Inside Charlie Kirk’s megachurch memorial service

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According to a rough transcript of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, the word “martyr” was uttered less than 10 times. But to the 90,000-plus people watching live in Glendale, Arizona, and the 100 million who reportedly watched the livestream, it didn’t have to be stated so explicitly. As every speaker at the four-hourlong service repeatedly exhorted, the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder had died as a faithful servant of Christ, bringing the gospel to college students to save them from the spiritual darkness of the left.

But to the emissaries from Trumpworld, Kirk was also a political ally in charge of a huge activist network. So far as I can tell, Donald Trump Jr., Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump were the only people who used the word “martyr.” You could tell from the way they spoke, as did the other speakers from the political world, that they intended to leverage his death for maximum political results. And they could only do it if they won over the evangelical Christians in attendance.

I covered the memorial for The Verge, and my article should give you a full sense of what it was like to be at the State Farm Stadium. My main takeaway: the crowd that had turned out for Kirk’s death was much, much larger than any I’ve ever seen turn out for a Trump rally, and they came more for the religious revival than they did for Trump himself. The president spoke last, after Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, had given a gripping speech about forgiving her husband’s killer, and within minutes, attendees were streaming toward the exits. By the time Trump finished 40 minutes later — adding that contrary to what Erika and Charlie Kirk believed about forgiveness, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them” — the stadium was half empty. It suddenly recontextualized all the speakers that had come before Erika Kirk, the new CEO of Turning Point USA. The White House and the MAGA influencers who spoke weren’t just honoring their friend — they were there to lock down a constituency and justify their actions.

They’ve already started. Just days before, NBC reported that Department of Defense officials had suggested running a military recruitment campaign centered on Kirk’s legacy, using TPUSA chapters to find prospects on college campuses. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at the memorial, saying that Kirk’s death was “lighting our country on fire for Christ.”) Attorney General Pam Bondi implied that any celebration of Kirk’s death was “hate speech,” and that law enforcement would “target” anyone who was engaging in it. (To clarify: “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment.) On Monday, Trump signed an executive order designating “antifa” as a terrorist organization.

The most audacious move, though, reached the homes of millions of Americans. Last Thursday, Brendan Carr, a Trump-appointed commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, successfully pressured Disney into suspending late-night host Jimmy Kimmel “indefinitely” for making a brief joke about the man who allegedly killed Kirk. (The joke: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to desperately categorize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”) Claiming that Kimmel had characterized the shooter as MAGA — which was, in Carr’s interpretation, “news distortion” — he had threatened to pull the broadcast licenses for any television station that aired Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Nexstar, which owns the most television stations in the country (and incidentally needs FCC approval for a merger), soon folded. So did Sinclair, the second-biggest owner of television stations. And within hours, Disney folded, too.

MAGA influencer Benny Johnson had just hosted the show where Carr made the threat. And right after the news about Kimmel broke, he posted: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re only just getting started…” To show how serious that threat remains: Disney eventually reversed its decision and announced Monday that Jimmy Kimmel Live! was coming back, but Sinclair, which has a famously right-wing tilt, has stated it will still not air the show.

The FCC has been a pet coverage area for The Verge for years, and I have never seen a newsroom so keyed into telecoms, spectrum allocation, broadcast standards and corporate media mergers. (Our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, has been ranting about Brendan Carr before it was cool.) In the wake of Disney yanking Kimmel off the air, I chatted with Adi Robertson, our senior tech and policy editor, about how the Trump administration leveraged weak telecom policies, corporate monopolies, and a very loose interpretation of “the public interest” to silence its critics.

As she put it: “Everything is on fire because the Trump administration is showing a complete disregard for the First Amendment and is taking advantage of the failure of institutions to check it.”

My conversation with Adi is below, but before that, here’s what we’ve published at The Verge this week:

This interview was conducted before Kimmel was reinstated, but it captures the nightmare situation that Disney had stumbled into, and what other media companies will likely face when it comes to Brendan Carr’s FCC.

Everything is on fire, Adi. Why is everything on fire?!

Everything is on fire because the Trump administration is showing a complete disregard for the First Amendment and is taking advantage of the failure of institutions to check it. I’m thinking mostly about Congress.

Congress has created these loopholes and repeatedly refused to act on Trump completely exceeding what seems like any civil authority he has as president. Congress has, in fact, jumped on this completely, on the idea that regulators should be able to infringe on speech, that they should be able to use congressional authority to force social media companies to ban people for months. There is just a complete disregard for freedom of speech, and it’s being framed in this very disingenuous way as tit-for-tat cancel culture. This idea that people get fired for saying bigot in things or denying covid, and therefore, this is nothing different — that’s just a complete category error.

So Congress previously refused to address this, even when the Democrats were holding it?

Even before the Charlie Kirk thing, there was this huge push to basically strip anyone who had a visa or anyone who was a naturalized citizen, of speech rights. And the reason they could do that was these McCarthy-era laws that were never taken off the books, because Congress, for decades, has failed to close off the ability to do things under this pretext of national security.

