‘The jokes about Charlie Kirk are symbolic of what have been pretty seismic shifts happening within the online culture,’ said Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘The jokes about Charlie Kirk are symbolic of what have been pretty seismic shifts happening within the online culture,’ said Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images Charlie Kirk shooting ‘His legacy is cringe’: how Charlie Kirk became a meme among the young – even his supporters Crude jokes about the Maga luminary are exploding online – less than a year after conservatives were suppressing any slander against him
Prefer the Guardian on Google Ten months since his assassination , Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online. Just not the way the far-right activist would have wanted.
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 .
Read more 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.”
The meme-ification of Kirk threatens to upend the legacy he had carefully cultivated during his lifetime. It has also distracted from the prosecution of his alleged shooter , Tyler Robinson. Preliminary hearings began in Provo, Utah, this week, during which prosecutors reportedly showed graphic videos of Kirk’s final moments. Robinson has not yet entered a plea.
View image in fullscreen A protester carries a Charlie Kirk sign during a ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London on 13 September 2025. Photograph: James Willoughby/Sopa Images/Shutterstock The online noise also demonstrates how Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA , has struggled to retain its grip on online discourse since his death – even with his widow, Erika, at the helm – and how quickly other rightwing influencers have sought to supplant him. (Turning Point did not respond to a request for comment.)
“The jokes about Charlie Kirk are symbolic of what have been pretty seismic shifts happening within the online culture,” said Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate.
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