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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13565 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.

I saw a post (I think on Substack) making the point that the way progressives talk about Kirk parallels Umberto Eco's observation that, in fascism, the enemy must be seen to be both strong and weak. When Trump wants to name a street after Charlie Kirk, progressives tend to roll their eyes and say that he's undeserving of the accolade because he was just some guy with a YouTube channel. But when people are saying that it was bad that Kirk was assassinated, progressives will turn around and say that it was justified, because he was a powerful and dangerous demagogue who used his platform to invite violence against [minority du jour].

Obviously, it cannot be the case that Kirk was both an insignificant YouTuber and an influential demagogue: only one of these things can be true.

That's because "Everyone I don't like is extremely dangerous and must be destroyed. But they're also, like, a total loser, man." is a general feature of human psychology.

(Very effective tactic too. Great way to get your lynch on when that needs doing. Justice, consequences, accountability, you know the drill.)

There are certain varieties of loserdom which are compatible with being extremely dangerous. Riad Bouchaker was both a loser (his stated reason for his violent outburst was that his social welfare application was denied) and extremely dangerous to the young girls he permanently maimed. Likewise Vickrum Digwa, Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. or any school shooter you care to mention. Just about any able-bodied person with a knife or a gun can pose a legitimate threat, no matter how ineffectual or pathetic they otherwise are.

However, being dangerous by virtue of being such a compelling and seductive public speaker that you can persuade an army of anonymous footsoldiers to do violence against your enemies through words alone is not compatible with being an insignificant loser. Anyone charismatic and persuasive enough to amass an army of thousands (whom they've never even met) willing and able to do violence on their behalf is definitionally not a worthless loser. It takes considerably more skill and intelligence to persuade someone you've never met to stab someone than to stab them yourself.

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