I didn’t know that it dated back to McCarthy.

There’s a Cold War-era statute that gives the administration a huge amount of leeway to just unilaterally strip the right to be in the US from anyone who they declare poses a threat. And so this is now being used to say anybody who did pro-Palestinian activism — or at this point, although we haven’t seen this directly, anyone who criticized Charlie Kirk — should be thrown out of the country. And like the tariffs, which also are being done under this emergency national security power under the pretext of an invasion, these loopholes could have been foreclosed. We could have had a Supreme Court that would actually curtail these powers and say that this is something that a president who has no respect for the Constitution shouldn’t be able to do. And everyone failed to prepare for this moment for decades.

The mechanism Carr used to silence Kimmel was pretty complex: threatening to take away licenses from television broadcast networks that broadcast “news distortion.” Was that a loophole or was that an incredibly clever, 4D-chess way for Brendan Carr to leverage the laws in his favor?

That was bad faith. The reason why Brendan Carr could make these threats on top of the threat of slow walking a merger between Tegna and Nexstar, a part of it was seeing what he did to Paramount, so then they know what’s on the table. The idea is that because they’re using a very scarce resource, spectrum, broadcasters have the authority to act in the public interest. The problem is that Brendan Carr is just defining public interest in a way nobody has defined it, ever.

And so at that point, you ask, did he find a loophole? Well, yes, but the loophole is: if you elect people who appoint officials who absolutely have no allegiance to what words mean, then you can’t have a government. You can’t have a government if you’re going to have people who just will not, in any way, adhere to the understanding of how government is supposed to work. So the system failed to meet this moment, but there is only so much you can do to have a government if you are going to elect people who have contempt for the idea of democratic government.

Brendan Carr had laid this out in Project 2025. And honestly, everyone in this administration who’s stripping away civil rights did come from institutions that had been publishing white papers on how to do this for decades. And Congress didn’t take what they wrote seriously? Did they have a chance to put safeguards up against whatever the hell Brendan Carr is doing?

At least in some cases, yes. Congressional Democrats are saying that Brendan Carr misdefining the public interest and asking him to tell them exactly what he thinks that means. They could have made that clearer. They could have said, look, these are the actual boundaries, and even if Brendan Carr breaks those boundaries, it can be very clear that he broke them. But I think there’s just been a huge amount of shortsightedness. There is this sense in which liberals and Democrats try to attribute the best, kindest possible motives to people that they know personally and that they work with and that they consider peers. That seems clearly not correct.

Exactly how much power does Brendan Carr have to halt any of the mergers that have been in his purview?

In general, the FCC has pretty broad latitude, although you can challenge things. In general, I think that he does not have absolute power. But in this case, it’s not just a merger, it’s that the FCC has to actually change rules and deregulate so that Nexstar can own an unprecedented amount of the market. So he has a pretty strong case here, because the only reason they can pursue this is because of what they’ve called this “deregulatory moment” that Trump is creating. It also just raises this whole huge other problem, which is consolidation and the failure of previous FCCs to check it and to issue guidance that makes it clear that they don’t want this level of consolidation. It’s made it easy to create these few gatekeepers that are very easily pressured.

Specifically, I’m referring to places like Disney and Nexstar. These are huge media companies whose goal is to grow infinitely. If your goal is to grow infinitely, you are constantly dependent on the FCC. And if you fold, then a huge amount of the media ecosystem goes with you.

If we had a more robust ecosystem where there were a bunch of different players and Jimmy Kimmel didn’t rely on just a few gigantic companies to run a huge night show on broadcast TV, and if Disney was not facing down a couple of really gigantic companies, I think that this whole situation could look different. It’s harder to play whack-a-mole with a large number of key players in a diverse private market than it is to just go after a few big names.

Wait, that kind of makes sense. When there are so few players, it’s a lot easier to pressure a single one, and the more those guys become a monopoly, the easier it is to be like, it’d be a shame if your monopoly was taken away.

Trump was quote-unquote joking, “Well, I was gonna break up NVIDIA. And then Jensen Huang became my pal.” So I think that’s a fair read. Maybe this is overly psychologizing, but it seems like the people who have the most to lose are consistently the ones least likely to stand up, partly because they always believe they will be the exceptions. The corporations’ upside is that they can be oligarchs. And even though oligarchs are very vulnerable and often end up in ditches, that’s pretty appealing.

“Be an oligarch or be dead?”

At this point, they’re not going to be dead. Like, at this point, you can say, I’m not going to obey Brendan Carr, I’m going to go and do my own thing. I’m pretty sure at this point, you seriously won’t have huge, dangerous criminal repercussions against you. But the further down this road you go, the more you cement your power in an institution that has a complete contempt for civil liberties, the bigger the risk if you go on the outs with it. And the closer you go to an institution that’s just trying to crash the economy, which is not a good condition — I think that there’s this sense, especially in tech, that they’ve just completely separated from the market now and they’re too big to fail. But economic uncertainty is not good for them either.

