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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.
I wasn't entirely sure Charlie Kirk was a real person or what he really looked like before he died. I was vaguely aware of someone named Charlie Kirk and something called Turning Points, but I had knew nothing about him and had no real opinions on him or his organization.
Then he got shot, and suddenly he was everywhere. Conservatives were passing around hadiths of things Charlie had told them before he died as authoritative statements on any given topic. His name and his face were all over. He was the leader of the future. People were on here saying that his assassination was an effective strike against the Red Tribe because he was irreplaceable.
The whole phenomenon reminds me of nothing so much as when a singer with three top-40 hits in the 80s dies, and suddenly everyone is telling us how they were "the voice of a generation" and "meant so much to so many people." And every radio station is playing her two hits over and over. And it's like, nah bro she was pretty good, but there were a dozen other singers in the 80s on her level, and she was mogged by Madonna throughout her career.
The result of the Charlie mythos being so rapidly built and so thoroughly overshot was that the gap between the myth and the reality created opportunities for humor. This can occur even with a really serious tragedy (9/11, the Holocaust, the Soviet purges), but it's even easier when the gap between the publicity and the tragedy is bigger.
You weren't Kirk's target audience.
A poll of 1030 college students found 94% of college students were aware of Charlie Kirk and that 30% of them engaged with his content at least a few times per month. The guy was popular enough to get a parody of him made in South Park. Why would there be so many people that was absolutely gleeful at his assassination, if he was some nobody?
With the singer comparison, I think it would be relatively easy to point to another artist who is currently more popular with young people. Which politician/activist other than Donald Trump is more popular amongst right leaning young people? Maybe Asmongold, but he's not really a politician or even an activist, more of a streamer/commentator who occasionally says things left leaning people don't like.
I think this is indicative of the gap between young people on the right and the older generation. Kirk may not have been a thought leader creating new ideas for republicans to rally around, but he was certainly very effective at getting their message out to the younger people. Who are the young people listening to now? Kirk's death is clearly a big loss for the Republicans.
Kirk having niche popularity with a subset of the population, but not mainstream notoriety of the type I would be aware of, still creates the cognitive dissonance and room for a punchline I'm talking about, among the subset of the population that wasn't really familiar with him.
If Jalyx Hunt were suddenly in every Gatorade advertisement on TV, and "who the hell is Jalyx Hunt?" became a punchline online, that every serious Eagles fan knows who he is (a beloved local event planner for the city) or that he's actually a pretty underrated edge rusher doesn't alter the situation for people who have no idea who he is beforehand.
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