Charlie Kirk has been turned into the first martyr of the MAGA faith. And this matters because it is martyr veneration that helped both Christianity and Islam transform from small local movements centered on charismatic preachers into global religions. In launching its own martyrs, MAGA may be moving from a movement focused on one beguiling leader in the person of Donald Trump to a broader faith that could outlast him.

Since the assassination, a variety of MAGA-foe pundits have compared the MAGA response to Kirk’s murder — including Stephen Miller’s convenient claim that Kirk’s last message to him was a call to “dismantle the radical Left” — to the response to the killing of Horst Wessel, a German Nazi murdered by two members of Communist Party of Germany in 1930. In the hands of Nazi pro

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