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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21018 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.

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.

After the 2020 election, it became crystal clear to me that 99% of the grumblings about civil war are not serious. Something like half of Republicans claim to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Republicans are a heavily armed demographic. Yet there were almost no violent incidents in response to the supposed election theft.

The violence-promoting subset of the left is equally unserious. Hence the famous Twitter post: "People on twitter will really be like 'you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart' and then not firebomb a Walmart."" Yes, there are occasional incidents of left-wing violence, but given how many people there are in the US and how easy it is to get guns in the US, these incidents are actually extremely uncommon.

Which is not to say that civil war or uprising is impossible, but it gives one a sense for how away we probably are from it that even a widespread belief or professed belief that the election was literally stolen from millions of people's preferred Presidential candidate led to almost no violence.

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