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'His legacy is cringe': how Charlie Kirk became a meme among the young – even his supporters
It is gratifying, though unsurprising, that Kirk's death did not kick off a wave of revenge killings and mass violence, as fedposters fervently predicted. Regardless of what the Guardian's experts say, it was reasonable to deploy cancel culture against the most gleeful celebrators of Kirk's death. Killing people you disagree with in a democracy is bad, and celebrating it shouldn't be accepted. But the right clearly pushed their chips in too far trying to martyrize the guy and now his legacy is incomprehensible memes that have nothing to do with his life or message. Turning Point was always aimed at zoomers, and their verdict is in. There are probably a bunch of them who don't realize Kirk was a real person. And the less said about Erika the better.
As a side note, there are a whole bunch of retarded conspiracy theories around his death, because we can't accept that a guy could just be shot by a lone nut despite multiple videos. Even JD Vance isn't immune.
Zoomer humor might have done it eventually anyway, but the right wing reaction to his death was definitely a major catalyst. The ridiculous over the top cringeposting (such as people going like "this means war!") was not serious behavior. It was the behavior of people more obsessed with signaling how Cool and Brave they were to their audiences and like-minded peers. Throw in the conspiracy theories claiming that some trans witch coven, or Israel, or whatever other nonsense besides the literal guy who is on camera in the area who used his own family's gun and admitted to it to people in his life shortly afterwards, and how was it not going to become a joke?
If you act like a fool, people treat you like one. The reaction was ridiculously over the top, and that engineered its own mockery. They tried to force a martyr but that doesn't work easily when you're in a personal responsibility country and the lone wolf culprit is quickly caught and brought to justice. You can't form a meaningful protest or statement against anything, the killer was arrested the second he was found! There's no ongoing injustice to sustain anger against, unless of course you make shit up.
The only reason George Floyd worked even a little is because police are a government organization so blaming it on "policing" as a whole is reasonable in the minds of ordinary idiot citizens who don't actually understand how government works and that police departments in the US are highly compartmentalized from each other. And even that response was so large because COVID, people were bored and wanted something to do. You can't do a COVID era campaign in a non COVID time.
And as history has shown us, this was cringe. Incredibly cringe. His death is a meme because even his fans and allies (looking especially at those like Tucker Carlson claiming Israel killed him at the funeral, Candace Owens, and even as you pointed out Vance himself) couldn't help themselves from being cringe. That's why we got incredible jokes like this.
Just to add finally, this was pretty much unpreventable. The right wing media atmosphere now is tuned to making outrage slop, and pivoting on a dime to being serious is just not happening. Internet pundits can't take his death seriously, because the slop machine is on full throttle.
"Aura" might be my favourite word in zoomer lingo, I can't think of a non or pre-zoomer equivalent. Aura dramatically shapes hagiographies.
When a high profile target is killed by an underdog striking against overwhelming power, the killer earns significant aura bonus for themselves and their cause. David striking down Goliath was a heroic act of resistance. The power asymmetry makes the killer look righteous.
On the flip side, when the assassin is understood to be the more powerful or unprincipled actor - like blood soaked royals murdering dissidents - that creates a martyr narrative for the victim's side and makes the killer look like a coward. Maybe blaming Israel raises his martyr standing, the insinuation being that he was especially threatening to ZOG world order. And painting George Floyd as an example of systemic oppression harkens back to civil rights era resistance narratives.
But the resistance narratives don't work in either case. Charlie Kirk's killing is pattern-matched to his final act of defending 2A at a college campus, add to the fact his killer seems to be a schizo with murky motives. Tragic, certainly. But heroic? Not really. Re Floyd, the resistance narrative cannot hold up when it was your (not YOUR "your") side rioting and burning small businesses for an entire summer, and cancelling people left and right with the entire media ecosystem defending your behaviour. I do agree that the memeing was organic in both cases though.
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Sigh. Look man, modhat off.
You're getting reported a lot, of course, but none of your posts are really rule-breaking, they are just... obnoxious. Because you're doing this schtick where "no one actually celebrated Charlie Kirk's death" (yes they fucking did) and the left wing media atmosphere is definitely as tuned to outrage slop as the right wing one. I don't think you are a troll or a Darwin alt, but you generally do not post good or interesting thoughts, just very weak equivocations. As someone who's been accused of that myself because of my squishy liberal sensibilities (now decaying like a gangrenous sore), what offends me about your posturing it that it often seems fundamentally disingenuous and I don't trust that you are being entirely sincere and not just trying to farm outraged responses yourself.
