The Trump administration recently hung a banner of slain anti-LGBTQ+ MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk outside the Department of Education’s headquarters. Kirk’s banner flies alongside several others featuring historic education advocates, all hung in celebration of the U.S semiquincentennial (the nation’s 250th birthday).

The other banners feature the faces and names of Booker T. Washington, the first leader of a Black institute for higher education; Catharine Beecher, an advocate for women’s education; Benjamin Franklin, a promoter of Black-inclusive public education; Martin Luther King Jr., a landmark civil rights leader who fought for racially integrated schools; and Anne Sullivan, an educator who famously taught deafblind disability advocate Hellen Keller.

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No, I won’t be shedding any tears for Charlie Kirk

Comparatively, Kirk is a college dropout who became famous for his viral videos of himself holding bad-faith debates with young left-leaning students at universities, which Kirk used to argue against abortion, affirmative action, and other typically Democratic political stances.

Kirk advocated for American education to return to “traditional values,” which aligned with the current administration’s rollback of educational programs focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion of marginalized groups (including non-white people, women, and LGBTQ+ people).

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The Trump administration has credited Kirk and his young conservative organization Turning Point USA with helping get Trump elected in 2024. When an assassin killed Kirk last September, Trump hailed Kirk as a “wonderful American” and a “martyr for truth and freedom,” and promised to use his murder as a pretext to go after left-wing “organizations that fund .. and support” the ideology that allegedly led to Kirk’s killing.

Charlie Kirk believed that gay people should be stoned to death, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake,” that we should legally be allowed to whip foreigners in the U.S., that Muslims only move here to destroy the country, that American Jews encourage anti-whiteness, that men should physically attack transgender people, that all women should submit to their husbands, and that Black professionals “steal” their jobs from more qualified white people.

Trump has sought to completely eliminate the Department of Education. At the beginning of his second presidential term, Trump slashed half of the department’s workforce and made large funding cuts to the department’s Office for Civil Rights (which investigates educational discrimination) and its Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on national academic progress.

Trump has since used the Departments of Education and Justice to illegally extort and deny federal funding to schools with transgender-inclusive student policies.

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