Snopes Finds ‘Rhetorical Similarities’ To Goebbels In Miller’s Kirk Memorial Speech
25th September 2025
After Charlie Kirk was assassinated there was some nice-sounding talk about toning down the inflammatory political rhetoric, but some on the left didn’t get the memo. After Kirk’s memorial service, some internet-dwelling lefties compared Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech to that of future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech about Horst Wessel. Snopes’s Nur Ibrahim set about fact-checking this claim on Thursday, but couldn’t bring herself to give it a false label. Instead, she just observed how there are “rhetorical similarities.”
The problem was clear right away, as the first part of Miller’s speech Ibrahim chose to compare was when he said, “The day that Charlie died the angels wept. But those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.”
That was supposedly comparable to Goebbels’s, “So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophecy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.”
The supposed parallels got even more tortured from there. Nur noted how Goebbel’s speech was called “The Storm is Coming” and then quoted Miller, “When I see [Kirk’s widow] Erika and her strength and her courage, I’m reminded of a famous expression: ‘The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength, and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.’ Erika is the storm. We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.”