We’ve gone from talking about media environments, and now we’re talking about tech environments. In the context of this conversation, are they conceptually different or are you pushing them into a single category? They are kind of reliant on each other.

I think there’s a lot of reliance. When people say tech, a lot of what they mean is social media or a couple of computer companies, but there’s a lot of crossover. Like, NBC Universal is also Comcast, which is a gigantic telecom. Amazon owns MGM. They’re increasingly just becoming the same thing.

So if MGM puts out a movie that Trump doesn’t like, he can go directly to the top and threaten Amazon.

That is definitely, I think, a viable fear.

Yeah, it literally just happened!

Another basic example of that is: Paramount owns Paramount+. They are a streaming provider. They also own CBS, which is a news outlet. Those two things basically ended up being in opposition to each other, because Paramount has no real allegiance to CBS as a journalistic entity, because it’s not the place they make all of their money. If you imagine that CBS is a company called CBS and CBS makes its money by being a respected journalistic outlet, then CBS has no interest in settling with Trump as it did over what’s a ridiculous lawsuit. But if you imagine that CBS is part of this gigantic corporation and CBS is a small part of it, then it’s a very easy business decision to throw it to the wolves.

What consolidation does is that it means that any individual part of a service, especially one that’s not the most lucrative part, is expendable. And they have no reason to stand up for it the way they would if that were actually where their skin in the game was.

Which is why The New York Times has more safety and flexibility to report on the Trump administration. Oh, man, I wonder how The Wall Street Journal is going to fare.

It’s a good question. It’s a really good question. I mean, The Wall Street Journal, at the very least, is still owned by something that is, at its heart, a media company and not, say, a technology company. The Washington Post is an arm of Jeff Bezos. His business is not The Washington Post. And I think that’s become very clear in its opinion pages in particular and its journalistic policies. That’s caused the Post a lot of problems because the Post is vestigial.

Weirdly enough, going to the other side of the aisle, the people who I think are in a better position to criticize Donald Trump from the right are truly independent content creators — not part of a giant network, not part of Turning Point, which is a massive organization. But Candace Owens is essentially doing whatever her right wing Substack is. Nick Fuentes is multiplatform, as well. Tucker Carlson owns 100 percent of his streaming service.

I think that a lot of these players are vulnerable in other ways, though, which is that they still depend on platforms. They spend a long time complaining that these platforms are censoring them because the platforms are liberal. But at this point now, Elon Musk owns X and Elon Musk seems to have very little fear of outright demonetizing or suspending people that he doesn’t agree with. And so I think they’re vulnerable from the tech side still. There are still not that many places to reach gigantic audiences on the Internet.

Are there any brakes Congress or the public can pull to stop this?

I think some of the brake probably is public sentiment. Midterms are, in theory, coming, and there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily want to be associated with a very unpopular administration. And so I think that people complaining about that also puts pressure on Disney and puts pressure on the companies. They do, at some point, ultimately have a responsibility to the public that lets them make money. On a larger scale, there are legal loopholes that could be closed. There are policies that could be clarified.

But I think ultimately, the American public has to want civil liberties. I think they have to consider that important and they have to consider it precious and fragile. I think that they have been very complacent, and I am kind of hoping this is a wake-up call. A large portion of people, I think, have had this kind of “It can’t happen here” mentality. And I hope that this is a sign that it very much can.

I was actually thinking about this — Kimmel’s show goes directly into people’s homes, and it’s not just, like, an abstract media outlet in Washington, which they don’t like anyways.

It’s also something that just kind of regularly shows up in people’s homes. If it’s, like, somebody who makes movies, you’re not going to notice the lack of a scheduled film. You are going to notice when Jimmy Kimmel is not on TV.

Would corporate boycotts work against Disney? Like, canceling ESPN, Hulu, and Disney Plus subscriptions?

There’s a bunch of actual research on this. I am not the expert on it, so I couldn’t cite about the exact circumstances under which they work, but I think that there is definitely evidence that if well-organized and communicated, yes, they can work. I think that Disney doesn’t want to alienate huge numbers of people, and I think based on other reporting, it seems clear that they didn’t want to drop Kimmel, they did ultimately want him back. They just may have miscalculated on how well this would actually placate anybody.

The other thing we’ve seen are creatives saying they don’t want to work with Disney. That’s also a potential route of boycott — even though, again, creators don’t necessarily have nearly as much leverage as the companies themselves. They’re still only people that Disney ultimately depends on until it replaces them all with AI.

Uh, I did not expect other technology to play a role in this.

I’m being a little alarmist. They don’t say they want that. They don’t want to do it, but it sure would probably make some things easier for them.

AI won’t go on strike if they cancel Kimmel.

AI also doesn’t create names that people will look at and go, if the guy who made Lost doesn’t want to work with Disney, then maybe I don’t like Disney. Because there will be no guy that makes Lost.

See you next week.

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