For most Australians, fabled for a sense of decency and a laconic, low-key but abiding commitment to giving a bloke a fair go, watching Donald Trump posthumously drape America’s highest civilian honour around the memory of Charlie Kirk is an outrage. It feels like witnessing if not aiding and abetting a smash-and-grab raid on a cathedral. But the real tragedy isn’t what’s happening in America—it’s how eagerly some of our own political class are genuflecting before this grotesque canonisation.

The Scramble for Sanctification

Within hours of Kirk’s assassination, Australian politicians from John Anderson to Michaelia Cash were paying tribute to “the young activist,” while Turning Point Australia’s Joel Jammal mourned “a shining light” as if Australia had lost Nelson Mandela rather than a man whose career was built on weaponising grievance and manufacturing division.

The unseemly haste with which our conservative establishment rushed to beatify Kirk reveals something deeply troubling about the state of Australian political discourse. Here was a figure whose life’s work involved compiling “professor watchlists,” busing extremists to January 6th, and turning university campuses into ideological battlefields. Yet our own right-wing luminaries queued up like mourners at a state funeral, desperate to claim kinship with American grievance politics.

Turning Point Australia organised candlelight vigils as if honouring a martyr for democracy rather than someone who spent his career undermining democratic institutions. The cognitive dissonance is staggering: mourning a man killed by the very gun violence he championed, while simultaneously elevating him as a champion of civil discourse.

The Presidential Medal of Mythology

Trump’s decision to award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom isn’t just wrong—it’s a calculated desecration of American idealism. This is the same honour bestowed upon Rosa Parks, who risked everything to sit in a bus seat; Martin Luther King Jr, who dreamed of racial harmony; and Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to society’s most vulnerable. Kirk’s contribution? Organising digital lynch mobs and turning political opposition into a blood sport.

The medal traditionally recognises those who “have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavours.” Kirk’s legacy is the antithesis of each criterion: he weakened democratic institutions, poisoned public discourse, and turned young minds into weapons of political warfare.

Yet here we are, watching Australian conservatives scramble to align themselves with this perverted definition of civic virtue, as if Kirk’s brand of slash-and-burn politics represents some aspirational model for our own democracy.

The Australian Appetite for American Poison

What makes this particularly galling is how eagerly some Australians have imported Kirk’s toxic playbook. Kirk had plans to expand his operations to Australia before his death—plans that his local acolytes are undoubtedly eager to fulfill in his memory. The prospect of Turning Point Australia weaponising our university campuses, targeting our teachers, and turning our young people into culture warriors should terrify anyone who values democratic discourse.

We’ve already seen glimpses of this future: the targeting of academics, the demonisation of diversity programs, the transformation of educational institutions into ideological battlegrounds. These aren’t organic Australian movements—they’re carbon copies of Kirk’s American template, complete with the same manufactured outrage and performative victimhood.

The Australian commentariat’s rush to sanctify Kirk suggests we’re already well down this path. When The Spectator Australia runs headlines about “debate, not demonisation” while lionising a man whose career was built on demonising his opponents, we know the rot has already set in.

The Spectacle of Moral Bankruptcy

The most damning aspect of this entire spectacle isn’t Trump’s decision—we’ve long since abandoned any expectation of moral leadership from that quarter. It’s the eager participation of those who should know better, including our own political class.
When John Anderson, a former Deputy Prime Minister, offers prayers for Kirk’s family while studiously avoiding any critique of Kirk’s divisive legacy, it signals that even our most respected conservative voices have been captured by the American right’s grievance industrial complex. When Coalition senators condemn “political violence” while celebrating a man whose career was built on inciting it, they reveal the hollowness at the heart of contemporary conservative politics.

The Medal’s True Legacy

This medal will forever carry Kirk’s stain. Future recipients—scientists, artists, humanitarians, and genuine public servants—will now wear the same honour bestowed upon a man who turned democracy into a demolition project. The medal hasn’t elevated Kirk; Kirk has degraded the medal, transforming America’s highest civilian recognition into a participation trophy for political loyalty.

But the deeper damage is what this moment reveals about our own democratic culture. The speed with which Australian conservatives embraced Kirk’s martyrdom suggests we’re not immune to the same democratic rot that produced Trump. We’re simply one charismatic demagogue away from our own descent into grievance politics and institutional vandalism.

The Warning We Must Heed

Kirk’s posthumous elevation should serve as a stark warning for Australian democracy. When a nation starts honouring its dividers rather than its uniters, its destroyers rather than its builders, its demagogues rather than its democrats, it signals the beginning of the end for civil society.

The tragedy isn’t that Charlie Kirk is dead—political violence is always wrong, and no one deserves to die for their beliefs, however toxic. The tragedy is that we’re now expected to pretend his life’s work was worthy of honour rather than condemnation, that his legacy of division deserves celebration rather than examination, that his assault on democratic norms should be mourned rather than rejected.

Trump may have hung this medal around Kirk’s memory, but he’s really draped it around the neck of American democracy itself—a funeral shroud disguised as an honour. The question for Australia is whether we’ll learn from this moral catastrophe or eagerly import it, complete with our own flag-draped demagogues ready to burn down our institutions in the name of saving them.

The medal ceremony will be brief, but its damage will be permanent. Long after the cameras stop rolling and the tributes fade, we’ll be left with the knowledge that America chose to honour a man who spent his life teaching young people that their fellow citizens were enemies to be defeated rather than neighbours to be understood.
That’s not a legacy worth importing. It’s a warning worth heeding.