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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15475 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.

The Right does not know how to do martyrdom culture. It’s sad because Kirk could have been a great conservative martyr. But we just don’t know how, apparently. We lost the technology. The, the spirit of a martyr should be carried through reverent rituals and heart-moving music. They tried to carry it with pyrotechnic displays, a colorful widow in too much makeup, really silly events, etc. Just terrible. Tasteless and senseless. You needed a song like Horst Wessel Lied that could be sung in a mass gathering under reddish hued lighting. You needed dedicated photographers to only present the experiences in the most powerful frame. You needed to associate his death with weeping women. George Floyd was effectively martyrized because the Public consumed his image intermediated by emotional actors (TV anchors), saddened women replaying his death, and cool people telling you to join them in a march. But the Left immediately de-martyred him through a face-swapping meme and the intentionally humorous “we are Charlie Kirk” anthem. Just plain social engineering that the right can’t compete with.

You needed to associate his death with weeping women.

Okay, I know what you mean there, but that was the

colorful widow in too much makeup,

it's just that the other side proceeded to vice-signal it away by reveling in it and vilifying her, what you're calling "de-martyring" him.

Widows should wear black and take on the role of a victim, but she wore a white girlboss suit and presented herself as a new leader. This is not the liberal’s doing, it was just a tasteless and irresponsible choice. Also, the addition of conscious artifice to mourning is old. Like ancient Babylon and Old Testament old, where the family of the deceased would hire ritual female weepers. The problem is not so much that Erika was artificial as that her artifice was tasteless. Not to blame someone going through the worst event of her life, but her team should have stepped in and commanded her what to do.

I think this is part of a wider pattern. In a world where political violence is not, in fact, acceptable (very much including the one we live in), a ghoulish but rational response to your own ally being assassinated is "Excellent - this is a huge pile of free political capital. Let's celebrate." Letting on in public that this is how you feel means you lose the free political capital you were hoping to celebrate. Erika Kirk's behaviour makes perfect sense if she is rushing to capitalise on the political capital of her husband's death while it is still fresh, which she was. And she wasn't the only Republican who very visibly saw the assassination of Kirk as more of an opportunity than a tragedy.

I have to wonder if they were looking at the numbers in the background and felt they had to find a new anchor ASAP to keep people in their jobs.

I don't think it would have mattered. More than one appearance sobbing would have gotten a similar reaction. Kirk's murder was just too much. And, in a partisan environment, that actually means people are less likely to back down. Backing down on the dehumanizing rhetoric and mockery implies you have something to be guilty for and nobody wants to pull on that thread, especially if it means rounds of right wing cancel culture.

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