against the nation to which he had sworn allegiance, an act of treason that is a curious thing to honor in the place where U.S. Army officers train. What’s more, Confederate monuments disingenuously rewrite history. The Confederacy wasn’t leading a noble crusade for state’s rights; its fight was about maintaining slavery. And enslaved laborers didn’t generally follow their masters into battle out of devotion; they were most often coerced. These monuments were designed to serve as a chilling message to a free Black populace about who maintained power in the Jim Crow South. As noted in an article published by the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this year, nearly 20 percent of the country’s 2,300 original Confederate memorials were erected on courthouse lawns.

In resuscitating these monuments, Hegseth has reignited the struggle over how the Civil War is remembered. But perhaps he needn’t have brought them back, for the United States now has a new Lost Cause — the death of Charlie Kirk — to which it is determined to build monuments.

On the surface, these events might seem unrelated — one is a brutal war; another, an assassination. But given the fact that Kirk’s killing immediately unleashed cries of “civil war” (primarily from  right-wing politicians and influencers), they are worth discussing in tandem. Civil War 2.0, which for now is being fought primarily in media channels, raises familiar conflicts over who is allowed to fully occupy American citizenship, and how history is memorialized. It also raises the recurring spectacle of powerful efforts to soften the sharp edges of White supremacy.

To be clear: I condemn the killing of Kirk. Just as I condemn the killing of Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated along with her husband and her dog in June. And as I condemn the shooting at a Colorado high school that left two students critically injured — on the same day that Kirk was shot. (Terminally online cultures that marinate in nihilism and contempt do not make for good civil discourse in a country that is also marinating in guns.)

But the actions taken in the wake of Kirk’s death aren’t simply about expressing grief; they are about stoking division and sowing fear. The televised memorial held in Kirk’s honor on Sept. 21 was essentially a White Christian Nationalist political rally that laid down battle lines in the holy war between “us” and “them.” There was prayer and song, and Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, admirably forgave her husband’s assassin. But the overarching message of the nearly five-hour event was that Kirk was a “martyr” for a political cause. The speeches delivered by the GOP brass — which occupied much of the memorial’s lineup — weren’t eulogies, but dogmatic screeds. 

Trump described himself as feeling “hate” for his opponents. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller used the opportunity to attack political enemies: “You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy.” The speech was so foreboding, it quickly drew comparisons to an infamous address by Nazi propagandist Joeseph Goebbels on social media — with one TikTok user taking the opportunity to depict Miller as a vampiric bat.

The aesthetics of this unusual service were like those of a party convention. The stadium set was rendered in brilliant, ruby red. Many administration officials wore not mourning attire but the GOP uniform of white shirt and red tie (a style I refer to as “Trump Trad”); attendees showed up looking as if they were ready for a Fourth of July picnic. A screen crawl running along the bottom of the broadcast on Kirk’s official YouTube channel offered a number that viewers could text for merchandise. There were blazing pyrotechnics, too. Some social media users likened the spectacle to an episode of “The Boys,” the streaming series about a group of arrogant celebrity superheroes.

Accordingly, Kirk’s reputation has been dutifully laundered to make him a more palatable martyr for the cause. The conservative activist’s racist and homophobic ideas have been well documented. Kirk was a proponent of the “great replacement” theory, a conspiratorial plot to diminish the influence of White people. He declared that LGBTQ+ pride and trans civil rights movements were really about “grooming kids.” He said that prominent Black women such as Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson and the late U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee did not have “brain processing power” and used affirmative action “to go steal a White person’s slot.”

Yet the paeans in his honor have overlooked these statements. A one-hour special produced by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group made only one mention of his “extremely polarizing” comments. Kirk was saluted by the likes of New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, who claimed that the conservative activist was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California Governor Gavin Newsom encouraged his followers to continue Kirk’s work: “engage each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”

Never mind that Kirk’s approach to discussion — an example of the worst “debate me bro” culture — was less about honestly engaging opposing viewpoints than in generating viral moments for social media. Moreover, his organization, Turning Point USA, maintained a McCarthy-istic “Professor Watchlist” that purported to unmask “radicals” and professors advancing “leftist propaganda” in higher education. For professors, appearing on the list often resulted in harassment and death threats; people of color were disproportionately represented. Yet Kirk’s ugly tactics and ideologies are getting swept under the tragedy of his death. As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous.” 

The real world consequences are indeed harrowing. Already, supporters  — including Vice President JD Vance — have pushed for the firing of individuals critical of Kirk. Hegseth announced that the Pentagon would review the social media posts of servicemembers who posted negative commentary about Kirk on social media. And the President issued an executive order declaring antifa a terrorist group (even though antifa is not a group, but an ideology). The order is so far-reaching it could potentially stifle just about any form of dissent.

As Kirk’s reputation is burnished as a father, husband, dedicated Christian and spirited debater, some are calling for further memorialization, including permanent monuments: 16 GOP lawmakers sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson asking to erect a monument to Kirk in the U.S. Capitol, a Congressman from Arizona wants to put Kirk’s face on silver dollars, and Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have proposed installing statues of Kirk at all of the state’s public colleges and universities. The New College of Florida in Sarasota has even released a rendering of a proposed statue: a bronze showing Kirk seated at a table, ready to debate — or, more accurately, perform a debate. 

These memorials would disguise Kirk’s casual cruelties with the trappings of authority and reverence. Monuments are supposed to be collective tributes to shared ideals. Like Confederate statues, these would function as the opposite — broadcasting a one-way message, that, as historian Saida Grundy has written, “throttle any interrogation of their subject.” 

Hegseth doesn’t need to reinstate the old Confederate monuments if new ones are built in honor of Kirk. They, too, will function as an admonition to anyone who isn’t White, Christian or nationalist: Fall in line.