“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump and his allies will understandably want to use the event to call out a tide of left-wing intolerance and violence. But they need to strike the right tone — or they risk squandering Kirk’s legacy.”

Value, with legacies as with everything else, is subjective. Whether you’ve invested well, or squandered, a legacy comes down to what you’d prefer to accomplish with that legacy and whether you succeed or fail at it.

In a perfect world, Charlie Kirk’s supporters would focus on, and mine the legacy value of, his reputation as an advocate of free speech and debate. Whatever one thinks of the views he promoted and defended, there’s 24-karat gold in the notion that verbal argument is, in both moral and practical terms, better than physical violence as a means of resolving disputes.

We do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, prominent figures on the “MAGA” right — including but not limited to the president and vice-president of the United States — look at Charlie Kirk and see their very own Horst Wessel.

Like Kirk, Wessel was an accomplished advocate and public speaker for his political party: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party, aka the Nazis. Unlike Kirk, Wessel was also a violent “stormtrooper” who engaged in street violence against the Nazis’ opponents.

Like Kirk, Wessel was murdered at a fairly young age. Like Kirk (for the moment, anyway), the motives behind his murder were unclear.

Joseph Goebbels immediately and successfully began promoting Wessel as a martyr to the Nazi cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Adolf Hitler’s political opponents.

Goebbels’s MAGA equivalents are already hard at work promoting Kirk as a martyr to their cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Donald Trump’s political opponents.

For years, I’ve heard from some quarters that Trump is “literally Hitler.”

We’re about to find out whether, and if so to what extent, that’s true.

If he and his underlings continue with the Horst Wessel approach, and use Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to call for more heads on more pikes in Kirk’s name, it’s almost certainly true.

If he and his underlings take a few deep breaths, examine their own motives and souls, and turn Kirk’s funeral into a celebration of free speech and open debate, it probably isn’t.

Either way, they’ll only have squandered Kirk’s legacy if they don’t manage to squeeze whatever they’re after out of that legacy.

As for the rest of us, we avoid squandering it by paying attention to how it’s used.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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