I am aware a lot of the celebratory posts about Charlie Kirk getting shot were obtained by skimming the worst people on X and reddit, which is always a goldmine of really bad takes if you're trying to assemble a wall of Chinese Robber mugshots, LibsOfTikTok style. But in my own social media orbit (i.e., people I know), I saw a lot of takes along the lines of "Well, murder is bad, but he did cause harm to marginalized people..." Or a smirking repost of his quote about how the 2A was worth a few dead children.
Do I personally know people who would outright celebrate an assassination? Noo... but a whole lot who would "read the news with pleasure."
I think this is bad and cause for worry and it's why I tend to put a boot on "fedposting," even if @gattsuru thinks I am overzealous about it. People who celebrate death, who advocate murder, who think it's funny when someone on the "other side" dies, who want violence, are bad people.
Being happy that someone ended up dead is fundamentally different than supporting their death. Everyone here must understand that distinction, else Trump's comments on Mueller would be more than enough evidence to condemn "the right wing" on this.
Someone I want dead would be like, Putin. I've said before I hope Ukraine wins enough they can drone strike him or give him death sentence or something. Someone I would not care if they died and maybe even be a little cheerful for but don't support their death for would be like, Logan Paul.
You believe that Putin is some sort of magical villain that killing him solves everything? There is some chance that that would give result like you want, but there also is the chance that Russia will get more competent leader, or the chance that it will eventually lead to nukes flying, that would damage your well-being.
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It's just a matter of Russell conjugation.
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There are many people I dislike and would not be sorry to see go. I personally consider it gauche to celebrate death, even someone like Putin or the Ayatollah, though I certainly wouldn't be sad about them. But first of all, wartime deaths are fundamentally different. Second, I'm talking about people who are happy to say they think someone deserves to die for being on the "wrong" side politically. Or even openly advocating for violence.
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I think this is just cope -- the left would have taken any reaction from conservatives as justification to mock Kirk's death. There really isn't some noble pro-modesty faction that would have been nice and respectful, if only the reaction hadn't been so bad. Conservatives pounce! We can just admit that a lot of leftists are glad Charlie died, because they said so, that was what started this thing in the first place.
Your argument in fact falls down by simply noting that a lot of liberals were cheering Charlie's death or going even further and cheering for more deaths of more conservatives. Come on, we all remember it.
This would be far more convincing of an argument if the only people making Kirk jokes were the left. But I know and have seen many people who aren't particularly political who have made jokes about him, in the same way I know plenty of people who aren't particularly political that talk about "goyslop". NYT even wrote an article on how it's just become zoomer slang. It's not just the anti Israel people making that joke, it's tons of normies who find it funny.
Unless all the kids these days are hardened antifa supersoldiers, there's gotta be another explanation for why so many normies have made and shared silly Kirk memes and that explanation is that they're shitposters who make fun of cringe and take on funny memes. And when you act cringy and don't behave seriously, you invite the shitposting.
There's a big difference between post-ironic edgelord jokes about Kirkenator and lowkirkenuinely (which even the right enjoys) and leftists saying that they're glad Charlie died he deserved it. Conflating the two is part of the gaslighting.
Honestly Agartha Charlie Kirk is more entertaining and a better argument than anything else I could say here.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DBjL9xOuHyY
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I grew up in Arizona. It upset a lot of people and was really, really gruesome. Edgy hasan orbiters were outright gleeful about it right after. I think it’s a lot more ‘cringy’ to make memes about a widow trying to carry on in public life after her husband gets murdered in plain view. I don’t get seeing a public figure get murdered and thinking it’s odd people try to find good things to say about them.
It also makes 0 difference whether it was a lone wolf. You seem to forget that this was less than a year after the attempted assassination of Trump. There was a real feeling that a cycle of violence was beginning. Thankfully that did not come to pass, but a lot of the ‘martyrdom’ was coming from ‘why exactly was a somewhat edgy college debater murdered?’ and ‘why are people snidely saying he deserved to be murdered?’
