The shocking murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah in September triggered a storm of extreme rhetoric and mutual blame.
Democrats and Republicans accused each other of promoting a culture of violence. Partisan commentators clung to any evidence that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who was eventually arrested and charged with Kirk’s murder, was motivated by the ideology of their respective political opponents.
There were also expressions of grief. But these were largely lost in a bitter debate about Kirk’s legacy. While his supporters demanded that anyone who criticized the self-proclaimed First Amendment champion should lose their job.
Murder, blame and initial reactions
Despite the fact that hundreds of Americans were fired or suspended by their employers as a result, the pitch-black humor that permeates our social media ecosystem could not be suppressed. In the weeks and months after the shooting, Kirk’s name and face became a new fixture on the Internet. Not out of reverence for a fallen hero. But out of trollish and persistent contempt. In some ways, the phenomenon was reminiscent of the unsympathetic comments following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year. His alleged perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, enjoys significantly more public support than Robinson.
Instead of fading away like most internet trends, Kirk memes continued to proliferate and change. His likeness was inserted into classic Reaction images. And mounted on the bodies of countless celebrities. An exchange process that became known as “Kirkification.” By December, TikTok users were racking up millions of views on AI-generated Brain Rot videos that featured Kirk as Captain America in the finale of “Avengers: Endgame.” Side by side with Jeffrey Epstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs. How can this be explained?
Kirkification and digital escalation
After his death, some felt justified in mocking Kirk for the racist and sexist policies he relentlessly promoted during his lifetime. It probably also helped that the founder of Turning Point USA had been the target of mocking memes for years, most of which focused on his appearance. Others seemed to see the MAGA coalition’s crackdown on anti-Kirk comments – which undermined their whitewashed image of him as a holy martyr – as an invitation to go further.
Unable to express dignified mourning, conservatives relied on spectacle and tasteless remarks. This tone prepared the ground for the mockers. Two days after the world saw Kirk killed by a single sniper bullet, a reporter asked Trump how he was processing the brutal execution of a key political ally. Trump instead spoke about his plans to add a $200 million ballroom to the White House. Later that month, both the president and Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, entered the memorial service at the Phoenix stadium under a shower of fireworks. Like professional wrestlers.
Conspiracies, spectacle and self-parody
Right-wing commentator Candace Owens, a longtime friend of Kirk’s who began her career at TPUSA, worked tirelessly to spread confusing conspiracy theories about an alleged international plot involving the governments of Israel, Egypt and France. Milo Yiannopoulos, another right-wing commentator, speculated that Kirk was gay, his body was never buried and he could still be alive. A crypto entrepreneur promoted a meme coin called “Kirkinator” with AI-generated videos showing Kirk as a cyborg.
Under the Trump 2.0 regime, right-wingers in online forums where moderation has been massively scaled back said they had free rein to say goodbye to “woker” or “politically correct” language. They revived insults to demonize opponents and mercilessly exploited the assassination of progressive liberals. However, this same climate also made possible brutal attacks on a provocateur from within their own ranks who had just been murdered in cold blood. The more outraged they were at the disrespect shown to a fallen comrade, the more emboldened the haters became and produced edits depicting Kirk as Michael Jordan, Jonah Hill, Beethoven, or even Mona Lisa.
Kirkslop, merchandise and AI cult
Serious attempts to immortalize Kirk or cynical attempts to profit from his death fueled the rise of the so-called “Kirkslop.” This included a campaign to erect a statue on the New College of Florida campus that depicted an AI-generated Kirk in bronze and was derided as a tacky, unwanted homage.
Some social media users apparently tried to deify him in a Christ-like manner by using the abbreviation “AK” (“After Kirk”) for the time after his death – but critics seized on the term ironically and turned it against the TPUSA disciples. Even cash-grab products like a line of Kirk-branded wines from a pro-Trump winery were almost indistinguishable from self-parody.
And then, of course, there was the AI-generated song “We Are Charlie Kirk” by the non-existent band Spalexma – an anthem so empty yet bombastic in its adoration of the late podcaster that it was destined to provide the soundtrack for thousands of TikToks that they used for highlight reels of Kirkified images.
The song was from a full album called Charlie Kirk Forever Alive, which appeared on Spotify eight days after the attack. Spalexma has already released an impressive 18 albums in 2025. The tracklist concludes with titles such as “Voice on Fire”, “I Bore the Cross” and “A Warrior of Truth”. An earlier Kirk tribute from the fictional group, “Welcome Home Charlie,” didn’t quite achieve the same level of attention. Although it was Kirk’s grateful supporters who initially spread this noisy algorithmic oddity, it now clearly belongs to the sarcastic left.
Digital insignificance and bitter legacy
It’s obvious that Kirk is the first national figure to be fully absorbed into the expanding multiverse of digital junk. This is due in no small part to the popularity of this anti-creative aesthetic – and a fundamental indifference to truth or empathy – among his most prominent companions.
It would have made less sense to those who despised Kirk and everything he stood for to degrade him in this way if his political current wasn’t itself so strangely enthusiastic about the potential to distort reality using deepfakes and crude animations. Now he belongs to this tradition, caught in an in-between realm of endlessly recycled references.
Kirk’s allies want him to be remembered as a champion of young conservatives and open debate. But this massive flood of content, which ridicules any notion of his lasting importance to the American republic, points to an entirely different fate. As a visual punchline without ideas, it only stands for the nihilism of the moment, for our ability to transform even the collapse of the civil order into a permanent joke.
What’s truly frightening is that these artifacts are produced by and for the toxic internet subcultures in which Robinson moved – milieus in which political violence is promoted as a means to viral fame or as a justifiable end in itself.