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 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.

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.

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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A lot of young people [are] looking at him and the legacy of his messaging and thinking that it’s really cringe

Eviane Leidig

“After his passing, there was really a power vacuum when it came to who was going to be the next big voice for young conservatives and for Maga,” she continued. Figures such as Candace Owens and white nationalist Nick Fuentes are among those who have jockeyed for clout.

Already, Leidig said, Kirk has fallen out of favor with the younger generation of conservatives – a shift that had begun while he was alive. “A lot of young people [are] looking at him and the legacy of his messaging and thinking that it’s really cringe,” she said. “It’s not cool any more.”

At the peak of his influence, Kirk was Maga’s youth whisperer, able to generate viral clips that extended the Republican party’s reach. His comments were often incendiary, and he was accused of outright bigotry. During one 2023 stream, for instance, he declared that “in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people. That’s a fact.” In 2025, he commented about Taylor Swift and her then fiance, Travis Kelce: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor.”

Kirk himself was a product of internet culture. He traveled the country challenging college students to debates (which was the reason he was at Utah Valley University on the afternoon of his assassination), and participated in online political brawls with liberals. These gatherings weren’t actually about generating productive dialogue or changing minds. Rather, they were designed to create viral clips, said Jamie Cohen, associate professor of media studies at Cuny Queens College.

Kirk fit into what Cohen describes as a collective of “media martyrs”, a group of online voices who claim to be bravely countercultural. His tactics appealed particularly to young men who saw him as a “truthsayer”, Cohen argued. In his view, Kirk’s acolytes believed they had been marginalized in a culture that had deprioritized white men. They saw him “as brave and willing to say what others won’t”, Cohen said, “though they rarely realized that Kirk was basically making it up for clicks and views”.

Robinson, the alleged shooter, was also religiously online, to the point that he is accused of etching obscure internet phrases on to the bullets that killed Kirk. As the New Yorker wrote just after Kirk’s death, both he and Robinson emerged from “the same warped online worlds”.

Those digital ecosystems have struggled to make sense of Kirk’s killing. After the shooting, online forums flooded with a wide spectrum of content: conspiracy theories, tributes, attacks, and, soon enough, mockery and memes.

There were different possible framings for Kirk after the assassination, Turvy said: a casualty of senseless violence, a free-speech martyr, a victim to the same divisive rhetoric he trafficked in, a symbol of where the country is heading. In previous eras, the country would have been more likely to unify around a common explanation – delivered through the press, the government, the family, or his political group.

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The memes are what fill the space where a settled meaning used to go

Alex Turvy

“What’s different now is that online everyone has a roughly equal-sized megaphone,” Turvy said. “Every camp can reach for the meaning of his death, and none of them can make theirs stick. The memes are what fill the space where a settled meaning used to go.”

Previously, Turvy said, it used to take years for tragedies to become fodder for cynical internet humor (9/11 being one example). With the power of generative artificial intelligence and image-doctoring, however, Kirk was meme-ified in a matter of weeks.

“Political beliefs aside”, the discourse has been “really graphic and dark on a human level”, Turvy added. “Ultimately, a 31-year-old was shot in the neck in public … There’s a real widow and two real kids.”

After the assassination, Turning Point USA experienced a surge of relevance and visibility. The US Senate established the National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk roughly a week after his death; days later, Erika Kirk took the podium at his funeral in front of an audience of millions. Soon after, the White House announced plans to counter “domestic terrorism”, citing his death as a factor.

Erika Kirk prepares to speak at a memorial for her late husband, Charlie Kirk, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on 21 September 2025. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Some of that visibility has since receded, particularly among the youth. “They’re dealing with the fact that no longer is Turning Point really this countercultural movement that it used to be,” Leidig said. While the organization is still influential, she continued, some young conservatives see its ties to Maga and the Trump administration as “a sell-out to the establishment, and thus cringe”. That has made Kirk even more likely to serve as the butt of online jokes.

Likewise, Erika Kirk is in an awkward position. She and her husband promoted traditional gender roles centered on women’s subservience. Now, she is tasked with leading a multimillion-dollar organization. She has also been memed, at times misogynistically, for her quick return to public life after Charlie’s death – another demonstration of Turning Point’s struggle to control the digital narrative.

Without broad buy-in of Erika at the helm, Turning Point is a weakened enterprise. As Leidig observed, under Charlie Kirk’s leadership, the group pushed its messaging through a calculated “top-down approach” – with a cohesive strategy, funding from prominent Republican operatives, and support from the White House. This is a sharp contrast with amorphous grassroots entities such as Fuentes’s acolytes, the Groypers, who have ascended in the vacuum left by Kirk.

Perhaps Robinson’s expected trial – in which prosecutors are seeking the death penalty – will give Kirk’s supporters a chance to once again reshape online discourse. As it stands, his legacy may be doomed to meme-ification.