I'd also mention that in other similar situations the normie woke-adjacent line of thought is usually that people mourn in all sorts of different ways, you don't know what they're going through, it's petty and cruel to openly mock and criticize their attitude etc.
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Yeah and that's old fart behavior. People joke about 9/11, and suicides, and all sorts of other dark crap. Wanting to be immune to it is another form of cringe and invites even more jokes. This is part of why Kirk cringe snowballed, because getting upset at the youth's memes just make them meme harder.
Correct, the feeling was bullshit. It was a real feeling but that's because people are paranoid idiots.
There's a pretty big difference between joking about something dark to be edgy, and joking about something dark because you well and truly celebrate it.
Part of what made people joke about 9/11 is the fact that there is such a widespread consensus that the speaker knows the listener will probably not interpret them as actually feeling good about the tragedy. Comedy is about breaking expectations, not reinforcing them. If you interrogated the average 9/11 joke-sayer about how they feel about the gruesome details, they would most certainly admit that it was awful. That's why it's funny when such a person will spin a bit of dark comedy out of the situation.
What makes Charlie Kirk's assassination incomparable is that the reaction was open celebration. Leftists joking about Charlie Kirk is less like Americans making a 9/11 joke, and more like if an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist did so. Such a person is clearly not advancing black comedy, it's just somebody who dehumanizes his opposition celebrating bloodshed. That's the same as what you're effectively defending.
Or do you think chuds joking about "41% of trannies commit suicide" as they celebrate a bridge where a specific 14 year old transgender girl jumped off are exactly the same as random black comedy too?
You come off like you're running cover more than anything else, denying that such ugliness can possibly exist, driving a false equivalence narrative to argue that it's silly to call it out. Comparing this to generic dark humor is convenient to mask the actual, very real hatred.
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None of the jokes or memes I’ve seen have been from perspective of ‘Charlie deserved it’, just usual bizarre post ironic references, so I don’t really get what you’re saying. The whole problem people had was with the initial jubilant reaction towards the actual act of violence and people earnestly saying he deserved it.
The only stuff I’ve ever seen people get mad about is mean spirited stuff where people do a finger gun to their neck and intimate that some person deserves what happened to him.
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An interesting position.
Shit, that doesn't seem very consistent. Reading this thread, it seems like you think people "joking" about "dark shit" is a very serious problem, sufficient to make a long and highly-uncharitably framed post about it, provided it's your outgroup in the hotseat.
Damn, check that out, a whole additional post and extensive comment thread where you very much seem to be attempting to frame this as a really serious, chronic problem that demands action! Can you point out any place in either of these posts or the subsequent threads where your critique of "old fart behavior" or "wanting to be immune to it is another form of cringe" impinges on your analysis?
Let us speak plainly. I don't think you actually believe anything you write here. You are a committed Blue Tribe partisan, and in each post you say whatever you think will advance your short-term partisan interests in the immediate context, with zero concern for any sort of long-term principle or consistency. You will (and have!) argued in favor of free speech when you perceived free speech to be of benefit to you, and you will (and have!) argued for censorship when censorship is of benefit to you. If you have anything recognizable as actual principles, I do not believe you have ever shared them here; certainly I do not believe that I have seen them.
Now to be very clear, I do not think you are breaking the rules by behaving this way, and as far as I am concerned you are perfectly free to continue as long as it pleases you. This place is for arguments, and you certainly bring arguments. To the extent that your pattern of argumentation is viewed as obnoxious by others, I encourage them to simply remember the things you have said, and repeat them back to you, and those who agree with you, when the moment becomes opportune. As an example, I think it is pretty likely that Blue Tribe is going to, at some point in the next few years, start experiencing what it's like to be on the receiving end of actual, motivated, grassroots political murder. And when that happens, and when Blues here discuss how prominent members of their tribe being publicly murdered worries them, I am going to quote them this line right here:
...along with a bouquet of similar quotes from your previous posts. And why shouldn't I? These are the arguments you choose to make, and the other Blues here choose to accept, are they not?
Do you not understand the difference between teenagers shitposting on casual discord chats and on tiktok vs professionals posting in work related chats?
