Know Your Enemy - Death, Power, and the Charlie Kirk Memorial (w/ Pat Blanchfield)

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

Duration: 1h 26m
Broadcast on: 29 Sep 2025
Audio Format: other

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 seen subcultures 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" (link)

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," Wash 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

...and don't forget to subscribe on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 121 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam Otherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. You know, this is one of those episodes. I don't want to say it's a treat for listeners because the topic is sort of foreboding and a bit sad, but we did decide to do an episode on the Charlie Kirk Memorial service held Sunday, September 21st, right around a week before you're going to be listening to this. We decided to watch it and try to understand what was going on. It's a bit of translation for you listeners who might not be familiar with this kind of evangelical Christianity that was on display. And obviously, it was also, you know, a kind of funeral liturgy in a way. Death and politics mixed together in very interesting ways. And so we thought the best person to have on is so one of the great thinkers in the Freudian tradition, I think writing and talking these days are friend Pat Blanchfield. Yeah, when death and politics comes up, there's almost no one I'd rather think with and talk with than Pat Blanchfield. We mean that as a compliment. We really do. Pat listeners will be familiar with from previous episodes of the show. We did an early, and I think a really, really important episode with him on guns and power in American politics. We've had him on to talk about Freud in politics. And of course, he's an excellent freelance writer, and he co-hosts one of my favorite podcasts with his wife, Abby Cluchin, called Ordinary Unhappiness, which is a podcast about psychoanalysis and politics and the way we suffer today, suffer and live today. And he's the associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute, where he teaches classes on psychoanalysis and politics and where I took several classes with Pat on Freud during the pandemic. And those of you who ever wants to know, I'll comment enough with this Freud bullshit can blame Pat. But he was the perfect guest for this conversation. Yes. And you know, I don't think we need to say much more before we get some housekeeping items, but I did want to make one comment. And it kind of follows from Pat being such a great Freudian mind and thinker. I will say it was very draining recording this, partly because of having to watch, you know, as much of the footage as we did, you know, close to four and a half hours. The link is in the show notes if you're so inclined. But there was something therapeutic about it. And so the only addendum to this episode, not a correction, but an addendum, is I do feel like my mood has lifted since the time of recording the 10 days or so between the Kirk assassination in this memorial service. I was in, as listeners know, one of the lowest moods kind of politically speaking, maybe ever that I've been in. And so I would just say, as I sat with it more, maybe some of my pessimism has lifted. In part, because I, you know, over time, I just wonder how many people really will be on board with a precise iteration of kind of Christianity and politics we saw on display at the memorial that this is so extreme. Like you listen to Stephen Miller. He's just such a freak and what they're selling is so nasty. And I guess I hope maybe this is a delusion. Maybe it's a hope. Maybe it's grasping at straws. But I do think there's more decency left in the American people than we're seeing on display right now from a lot of people in the Trump administration. I agree. Well, on that note, as always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do is the sponsors of the podcast is if you subscribe to the podcast on our Patreon page at patreon.com/knowyourenemy for $10 or more a month, you not only get access to all of our bonus episodes, but you get a free digital subscription to Descent. And of course, at that $10 a month level as well, you get access to the Know Your Enemy Discord. For $5 a month, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, including one that will reference in this episode, which was one Sam and I did for subscribers right after, just a few days after the Charlie Kirk assassination. So if you want to listen to our kind of real-time reactions, that is the last bonus episode we published. So do consider subscribing. Yeah, I recommend that bonus episode. If you want to relive those on more in a couple days that we had after the assassination with us. But I also think we did lay out some really important analysis there. And there's a lot more of it in this episode, for which we are grateful to our traffic producer, Jesse Brandiment, who wrangled this one, this conceptually ambitious episode, as it always is when we have Pat on the episode, he did a great job with it. And we want to thank Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast.

Transcription truncated.

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