Know Your Enemy: Death, Power, and the Charlie Kirk Memorial

Know Your Enemy: Death, Power, and the Charlie Kirk Memorial

Matt and Sam discuss the Charlie Kirk memorial service/MAGA rally with Pat Blanchfield.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

To try to understand both the power and strangeness of the Charlie Kirk memorial—one part evangelical worship service, one part MAGA rally—we turned, of course, to our friend Pat Blanchfield. All three of us stewed in the event’s footage, which runs to over four and a half hours, then convened to discuss it. After laying out for listeners what happened at State Farm Stadium in Arizona just over a week ago, replete with clips, we tried to understand how the event aimed to turn death and grief into power by unpacking its imagery, symbols, references, and, of course, how it might play “out there” among Americans not already plugged into the menagerie of subcultures seen on stage.

Sources:

Charlie Kirk Memorial at State Farm Stadium, Sept 21, 2025 (Fox News on YouTube)

— Transcript of President Donald Trump’s speech at Kirk Memorial

— The story behind the hymn, “It is Well with My Soul” (The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square)

Jack Jenkins, “At Charlie Kirk’s memorial, religion, politics and antagonism toward liberals combine,” Religion News Service, Sept 22, 2025

Amber Phillips, “3 takeaways from the Charlie Kirk memorial,” Washington Post, Sept 22, 2025

Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (2004)

Gabriel Winant, “On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer,” Dissent, Oct 13, 2023