It’s been just a few months since the murder of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, and the debate about his legacy has been a roller coaster.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death, dozens of people lost their jobs over social media posts where they referred to Kirk’s incendiary positions on race and gender.
Perhaps most famously, late night television host Jimmy Kimmel was briefly suspended from the airwaves for his comments about the killing. Throughout the fall, it seemed like saying anything publicly about Kirk that fell short of full-throated adulation was risky business.
But, as it often does on the internet, the situation evolved quickly. These days, sites like X are flooded with so-called “Kirkification” memes, where users post irreverent images with Kirk’s face swapped onto the bodies of random celebrities and public figures, usually as a way of making fun of them.
The phenomenon has led to what reporter Calder McHugh recently called a “context collapse.” McHugh reported on the Kirkification phenomenon in a recent piece for Politico magazine, and he spoke to The Show.
Full conversation
CALDER MCHUGH: So you'll see Charlie Kirk as the Pope, or Charlie Kirk as an athlete, or Charlie Kirk as a musician. Charlie Kirk sort of becomes everything, and, in a certain way, becomes nothing as well.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, and in your piece, you link to this website, which some listeners may be familiar with, called Know Your Meme, where there are some examples of this.
And you can see Charlie Kirk's face has been grafted onto that of Kim Jong Un for example, or Taylor Swift, or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It is a very interesting phenomenon, particularly given how recently Kirk was being publicly elevated to something like sainthood.
MCHUGH: That's a great point, I think about how recently that this is happening, and I think that that's something that you're really seeing with the kind of advent and of AI tools that help make a lot of these memes happen.
One sort of notable thing about this is that you saw in the very wake of his death, a lot of conservatives, a lot of sort of allies of Kirk on the right, suggesting that anyone who kind of thought about speaking out against Kirk in this moment, or who said something that they deemed offensive, should be punished for that in some way. You saw people lose their jobs. You saw people get kicked out of school for doing certain things like this.
But within about a month or a month and a half, he's become this very quickly meme-ified figure on the internet
DINGMAN: Yes, yes, well, and I think that's particularly interesting, because a lot of that persecution of folks who made what I think you could argue were not even particularly strong statements against Kirk in tweets or Instagram posts, things of that nature. You know, there were a lot of people who simply said, you know, let's not forget that Charlie Kirk once said this thing, and then quoted something Charlie Kirk said that was either racist or homophobic or whatever the case may be, and it wasn't, you know, I'm happy this person died, or this person is insignificant, or anything.
It was a counter to some of the adulation that we were seeing. These memes a lot of the time, you know, are specifically designed to denigrate Kirk. right, in very explicit ways.
MCHUGH: So there's one that I talk about in the piece in which, this is a video. So this is not Kirk on anybody else's face, but there's an AI-generated video of him. There's a song playing in the background called “We Are Charlie Kirk,” which was itself an AI-generated song that began as kind of a unironic song that supporters of Charlie Kirk were listening to in the very wake of his death.
This song was then turned into sort of a techno remix made quite ironic and in this video you have Kirk saying some of the last words that he said before he was shot and killed. Then it kind of cuts to a man with a sniper rifle, and then it oddly cuts to Jeffrey Epstein holding a bullet. Again, this is all AI-generated.
So it's this strange video, but you know, this sort of association with someone like Jeffrey Epstein certainly is meant to denigrate Kirk and just, just sort of make fun of him as a figure.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, one of the other things that you explore in this piece, that I think is really interesting, is that there was this attempt, it seemed, by some on the right to very quickly make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk.
But in reality, as you point out in your piece, the story on the right about Charlie Kirk was a little bit more nuanced, and there was a significant group who refer to themselves as gripers — and perhaps you can tell us what that term means — who did not care for Charlie Kirk, even when he was alive, and had already sort of laid the groundwork for this muddling of his reputation.
MCHUGH: Yeah, that's exactly right. So, Charlie Kirk, while he was alive, had a long-standing feud with these people who call themselves gripers, who are a kind of expressly and openly anti-immigration, racist, misogynistic, antisemitic group known mostly for their offensive and crude online presence.
These are people who mostly exist on the internet, and they disliked Kirk because they saw him as sort of an example, more of an establishment figure who they were fighting against. And in fact, many of these memes are coming from these griper communities.
So, you know, you have some kind of left-wing people who are posting many of these things, but the sort of very online gripers are also some of the people who began and sparked this kind of meme-ification of Kirk.
DINGMAN: So we are in this period of internet and cultural history where the remixing of Kirk's image and his reputation has reached a point where the efforts, I think, to turn him into sort of a figure of national ardor and respect, has been somewhat frustrated.
MCHUGH: I mean, it's a great question, and it's one that I was sort of thinking about and trying to address with my piece. I think that was sort of the main thing I was thinking about.
So to some extent, I think that, you know, you do, to be fair, sort of have a broad swath of conservatives and liberals and people kind of in the political arena who are not, you know, super online, or not really interacting with or seeing many of these memes, and so for them, maybe his legacy has not entirely changed.
But I think in these online communities, there is a real context collapse around Kirk, and it has certainly changed the way people think of him. I mean, just to give an example of that, after this piece was posted, I saw a post on social media the other day in which someone said that a teenager that they spoke with did not realize that Kirk was ever a real person. They only knew him as a meme.
You know, within these online spaces, people's understanding of him is changing, and has changed very rapidly and so he's gone from this kind of traditional conservative influencer to somebody who you know, like you said, could be Kim Jong Un could be Taylor Swift. Sort of represents everything and nothing all at the same time.
DINGMAN: It seems to me that a good number of these Kirkification memes that get built involve putting Kirk's face onto women's bodies specifically. Kirk was obviously very vocal about his belief in traditional gender roles and was explicitly anti-trans.
Do you think there's something particularly sharp edged about those Kirkifications?
MCHUGH: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, I would say that, you know, again, you see a lot of these memes. They have sort of saturated the internet now. So there's a lot of people who are sort of apolitical, who are making them and you do see a lot of them coming from the kind of griper community who, themselves, are not really trying to make the point that Kirk was a misogynist, because they actually want that mantle more for themselves.
DINGMAN: Right.
MCHUGH: But it just speaks to kind of the broader way that his legacy has been affected, in that people feel very comfortable now doing something that he clearly, I think, in his life, would have thought of as sort of strange or transgressive, putting a man's face on a woman's body. You know, that's something that he would not have liked.
And so the fact that, to your point, that's happening quite a bit does suggest, again, that his legacy is being changed after his death.
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The overall feeling of Turning Point USA’s annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix three months after co-founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University was one of determination to carry out his legacy. -
Turning Point USA conference attendees in Phoenix say the organization is back stronger — and resonating with women — following co-founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination. -
The group is called National Ground Game, and they’re calling their event something we can’t say on the radio. -
Looking forward, Erika Kirk says Turning Point’s political arm will focus on keeping Congress in Republican hands and electing JD Vance as the 48th president in 2028. -
State Sen. Warren Petersen, Gilbert Republican and GOP candidate for attorney general, said Charlie Kirk should be publicly recognized by putting his name along a 78-mile stretch of Loop 202. -
Several cities and towns across the Valley will consider requests to officially memorialize conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed by a gunman last month. -
The memorial event honoring conservative activist Charlie Kirk was held at State Farm Stadium on Sept. 21, 2025. See KJZZ's coverage from Glendale. -
The Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority owns the stadium in Glendale. An authority spokesperson says event contracts, done by a separate stadium manager, are confidential.