I would never accept this sort of dark humor from an employee, regardless of their age, while at work and in work related groups. They can do what they want in their own time, but they're getting talked to if they joked about 9/11 or Kirk on a work email. That is unacceptable. Kids making humorous Nazi memes is one thing vs professionals in a work related chat, they are different categories and I suspect you must work at a very low level position where no one takes your business communications seriously if you don't grasp this concept. If I had a 30 year old just start talking about their love for Hitler at work, no matter how levels of irony shitposting they want to claim they're being, they're gonna be written up if not fired.
Oh no, you're going to correctly respond that worries over random lone wolf nutjob violence are hyperbolic, I'm so scared.
There were lots of professionals posting under their real names that they were glad Charlie Kirk was killed. And Young Republicans signal group is not a work-related chat.
"Under their real name" is not the distinction unless you're like mid level management or more typically, above really. I personally wouldn't care if a fry cook is posting edgy memes on their own Facebook, just don't do it at work and don't share it on slack.
But some people do, and lots of them got fired as was their employer's right (if they were private sector).
Sure seems like it was given the number of higher up officials in the organization (and even including some politicians from my understanding?) in the group chat. It doesn't seem to be like fry cook John and night shift Henry share shit posts with each other on discord tier chatting, it seems to be something for the organization proper. That's the sort of thing I would fire many employees for, if they were sharing their edgy memes in "the company I work for" group chat that included the CEO and clients.
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Which of these are people getting "canceled" over in regards to Charlie Kirk?
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I think accusing Magicalkittycat of having beliefs in an overreach. Fairly high confidence it's just a work of contrarian performance art moreso than actually occupying any particular part of the political spectrum
If anything that seems like more of a reason to cast him into to the shadow realm rather than less.
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Send me a few links to where he did that to liberals or progressives, and I might buy that. Niche independent online fora are weird place to do "contrarianism".
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No, not all sorts. What you're describing hasn't been believable for over a decade.
It's so believable that dark humor jokes exist that this video is from even more than a decade ago. The internet making fun of your sacred cows is not some new phenomenon and wanting to be immune to it is again, just another form of cringe.
I'm saying dark humor, at least a certain political flavor of it, has become haram somewhere in the 2010's, so you finding an old video of an instance of dark humor that is not offensive to the side that declares things haram proves... what exactly?
Anyway, FFC pretty much proved your "tee he, it's just edgy jokes" facade is just an act.
Oh if you're saying the opposite and that dark humor isn't allowed anymore, then you're even more wrong. I see plenty of 9/11 jokes to this day, I see people constantly joking about suicide and self harm, and remember this whole thread is about how kids are joking about Kirk.
Or let's say, Epstein! Endless jokes about him, and he raped a bunch of children. I simply can't take the claim that dark humor isn't allowed anymore when Five Nights at Epstein's is a real game.
Like I said: "no, not all sorts". There used to be period on the internet where you could run wild with all sorts of offensive humor, but it's long gone, and I don't know who you think you're fooling by saying we're still in it.
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Enlightened centrist hat on: Leftists are hypocrites about this, but so are pearl clutching rightists when the dark humor is about Kirk and not minorities. Everyone has their sacred cows.
Ok, but don't tell me then it's just "le edgy zoomer humor" when you know an analogous joke from the other side will get you banned from any mainstream platform that is not Twitter in, like, 5 seconds.
George Droyd and such are still freely available on tiktok/youtube/insta.
People are literally spamming the N-word all over Instagram Reels. I think the userbase of The Motte is just too old, and their feeds aren't serving them all the edgy vertical videos that Gen Z and Alpha are consuming. Naturally, they end up with their pearls clutched and panties in a twist over fucking memes.
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Plus making fun of sacred topics like Trans Suicides gets a totally different reaction from the Left
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This maybe one of the most egregious examples of outgroup homogeneity bias I've seen in a while.
Yes, Candace Owens joined TPUSA claiming to have renounced her woke ways in 2017, but then she attempted a hostile take-over of the organization in 2024, got kicked out as a result, and seems to have been nursing a personal vendetta against Kirk's wife Erika ever since.
Meanwhile, Carlson and Hanania were only ever "allies" of Kirk in the sense that they were all ostensibly Republicans, A a party that both have been working to distance themselves from for some time now.
