Republicans have spent a lot of energy ensuring that Charlie Kirk will be remembered.
After the conservative influencer was shot in September, his funeral was broadcast live from State Farm Stadium in Arizona. Flags flew at half-staff in red states across the country. President Donald Trump declared October 14, 2025 – Kirk’s birthday – an official National Day of Remembrance. Fox News awarded Kirk’s wife Erika the first Charlie Kirk Legacy Award. And online there was a never-ending stream of posts venerating Kirk as a martyr who died defending white Christian values. Not to mention the hundreds of people who lost their jobs after the far-right mob doxxed them for critical posts about Kirk.
So it’s remarkable that Kirk’s face has been popping up all over the internet in recent weeks – not as respectful tributes, but as tasteless Photoshop and deepfake montages. Kirk’s face has been superimposed on Japanese porn actors, Na’vi from Avatar, popular memes like the viral image of Elvis Presley being operated on by aliens, and even FBI Director Kash Patel.
In normal times – and in a normal conservative movement, if you remember that kind of thing – trashy memes probably wouldn’t mean all that much. But for years the American right has made X.com, the site formerly called Twitter, its main social network. What was once a hub for journalists, artists, celebrities and anarchic shitposters has become the front line in the decline of democracy. Where the official White House account gleefully posts AI-generated images of handcuffed migrants and the official Department of Homeland Security account posts fake Pokémon cards of alleged sex offenders arrested by ICE. And as their massive troll army preaches: If you can’t stand it, go to Bluesky.
A fragmented ecosphere
But the Kirk memes could be an indication that something is shifting. Within this shitposting, in the midst of the “lol nothing matters” slide toward authoritarianism, one can see signs of division. No matter how much Republicans flirt with a third Trump term, he will soon be 80, and the movement will soon need a new cult of personality to hold it together. In many ways, Kirk should be exactly that personality: a reality TV president replaced by an influencer.
And making fun of him — especially after his assassination — is a line even the White House can’t cross. But on X and across the internet, a faction of radical burn-it-all-down extremists is vying to take over the heart of the party. And while the memes are more symptom than cause, Kirk’s death appears to be opening the door for one particular political commentator to claw his way back into relevance: the Holocaust-denying, white nationalism-embracing, and increasingly popular livestreamer Nick Fuentes.
The biggest mistake liberals make when dealing with the modern American right is assuming it is a monolith. A cursory glance at
Fuentes fills the gap
But up close, the movement is actually made up of various factions competing for both attention and ideological dominance. Mapping these factions is complicated, but there is some hierarchy. There are the classic Trumpists, the reactionary Silicon Valley CEOs, the anarchic white nationalists with anime profile pictures, the podcasting musclemen – and the further down you go, the more niche it gets.
It’s a fragile alliance, says Melissa Ryan, disinformation researcher and author of the newsletter Ctrl Alt-Right Delete. “Trump’s superpower has always been his ability to hold together this coalition that is constantly at war with itself,” Ryan tells Rolling Stone. Trump can be seen as a bastion of free trade for Silicon Valley capitalists, a beacon of white Christian America for heartland evangelicals, and a fascist demagogue for blood-and-soil nationalists.
Ryan believes that canonizing Kirk as MAGA’s patron saint may have backfired in subtle but important ways. “It’s hard to believe that the White House has any limit that is completely unacceptable,” Ryan said. “But given that so many in the current administration were personally close to Kirk and his death affected them deeply, this actually seems to be a line they would not cross.”
So far, no prominent right-wing figure has commented on the huge influx of Kirk memes – remarkable for an administration as online as the current one and desperately trying to turn every new viral trend into propaganda. But blaming the internet for making fun of Kirk would only give the whole thing more power.
Memes as the front line of the culture wars
And now it has become a game to trigger Trump supporters as easily as liberals. A game that Fuentes and his followers are only too happy to exploit by mingling with everyone else who is testing the new boundaries of good taste. A perfect way to portray the MAGA movement as old, outdated and – worst of all – a movement with standards.
During Kirk’s lifetime, Fuentes used him as a proxy for what he saw as the more moderate part of the MAGA movement. In recent years, he has sent his followers – who call themselves “Groypers,” named after an obese Pepe the Frog meme – to Kirk’s live events to disrupt them. Fuentes’ fans hated Kirk so much that shortly after Kirk’s murder, it was assumed that his killer was a groyper himself.
