This piece is the second in a small series. Read the previous piece here.
There was another incident that has an anniversary last week.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University by a sniper’s bullet on September 10th, 2025.
Let’s talk about memes.
You know what got turned into a meme almost instantly? September 11th, 2001. I’ve spent a lot of words in the most recent newsletter being very serious in my reflections on the attack and the aftermath that has followed it. Yet it should be said that 9/11 memes are often funny as hell. People can make memes out of anything, jokes will always appear in the most dire of times. Some memes were popping up within minutes of the first plane hitting the towers. Now, the memes are everywhere. Bringing up the towers is just a common joke.
It was an anticipated day in r/historymemes when 9/11 turned twenty a few years ago, when it was finally considered “history” enough for memes of it to be allowed. My personal favorite is the Toy Story video, if you know you know. Why do we joke about tragedies? That isn’t my realm of scholarship, so I can’t say for certain. My guess is that it’s something about the shock of the joke, maybe a way to reckon with all the things we know might come after it.
The memes are part of why the September 11th attacks live on the way that they do. It’s hard for me to quantify the reasons, but the attacks are just so ingrained in the psyche of so much of the world’s population, particularly the American psyche, that the attacks serve as a certain kind of universal language. Since memetic language relies on those underlying understandings, it makes the memes simply work.
There‘s a lot to discuss about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Like how easy it was to accidentally see any of the various videos of his death just by logging onto Twitter or Reddit. So many angles were uploaded so quickly, it may as well have been livestreamed. You could talk about the true herald of what would follow, the Mormon TikTok influencer recording himself evangelizing as people ran away, only to be seen later stealing blood-covered merch while Charlie’s kirkorpse was still warm. We should have known then what the tone of the year would be, and how important it would be in the long run.
What was his source? He made it the fuck up.
How important? Here’s my thesis: this will be the only “Kirkaversary.” The one year follow-up is going to be the only meaningful time that Kirk’s legacy, and his death, are meaningfully remembered. It’s worth remembering the year that has followed his death. Charlie Kirk, who was a genuine unknown to the average, normal, non-chronically online person, spent his whole career shouting down the arguments of college students, repeating far-right conservative talking points, and spewing hateful rhetoric. His role in the conservative ecosystem was to manufacture vast amounts of “own the libs” content for other conservatives to feel proud of and share. Then, many years into doing this, at one of the very college events that was routine for him, in the middle of throwing out a deflecting dogwhistle, he was shot. And then he died (but my sources tell me that he’s stable. Please God).
One year on, his legacy is a joke. His life’s work has amounted to little more than a collection of memes that themselves will die off as all memes do.
Well, let’s be fair. Right after his death, the Trump 2.0 administration attempted to use him as a martyr. The plan was to use his death to drive their fascist ideals, to censor anyone they viewed as speaking negatively of their project, and to target their enemies on the left using the apparatus of the state. Co-editor here at Pendulum, Sarah, was concerned at the time that Kirk’s assassination would be used as an excuse to justify the furthering of the fascistic agenda. I argued with her that Kirk’s death would be little more than a useful rhetorical point, but the administration didn’t need justifications for things that they already wanted to do. I argued that Kirk was a useful scapegoat to funnel their agenda through, but he himself didn’t actually matter.
I couldn’t begin to fathom how accurate I was, but also how much I had underestimated what would happen to Kirk’s legacy in such a short time. In the aftermath, the Trump administration has proceeded to oversee some absolutely terrible things over the year since Kirk’s death, like the ICE killings, the intervention in Venezuela, the war with Iran, so much more. But none of that was in Kirk’s name.
No, the high water mark of the post-Kirk conservative project was the short-lived suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a large sweep of people being fired for posting about his death, directly quoting his oft-spouted hate speech, or just not being mournful enough. Well, Jimmy Kimmel got back on the air soon afterward, and people who were fired have been reinstated or are now winning money in court for unlawful termination. To be clear, not everyone recovered from the Republican witch hunt, but to say that the witch hunt was actually successful would be a lie. (The folks at the podcast Trashfuture have a running tally on the “Charlie Kirk fund” for how much money is being given out to people wrongfully terminated.)
