The outpouring of emotion by the tens of thousands gathered in Arizona on Sunday to honour the life and legacy of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was viciously attacked in the French press, with some comparing the memorial to a Nazi rally.
More than 60,000 people were in attendance at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, just 11 days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a student debate event at Utah Valley University. The memorial event featured speeches from senior government officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump.
The event focussed heavily on the Christian principles upon which Kirk based his life and saw his widow, Erika Kirk, publicly forgive the suspected assassin of her husband because she said its “what Charlie would do”.
Despite this, many in the liberal French press were quick to denigrate the memorial for the 31-year-old American conservative activist.
Appearing on Thomas Snégaroff’s C politique programme on the France 5 public broadcaster, author of The Other America: When Roosevelt Challenged Capitalism in the United States Judith Perrignon said of the memorial in Arizona: “I thought of those Nazi rallies that took out in the United States in the 1930s. There were big gatherings.”
“American white supremacy is completely connected to Hitler’s racial thought. And all this is very related. And these images take me back to those gatherings of the 1930s… The connection is still there,” the former Libération essayist added according to Le JDD.
A similar sentiment was expressed by former French Minister of Culture under the socialist of Manuel Valls, Aurélie Filippetti.
Appearing on the France Info public broadcaster, Filippetti said of the Kirk event: “It inspires me with disgust and fear. All fascist movements have as a characteristic to victimise themselves and to instrumentalise their so-called heroes who died in combat.”
Meanwhile, former United States Ambassador to Finland, Charles Adams, took to the airwaves of private broadcaster La Chaîne info (LCI) to compare Charlie Kirk’s death to the 1933 Reichstag Fire, which shortly preceded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and which was used as a pretext to target communist groups blamed by the Nazis for setting the fire.
Asked by LCI host Darius Rochebin whether he expected “an authoritarian backlash from Trump” over Kirk’s assassination, the Obama appointed diplomat responded: “Absolutely, absolutely.”
“I would even say that for me this story of the murder, rightly condemned, represents for Trump what the fire of the Reichstag represented for Adolf Hitler at the time. The parallel is absolute and obvious, ” Adams told the French broadcaster.
The attempt to tarnish Kirk’s legacy has not been confined to France, with public broadcasters in Germany also using the occasion of his murder to brand the Turning Point USA founder as a “racist” and “misogynist”. Some state media journalists in Germany have also come under fire for spreading false claims about Kirk’s opinions, mimicking fake news spread by opponents in the United States.