Your standards seem ridiculously high if "former employee of 7 years with such a clear crush that people gossip about it" and "guy who literally spoke at Kirk's own funeral alongside the president" somehow don't count.
At that point who does?
If a scorned woman nursing a personal vendetta against the man and his family is your idea of an "ally", you have no standards at all.
They were close before he died, she literally worked at his company for 7 years and only left a year before his death. They frequently appeared together. They were so close that again, people gossiped about whether or not they had an affair.
And I'd also like to point out once more that Tucker Carlson, the other example, spoke at Kirk's funeral. He was considered especially important, near par to the president given that they were both guest speakers. So even if you want to say Owens should not count because blah blah blah, Carlson definitely does. If he wasn't considered an ally, why was he there?
Yes I know, I adressed that in my prior comment.
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If the BLM riots didn't discredit George Floyd, then it's farcical to say that the circus of Kirk's death discredits him. Right-wing George Floyd 'I can't breathe' memes are scrubbed off the internet, while Kirkist mockery stays online because of leftist bloodthirstiness.
Tu quoque?
Even George Droyd has been banned off most major platforms, including X. It's less about bloodthirstiness and more about who controls the censorship apparatus. Some left-wing employee at YouTube or Meta is the one deciding which accounts get pulled for "harmful content" and which are allowed to continue existing as permitted political expression.
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"Discredit" is the wrong word entirely. Kirk has not been discredited by being turned into a meme, people still widely think it was wrong to kill him (as you can see by the fact his alleged killer is on trial and likely to be sentenced).
BLM was a largely serious reaction by people who mostly took themselves seriously. The Kirk aftermath was silly and hyperbolic by people who didn't even believe in their own words. People like LOTT or Steve Bannon saying "this is war" are not serious. They did not and have not picked up arms or done serious protests (of what exactly anyway? Robinson was caught). They claim war, and yet do nothing. They do not mean what they say.
This goes up to the highest levels even. When we have JD Vance searching for conspiracies to believe in, and guests at Kirk's own funeral making it into a joke, how is anyone else supposed to treat it seriously?
lol it was a scam artist buffet and a free for all for violent morons.
they definitely took themselves too seriously, though.
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Wildly? Half of the left wing said it was a good thing, and that he deserves it. (The other says its a bad thing, but also deplores what he said, thus negating the virtue of the first.) Virtuous centrists are a rounding error.
Maybe you are sincere. But there are certainly players that are not, and I am tired of listening to the snide and back-biting commentary of the partisans of the other side. You take it seriously because a man is dead because he was killed for speech, a right that he had every freedom to exercise. Nothing can diminish that, although you've certainly tried.
If you applied the same lack of charity to Donald Trump's poasting that you need to get to "half of the left wing said it was a good thing", then he would be at the business end of a noose. Trump repeatedly shitposts about beating up demonstraters, molesting teenage girls in locker rooms, suspending the Constitution, celebrating political violence against the Pelosis, deporting US citizens, invading NATO countries, and running for a third term. Fundamental to the case for Trump is that this is just shitposting, and Trump's opponents who take it seriously are either dishonest or mentally ill.
"Every premature death is a tragedy, that of Charlie Kirk less than most" is not a belief I hold (I feel more commonality with people doing the work of politics on the other side of the aisle than I do with my own allies who stick to shitposting) but it is one that is entirely compatible with a commitment to democracy, free speech, the rule of law etc. Unlike the Cult of Luigi, I do not see any comparable sympathy for Tyler Robinson, which is what you would expect to see if large numbers of normies did in fact think the murder was a good thing. Essentially everyone on both sides of the aisle's attitude to Robinson is "please let him not be one of ours." What I saw was a lot of shitposting in violation of de mortuiis nil nisi bonum, which is a rule of etiquette and not of law or custom.
Is the claim here that the President of the United States should be held to a lower standard of public decorum than a classroom assistant in Minneapolis, or is it that it is different when it is our guy doing it?
Even more so as I constantly have to point out, there's a difference between professional conduct and private citizen conduct. A government employee shitposting in their private time is way different than shitposting on their official government accounts.
