Right-wingers of the world unite to echo Charlie Kirk's dark message

Eulogies for the assassinated American show what drives the global far right: xenophobia and anti-Islamic ideology. Diverse societies should be worried.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

If it was ever in doubt that the slain American conservative activist Charlie Kirk is now one of, if not the most, powerful galvanising symbols for President Donald Trump's fractious Republican Party, last weekend's memorial service put paid to it.

Mr Trump himself said the moment marked a "revival" for the conservative movement.

Coupled with his tete-a-tete with frenemy billionaire Elon Musk and a discernible quieting of other internal tensions - including rancour over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation - the assassination has coalesced the party in a way nothing had since the start of Trump 2.0.

One attendee, Ms Cindy Warford, a 62-year-old grandmother of two ardent teenage Kirk fans, told Reuters the moment was "this generation's Martin Luther King or JFK, or even 9/11". These sentiments, seen across reporting on the memorial in Mr Kirk's adopted home state of Arizona, cannot be written off as hyperbole; they surely reflect the mood across America's conservative spectrum.

For those of us looking in from outside, the more striking development is not the domestic martyrisation of Mr Kirk, but the speed with which his death became a cross-border rallying cry for kindred movements.

The resonance was clear across continents, with eulogies from high-profile right-wing leaders flowing in from South Africa to Latin America, and here, in this region, from South Korea and Japan.

To use the words of Hong Kong-based scholar Alejandro Reyes in a Sept 17 commentary in the Foreign Policy magazine, Mr Kirk's "canonisation after death revealed the consolidation of a right-wing international", recalling the Communist International or Comintern led by the Soviet Union in the early 20th century.

Mr Reyes suggested Mr Kirk - young, telegenic and digitally fluent - united otherwise disparate right-wing actors by championing common opposition to pluralism, gender equality and secular cosmopolitanism.