Conservative media personality Glenn Beck is calling on cities to name streets after Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was shot and killed in Utah last week.
“We must stop calling Charlie anything other than a civil rights leader,” Beck said on his BlazeTV show. “We need to plant that stake deep.”
He said Kirk was not doing politics but standing up for civil rights.
“Make no mistake: Charlie Kirk was a civil rights leader as much as Martin Luther King,” Beck declared. “I’m waiting to see the first city that will make a Charlie Kirk Boulevard.”
He specifically called on Phoenix, where Kirk’s Turning Point USA headquarters is located, to be the first.
“There’s a Martin Luther King Boulevard, there should be a Charlie Kirk Boulevard,” he said.
Beck also said that other “so-called civil rights leaders” of the past few decades are “jokes” and “money hustlers.”
He said King was a true civil rights leader, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President John F. Kennedy.
And he placed Kirk in that company, adding that he was “martyred” in the cause of civil rights.
“Charlie Kirk died standing up and trying to show people how to exercise your civil rights in a civilized manner,” he said. “And they gunned him down because of it.”
Kirk was not a fan of King, calling him “awful” and “not a good person.”