The president himself kept Fuentes at arm’s length, but never completely rejected him. “Trump has always been careful not to completely alienate Fuentes or his supporters,” Ryan says. “Of refusing to condemn Tucker Carlson for interviewing him [vor ein paar Wochen]right up to dinner with Fuentes three years ago.”
But as The Washington Post reported this month, Fuentes remains deeply hated even among conservatives in the White House — even as his open anti-Semitism, his blatant anti-Israel, his anti-war isolationism, and his complete devotion to escalating meme warfare have made him attractive to a very specific kind of young conservative.
The goal of the Groypers
“Hardcore youth on the right often have an antagonistic attitude toward mainstream Republicans,” Jared Holt, senior researcher at extremism watchdog Open Measures, tells Rolling Stone. “They may support Trump, but in recent years they have become quite bitter and disillusioned that he is providing the right-wing fever dream that they fantasize about.”
As for Fuentes, like Trump, being a fan doesn’t mean believing or even paying close attention to everything he says. Conservative author Rod Dreher recently published a piece about the major Groyper divide currently permeating the MAGA coalition, writing that “30 to 40 percent” of young conservative staffers like him but won’t blindly adopt his policies. “Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says or how he says it,” he wrote. “What they like most is his anger and his willingness to violate taboos. I asked one particularly astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (i.e. their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.'”
“Social media rewards outrage and tribalism”
And so, while the Charlie Kirk memes flying around the web right now may not come directly from Groypers — Holt says it would be a stretch to attribute them to any specific political subgroup — they nonetheless reflect a major cultural victory for them.
“The Trump administration has relied heavily on social media sentiment as a barometer of public opinion,” Holt says. “Social media rewards outrage and tribalism, and it’s naive to think anyone can control that for any length of time. The government has lost control of the conversation – even within its own base – and any attempt to regain that control will backfire.”
As much as Fuentes has been a wedge issue for the Trump administration over the years, he is also the figure who has come closest to filling the void left by Kirk – and the memes seem to tell that exact story.
2018 email chain between Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark
In addition to Kirk, this month saw an even clearer example of how meme warfare can backfire: the emergence of memes showing Trump performing oral sex on former President Bill Clinton. The meme that flooded the internet after the emails were published is based on a newly released 2018 email chain between Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark, which claims there are images of Trump performing sexual acts on someone they call “Bubba” – a nickname often used for Clinton in the Epstein circle.
Mark Epstein has denied that “Bubba” is Clinton, and it is unclear how serious the original email was. Nevertheless, the memes spread rapidly and, like the Kirk images, were another piece of internet culture that the MAGA meme machine could neither adopt, reinterpret, nor subtly dogwhistle. Which is again a problem when people have spent years trying to brand conservatism as the “new punk rock,” as InfoWars contributor Paul Joseph Watson put it.
“I don’t think it’s real. It’s funny though.”
“I think a lot of these people realize that Trump is on the way out,” right-wing researcher and journalist Mike Rothschild tells Rolling Stone. “They realize that the clock is really ticking for Trump, and someone has to take the leadership of the movement.”
And the first step in taking over the movement is happening online – and is best seen in which memes are being shared and which are not. None of the major MAGA influencers have mentioned the viral rumor about Trump and Bubba. But Fuentes quickly addressed it on a livestream, laughing about it and telling his audience, “I don’t think that’s real. It’s funny, though.”
It’s a strong signal to angry young conservatives that MAGA now has standards and loyalties — and Fuentes doesn’t. MAGA no longer seems like an outsider movement when there is someone who positions themselves outside of it. Rothschild explains that Fuentes was once often ridiculed even within the right, but has become much more popular because he has found a space outside of MAGA from which he can more easily attack them.
This race to the bottom only goes one way
“Content only gets attention if it’s completely over the top and ridiculously crazy,” says Rothschild. “So in a sense we’re all racing towards using this kind of crudeness for our own political ambitions.”
And the only way to win this race is to give in to everything that flashes across the screens – no matter who it offends. Even your own fellow conservatives. And this race to the bottom only leads in one direction: a Republican Party that is swallowed up by a wing that is even more extreme, hateful and nihilistic. And the question, at least for ordinary voters, is how far right can Republicans go before the average citizen is repulsed by them – like every other offensive meme in their feed.