This past spring, I started getting bombarded with ads on Instagram from Turning Point USA (TPUSA) promoting a book titled Stop, In The Name Of God, authored by the late Charlie Kirk. The ads suggested that, with a donation of any amount to TPUSA, I would receive a copy of Charlie’s book. I responded to this opportunity by giving them exactly one United States dollar.
Months later, when I was out of the country, my dear mother texted me that a package had arrived with my name on it. It was the book.
With production and shipping costs, I expect TPUSA lost money on that transaction. Still, you can consider this piece a more proper apology for giving them money in the first place.
It has been exactly one year since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed (graphic footage warning) by a sniper at an event where he was ‘debating’ students at Utah State University. He was in the middle of laying out a racialized gotcha about gangs and gun violence when he was shot in his jugular, rushed to a hospital, and pronounced dead. That day was memorable, least of all because it was my birthday.
The immediate aftermath, like the shooting itself, was surreal. The man formerly best known for berating well-meaning college kids and having a tiny face was now being hailed as the white MLK. TPUSA held a massive ‘memorial’ for him in Arizona featuring an actual nazi speech, many dozens were fired from their jobs for criticizing him, some groups tried and failed to dox people who refused to memorialize him, and TPUSA KU played pickleball in his honor.
And for what?
We need not retread what Kirk said in life. Others have covered as much quite effectively. What I find far more compelling is reflecting on what has happened since the chickens came home to roost.
Instead of seeing the emergence of “ten million new Charlie Kirks,” the weeks to follow saw a collective trampling of his legacy. From Kirk’s last moment of life being used as a reaction image for mild inconveniences, to the weirdness with Erika Kirk, to his name serving as a punchline in phrases like “lowkirkenuinely” and “getting that Kirk-Kirk,” the response to his assasination was deeply unserious. Funniest to me was the song “We Are Charlie Kirk,” a frustratingly catchy yet laughably terrible ballad celebrating the titular Charles. The subsequent absurd unironic slop music videos only added fuel to the fire, as if nothing else, the internet loves ironic shitposting.
These consequences are simply the snowflakes at TPUSA, the FSJ, and other such reactionary groups reaping what they have sowed. There seems to be an endless wellspring of content to dredge up from The Kirkening, from Druski’s skit about Erika, to the terrible statue nobody wants to buy, to the whiny bill about conservative free speech. Many who were ‘let go’ from their jobs for exercising their right to free speech are slowly being reinstated and compensated for the knee-jerk reactions of their employers. The militancy of the conservative backlash against those mocking Kirk’s assasination backfired hilariously, ironically causing more criticism and mockery than if they had just let people dance on his grave for a while.
To this day, however, the most infamous means by which Kirk’s death has been kept relevant has not been the ridicule of his legacy, nor the comedic effect of his name, but his likeness itself. The very AI technology that conservatives seem to love so much has been turned against them in the form of Kirkification.
Rather than be allowed to burn in the hell he ostensibly believed in, part of Kirk’s soul has been trapped in a worse, artificial hell. Every day, he is superimposed on pornstars, rappers, The Boys, and a thousand other people. I cannot condone the use of generative AI, even for comedic effect, yet I cannot help but choose to stand idly by and serve as a mere bystander to this repeated ritual. The incestual cycle of AI models training off their own AI-generated images has shattered Kirk across every byte of slop on the internet as his features are ruthlessly encoded, posted, and recycled. He is remembered not for his faith, but for his face appearing everywhere online, as though the joke of his memory is haunting the internet and everyone on it. Truly, this is a fate worse than death.
As with the memes about Jeffrey Epstein, Sean Combs, and Benjamin Netanyahu, when the worst people in our society are reduced to jokes, it can lessen the seriousness with which the abhorrent deeds they have committed are approached. Indeed, when confronted with reality, many have the instinct to retreat into humor and hyperreality, distancing themselves from the uncomfortable truth. There is no doubt some distance between Kirk, the virulent racist, and Kirk, the punchline. In death, the memes about him transcended his political platform, yet in so doing, that same platform has also been obscured behind a Kirkified barrier of humor. Coping with the depravity of those with power around us should not mean undercutting the seriousness of the growing cryptofascist threat in the United States, particularly among the younger generations Kirk targeted.
Still, how could one memorialize a self-serious hate-mongerer any more properly than this? The consequences of one’s own actions, the spreading of inhumanity only to be met with the same ambivalence for life, are not always politically productive, yet from a materialist frame, they can speak volumes about the system that produced them. These memes may prevent Kirk from ever being seen for who he truly was by the masses of lower political propensity, yet they are also an effective response to specifically preventing him from being venerated by the conservative establishment. Kirk cannot be a Horst Wessel-style martyr for his cause, as even the very idea of him has been internalized by so many as inherently unserious.
Part of me feels that we have given the corpse of this white man too much attention as it is, especially in a world with as many problems and as much death as ours. Yet it is perhaps more fitting that he be kept from rest through the endless mockery of his memory.
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