The Grand Imposters

In Grace, a Movement’s Moral Bankruptcy on Grotesque Display

Whatever one might criticize about Charlie Kirk’s political positions and Erika Kirk’s past statements and behaviors, it was a remarkable moment when Charlie Kirk’s widow offered forgiveness to her husband’s killer. We do, after all, have to live together, and Erika’s moment of appealing to our better angels, calling for love instead of hate, was admirable. It made what came afterwards all the more shocking. And much to my moral horror, the audience loved it.

Then Donald Trump took the stage.

Reading from prepared remarks, Trump began appropriately, noting that Charlie “did not hate his opponents” and even “wanted the best for them.” But he couldn’t sustain basic human decency for even five minutes. Breaking from his script with a knowing smile, he told the grieving widow and assembled mourners: “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them, I am sorry. I am sorry Erika. But I cannot stand my opponent.”

The crowd erupted in laughter.

Tucker Carlson completed the moral devastation by deliberately repackaging a two-thousand-year-old slander, weaponized for today. He told mourners about “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem who plotted to kill Jesus for “telling the truth”—then explicitly compared Kirk’s murder to Christ’s crucifixion. The flippancy was the delivery system—it turned one of history’s most poisonous lies into a laugh line. Defenders will claim this was just casual commentary, but that casual delivery was precisely the carrier for the ancient blood libel that Jews killed Christ, consciously repurposed for contemporary politics. The neo-Nazis celebrating his speech understood exactly what he meant, even if Carlson’s defenders pretend otherwise.

But leaders only reveal so much. What matters is how their followers respond. The real horror isn’t Trump’s predictable descent into hatred or Carlson’s antisemitic conspiracy theories. The disease is in the crowd’s response—ordinary mourners who witnessed extraordinary grace and chose to laugh at its corruption instead. Movements don’t rot at the top alone—they rot when ordinary people cheer the rot as entertainment. That laughter was the confession. It revealed a movement so morally hollowed out that it instinctively rejects the very values it claims to defend when confronted with their genuine embodiment.

Erika Kirk showed them what their professed faith actually demands: forgiveness for enemies, love for those who persecute you, the hard work of choosing grace over grievance. She embodied everything they claim to believe about Christian virtue and the possibility of national healing.

They chose mockery over transcendence, tribal comfort over moral challenge, the satisfaction of hatred over the difficulty of love.

The imposture runs deeper than individual hypocrisy. These people have constructed an entire political identity around defending faith while systematically corrupting it. They’ve become cargo cult Christians—performing the rituals of faith while missing the spirit that gives those rituals meaning.

This reveals why their movement, despite controlling every lever of federal power, remains strategically doomed. They can seize institutions and weaponize agencies, but they cannot create the moral authority that makes power sustainable.

When history judges this moment, it will remember Erika Kirk as someone who understood what her faith actually required of her. In the darkest moment of her life, surrounded by people performing virtue, she chose to embody it instead—and in doing so, exposed every imposter in the room simply by being genuine.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when confronted with authentic virtue, frauds always reveal themselves by choosing its opposite. When they reveal themselves, it becomes our duty to call them what they are—and to choose truth over fraud, reality over performance.