Trickle Down Rhetoric: How Grief Becomes Governance
“When the eulogies end with a campaign speech, we are no longer mourning: We are pledging allegiance.”
Filed under: Church & State, Boundaries Breached
Written by Rebecca M. Bell
When the eulogies end with a campaign speech, we are no longer mourning.
We are pledging allegiance.
THE LIGHTS CAME FIRST
Bright enough to bleach the stars from a winter’s night sky.
Then the crowd, gathered like a congregation— not just to mourn, but to witness.
They put a widow center stage, haloed in white light. Her grief projected larger than life.
She spoke of forgiveness, the word ringing like a hymn: we are the righteous ones.
And then, quietly, the booths.
Register here. Turn this grief into action.
Authoritarianism rarely marches in with jackboots.
It comes wrapped in ritual. It comes singing.
I. THE SCENE AS SCRIPTURE
A stadium is not a neutral place. Under those lights, the crowd becomes a single organism. Awe is manufactured through sheer scale— flags, camera pans, the swell of sound. It’s the kind of mass choreography Leni Riefenstahl perfected in Triumph of the Will, a film still studied for its ability to make power look inevitable.
Oklahoma already knows what happens when extremism and spectacle meet. The bombing memorial sits just miles away, a quiet testament to what happens when ideology curdles into violence. Tonight felt like the opposite pole— grief not as silence, but as pageantry.
Everything was intentional: the light washing the widow white,
the solemn pacing of her words,
the shot angles designed for broadcast. It was grief turned into national scripture.
II. FORGIVENESS AS WEAPON
Forgiveness is meant to be private. Costly. The slow work of a soul refusing to be devoured by bitterness. What happened on that stage was something else entirely.
When the widow declared her forgiveness for the shooter, it sounded like absolution for the nation itself— a sanctification of their pain, a call for unity on their terms. It’s a brilliant rhetorical move: if they can forgive, who are you to criticize? If they can be gracious, what is it that makes you push back?
Authoritarians love this move. Bush did it after 9/11: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Forgiveness becomes a weapon, framing dissent as cruelty, painting opposition as godless.
The timing mattered. The setting mattered. This wasn’t just personal grief— it was a public sermon, designed to turn a single act of violence into a moral crucible for the whole nation.
Forgiveness is supposed to be a whisper, not a battle cry.
III. THE GRIEF-TO-ACTION PIPELINE
Then they announced the booths. Fold-out tables, neat lines, clipboards stacked like communion wafers.
The message was clear: this pain should not go to waste. Sign your name. Pledge allegiance. Make this loss count.
This is what scholars call “civil religion”— the merging of faith and state into a single identity. Mussolini did this with mass baptisms, turning Italian babies into citizens of the regime before they could walk. The Nazis buried their dead as martyrs to the Volk, using funerals as propaganda to mobilize entire towns.
Grief, when left raw, is unpredictable. But grief that is organized, choreographed, and given a call-to-action? That becomes a political weapon.
IV. THE CANDIDATE AS HEIR
The crescendo came when Trump himself took the stage. Whatever grief had been in the air turned into applause, chanting, fervor.
This is the authoritarian script: a fallen figure is elevated to martyr, and then the strongman steps forward to claim their sacrifice as fuel for his mission. Stalin did this at Lenin’s funeral, casting himself as the true inheritor of the cause. The mantle is passed, not in words, but in collective feeling.
And it worked. You could feel the shift. This wasn’t mourning anymore— this was coronation.
V. THE PATTERN AND THE PRECEDENT
This was not a one-off moment. It is part of a rising tide. Project 2025, Christian nationalism, book bans, school prayer mandates— each a brick in the house being built where church and state live under the same roof.
Hannah Arendt warned us: totalitarianism thrives on spectacle. Umberto Eco called it “Ur-Fascism”— the eternal fascism that appeals to a cult of tradition, rejects pluralism, and sees dissent as treason. Tonight, all those notes were playing at once.
This is the kind of dystopia that does not arrive all at once, but piece by piece, until it feels normal to watch a funeral turn into a campaign rally.
CONCLUSION: THE COST OF SPECTACLE
Grief should be the last unscripted place left to us. Tonight, even that was staged.
This is what happens when religion, nationalism, and tragedy are braided together: you get a myth, not a memorial. And once that myth is lit by stadium lights and broadcast into living rooms, it becomes harder and harder to resist.
And if we don’t name what just happened— if we don’t tear the script apart— the next time the lights come up, it will not be for a funeral.
It will be for a nation already reborn in someone else’s image.
Under stadium lights,
—Rebecca M. Bell
www.rmbellwrites.com
PS:
They said bring candles,
but brought cameras.
They said bring prayers,
but brought booths.
The night was lit,
but the stars were silent.
Filed under: Church & State, Boundaries Breached