Kirk’s wife, Ericka, was supposed to be propped up as a new figurehead for the right in his place. This was mostly ushered in through tacky, firework-laden memorials and Turning Point USA events. Did that work? I don’t think so. Mostly, she seems to be hounded by the conspiracy theories surrounding her relationship with Charlie or being laughed at for the way she performed all these WWE-type entrances at tacky TP USA events after his death. Mostly, she’s become synonymous with, say, somebody posting a video of a woman in the front of the Eiffel Tower with a sparkler stuck in her ass cheeks, followed by someone quote tweeting it with just the words “Ericka Kirk.” There’s probably also an added aspect of how the right is united in a general hatred of women, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Then, there’s Kirkification and Kirkenuinely, memes so abstract and strange in their forms that I struggle to describe them if you don’t know them. Kirk’s face has been AI’d into so much stuff that his face has seemingly poisoned generative AI outputs to create his face as much as possible. It’s led to the comedic realization from many people that Charlie Kirk was such an average-looking, unremarkable guy that people keep seeing his face in places that it simply isn’t. Or they put his face there and make people go a little insane because they can’t quite tell.
An argument I’ve seen is that Charlie Kirk is functionally immortal because his memes are too gross to be touched on by big brands that might ruin them. Imperialist Realism published a thoughtful piece on Kirk’s lack-of-legacy last week with an observation that was echoed in Garbage Day. That being that Charlie Kirk is little more than a new Harambe. A surreal and profane meme that is far too disgusting, esoteric, and overwhelmingly strange for anyone except for internet weirdos to post it. The thing about Harambe memes is that normal people stopped posting about the gorilla, unless you were entrenches in some corner of a community that still believes in shock value memes. Because that’s all Harambe became. The thing is, the people who post about Harambe still, on the average, hated Kirk. Kirk is a meme mostly because of his political enemies even further right than he was. Kirk memes will continue to be posted, but soon they will become to fringe and vanishing than only the most internet-cooked freaks will even think to post about him. Because meme culture moves on. Even Kirk memes have had to rapidly change to stick around, but they’ve stagnated for quite a while.
This is Charlie Kirk’s legacy. He’s a ghost trapped in memes, not even memes that people truly enjoy. His life’s work has been boiled down to a collection of increasingly absurd and surreal jokes. After his death, the straining coalition on the right began to hack away at one another over its disagreements and failures, some just because people on his side didn’t even like him. But even that is too much to put on Kirk, because the coalition of the right was already starting to strain, and it was Trump’s international policy decisions and their instantaneous backfiring that actually started to pry the boards up.
His assassination is notable as another lashing out of political violence, a continuing escalation as targeted assassinations have become in-vogue again. But unlike the assassination of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman earlier that summer, which was a specifically politically-motivated killing, it’s hard to even know why Kirk was targeted. The publicly-known circumstances around his death are equally absurd and became fodder for meme material. The “American Years of Lead” just didn’t happen the way people on the left seemed to fear, and I don’t really think the lash-outs of political violence that preceded or followed it are uniquely different from normal American violence.
It’s worthwhile to look back on the year that has transpired since his death. It’s useful to see what the right spent that year doing, now that they finally had that martyr to exploit. But only the one year. Outside of a few die hard adherents, true believers, and people truly dedicated to a dead meme, I don’t think people will really even be thinking about “Kirkaversary” or “Kirkmas” again by next year. Certainly, by the time of the next presidential election, he’ll be mostly erased from the public consciousness. I’m certain his name and extremely-deep-in-AI-image-systems face will be invoked again by the political right, but the power in it was only when his death was everywhere. The right has already juiced him for everything he could offer, and it turned out the stone had very little blood indeed. Everyone else only remembers him as a joke. There isn’t even enough shared cultural impression of him for the memes to be easily shared. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Turning Points USA ad.
Kirk’s legacy is not difficult. He was a narrow-minded bigot and he died. Anything else is retrospect. The news will cover him a few more times. On this first anniversary, and whenever we see the results of the trial for his alleged assassin. And after that?
He lives on as an AI-generated song referenced less-and-less each day, a plague of AI-generated faces with no soul behind them that may very well disappear depending on how the AI bubble pops, a few meme phrases that have already begun to fall out of fashion, a political rhetoric that has already outgrown needing to remember him, and a frequently-seen meme gif of a clip from Avatar where a soldier is told to “shoot that guy” before it smash cuts to the impact frame of the bullet hitting him.
What a legacy.