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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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'His legacy is cringe': how Charlie Kirk became a meme among the young – even his supporters

Audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, as have ironic reposts of the apparent AI-slop song We Are Charlie Kirk, which was originally created as a posthumous tribute. He was the butt of a crude joke during the Netflix roast of the Hollywood star Kevin Hart in May. The next month, a viral tweet encouraged people to take “a shot” in his honor on Juneteenth. And a trend known as “Kirkification” has emerged, in which internet pranksters superimpose his face on to unlikely images, such as the Mona Lisa, a woman in a bikini, or Jeffrey Epstein.

This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor marks a dramatic shift from the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September, in which conservatives sought to suppress criticism of the late Maga luminary. Hundreds of people were fired or otherwise disciplined for denouncing him (which has since resulted in several settlements over alleged first amendment violations). The attempted censorship actually intensified the satirization of Kirk online, said Alex Turvy, a media sociologist and author of an upcoming book about internet culture, Memes in the Machine.

“For the first few weeks, the only safe thing to say was praise,” he said. “When you mandate reverence on a medium built for irony [the internet], you don’t freeze the image, you load the spring. A lot of the mockery was that pressure releasing.” Previously, it used to take years for tragedies to become fodder for cynical internet humor (9/11 being one example). With the power of generative artificial intelligence and image-doctoring, however, Kirk was meme-ified in a matter of weeks.

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.

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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