Political leadership, especially the president, is a 24/7 jobs. It's a job so important that it's even in some sense lifelong and we expect (or at least expected) even the former presidents to have some form of decorum about them. Bush takes it ultra seriously, beyond what I even think is necessary, and won't even comment about ongoing issues.
Anyone who seriously thinks low level small town government employee posting on their private accounts should be held to higher standards of etiquette than the president on his official accounts used for serious announcements has the world flipped on its head.
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Comments celebrating his death were actually quite uncommon. They were so rare that the "Charlie's Murderers" site that was being passed around had to cast a web so wide for a decently sized list that it includes people saying things like I hope there isn't more violence in response, dark humor jokes, and comments literally saying it was awful he got shot. That's how far the digging had to go, it includes people who literally said it was bad the shooting happened but that they don't personally like Kirk and think it's hypocritical to care about him but not dead children. Outside of the generic internet edgelords who say edgy things about everything, there wasn't really much actual pro violence talk, and we can't take the edgy shitposters seriously given that they're edgy shitposters.
Of course if you choose to cast a ridiculously wide net of nonsense, you get a lot of fish. But most of them were not what was actually looked for. If you actually look at what political leaders were saying, anti violence was the general rhetoric from the left.
There wasn't much "more please", although there's some nuance there because most of the fully-mindkilled ones were in full denial and claiming the murderer was a fascist (also, most people aren't risk-tolerant enough to endorse terrorism in public, though Destiny arguably was). There was a fair amount of celebration, though, including that newsroom whose backstage got caught cheering in a broadcast. I would count some of the jokes (though not all) as celebration (including e.g. this) - I mean, telling jokes is one of the main ways you celebrate in a text format where you can't organically cheer/clap/laugh/hug/fist-pump.
"Half" is an exaggeration, though, and I agree the actual Democratic Party leadership condemned the shooting.
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Come on. You're doing the thing that every edgy leftist is doing, and pretending that their not-so-subtle mockery wasn't concealing their glee at getting him. It does not convince, no more than 'in minecraft' is a defense against conspiracy. No comedian ever went on television and said that George Floyd was probably killed by a commie, and certainly no con was going around saying he deserved to die because he punched a pregnant woman (which is something he actually did.)
And yet, Kirk's assassination is deemed his own fault because of some amorphous harm to leftist causes, or something.
I'm not stupid. I can see the winks and the smiles. Your argument is unconvincing and insults the intelligence of anyone credulous enough to extend you the benefit of the doubt. The people who called him a Nazi have blood on their hands. People who use that word to rile up extremists to kill their political opposition have blood on their hands. If this isn't stoastic terrorism, it is at the very least 'turbulent priest' levels of wishcasting.
It is not too far to suggest that you have some infinitesimal part of his blood on your hands.
"If I substitute what you're saying with this imaginary thing you didn't say, it's just like you said the imaginary thing"
Yeah I guess so.
Damn, not only are words dangerous they can kill too?
Not a thing. It's never been a thing. You can tell because it's a modern invention for something that if it was real, should have been an established concept already. It's what gets said when people can't claim incitement (a legal term with actual standards) but still wanna whine about name calling or insults.
If you can't see that the memes about Kirk postmortem come from the desire to rile up the genuinely aggrieved right - that you stubbornly insist that the fig leaf is an burka - then there's no point to arguing with you. We simply don't share the same reality. You may skirt the rules of the Motte in doing what you're doing, but I refuse to let you bait me any further. Even if I did write a well-written, precisely worded argument, you'd just duck out and say that you didn't have time in your busy life to respond.
I'll merely reiterate what FCfromSSC said already, and add on: it's easy to win arguments when you run around the field with the goalposts. Or, in other words, you have already contradicted your past positions, and it's hard to see if you have any principles whatsover.
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You say this sarcastically, but there are contexts where yes, the full moral responsibility of murder attaches for words. Ordering a minion (or, I suppose, a machine that takes text/voice input) to kill is generally considered murder or something that amounts to it (absent the usual affirmative defences).
I don't think that calling Kirk a Nazi is one of those contexts - though one can argue whether it's culpable to a lesser degree, as e.g. slander/libel - but you're overreaching here.
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What's the last update you heard in the news about Goode or Pretti? Or is the slop diagnosis something that's only goes on direction, or only means something one direction?
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