The Kirkening Part 4: Kirk, Redux
It’s the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, and the world’s first Kirkiversary. And as we tentatively predicted last year in the weeks A.K. (After Kirk), the Internet has certainly changed as a result. But our initial assessment vastly understated the extent to which all our online lives have been Kirkified.
Charlie Kirk’s soul is trapped in an artificial hell, appearing against his will in innumerable memes. Internet users take part in the spectacle of making fun of him every day via a democratized, AI-enabled Kirkification ritual. His countenance haunts contexts and situations at any individual’s whim, summoned as a criminal, a victim, a perpetrator, or an animal – usually always the butt of a joke. We, as users of the internet, are all priests in the ritual of Kirkification whether willing or otherwise.
Much has been said about the increasing numbness American society shows in the aftermath of high-profile fatal acts of violence. To be clear, neither of us ever put out long-winded, simpering eulogies about Mr. Kirk, (nor will we) but the extent to which Kirk’s likeness has been continuously subjected to humiliating and controversial AI-generated images has surprised even the two of us.
Kirk may now be the first fully online ghost, a spectre on the screen. In fact, “Kirkifiers” or “Kirkologists,” our interim words for those who engage in Kirkification, may have created enough AI-generated Kirkified content this past year that AI models now reproduce his image organically in unrelated prompts. Like a recurring character motif or Jungian archetype for all future AI-generated content, the possibility of seeing Kirk in completely unrelated content has seemingly increased.
His likeness is also now increasingly divorced from the roles he held on this plane of existence. Many users have seemingly encountered Kirk exclusively through the Kirkification meme, as the volume of questions of “wait is that the AI guy?” or “the AI face guy?” is higher than one might expect. This is a far cry from Kirk’s old position here on Earth: one of great influence over a burgeoning grassroots machine for the right (one that uniquely connected with young men, even as Kirk himself was aging into unc-hood).
With that in mind, we wanted to compile a quick list of observations of what has indeed happened a year after Kirk’s death. Simply because we must shill for our own work (even as we critique it), we’ll approach this through three main branches tied to our previous three Kirkening pieces:
We will then close with a few thoughts on the recent Kirkiversary.
On Kirkification - One Year Later
We first would like to flex that our work on the online response to Charlie Kirk’s death correctly asserted that “Kirkification is here, and our online lives have unironically changed because of it.” Little did we know how far his likeness would travel or how many memes would be made.
Given this wide breadth of content, our prior work focused on a specific subcategory of Kirkified content: Kirkified rap album covers. We argued that these album covers are not solely examples of AI-enabled blackface, but instead also allowed Kirkifiers and Kirkologists to subvert Kirk’s reputation as a proliferator of anti-Black racism by digitally representing him in ways visually linked to well-known Black artists. As one social media user succinctly put it, “he became what he feared, a meme for Black people.”
Subversion of Kirk’s actual political work during his life continues to be a preeminent theme of Kirkified content. This past year, the authors have seen Kirk portrayed as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, as a porn star, even as George Floyd — all people and groups that, when alive, Charlie Kirk actively organized or spoke out against. Collectively, this makes it clear that Kirkified content acts as a form of ironic political speech, even a year later.
The vast majority of Kirkified content, however, does not have any readily apparent political leanings. Instead, most of it shows Kirk in unsuspecting, everyday, or generally offensive contexts. Our read is that at every possible turn, for all imaginable circumstances of online images, there is a Kirkified version of that content (we seem to be approaching a version of a Kirk Rule 34 rule for the Internet in the past year). That Kirkification continued despite aggressive authoritarian crackdowns on users who initially made light of Kirk’s death online (or simply accurately quoted him) could realistically be construed as a byproduct of this crackdown. As Katherine Krueger wrote for The Intercept, “The ridicule comes as a product of the American right’s insistence that Kirk’s violent death be taken seriously.”
Ultimately, we believe that Charlie Kirk’s likeness, and specifically Kirkification, has forever marked the online landscape. In the future, Internet archaeologists may refer to an online Kirkification Destruction Horizon, akin to archaeological layers identified at the sites of historic wars, fires, or volcanic eruptions. We wonder if they may interpret him as a minor deity we worshipped in the early 21st century.
On Forever Gamergate - One Year Later
As alluded to in the previous section, we also wrote about the extremely intense backlash to posting about Kirk in the wake of his death. The machine of networked harassment that the right has cultivated – largely through parasocial means in the contemporary – has, of course, created a much more toxic online experience. In the wake of Kirk’s death, people were making doxing sites to target anyone who spoke even mildly (or jokingly) about Kirk’s legacy. At the same time, patsy liberal pundits were celebrating Kirk’s life, often describing his approach to debate as akin to ‘the way politics should work’, regardless of the deeply harmful and vitriolic political points he was arguing.
We’re still unsure of how well resourced the toolbox for stopping this harassment is these days, but thankfully several of those aggressed by the state or online campaigns have gained some restitution: Karen Attiah won reinstatement with full backpay in August of this year, Tennessee paid $835,000 to a man who was jailed 37 days for posting a meme, Florida paid $485,000 in a similar case. All of this has been slow, ad-hoc, and at the scale of the individual, but this is still at least proof that such campaigns eventually fail. This remedy, of course, arrives a year late, well after the aggrieved person has already rearranged their own life.
The right was desperately trying to make Kirk into a martyr and seemed to be using it especially to foment the next escalation towards civil war. In many ways, Kirkification memes may have slowed this escalation, or at least forced it down another path.
This other path, unfortunately, appears to be the way the right has often done political violence: in wielding the violent tool that is the state apparatus. It is no coincidence, in our view, that the year since Kirk’s assassination has seen a substantial escalation of rhetoric, arrests, and policy targeting (semi- to formally-)organized left-wing movements. The NSPM-7 directed the IRS and National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate liberal nonprofits and their funders. Trump issued an ‘Antifa’ executive order. The chair of the FCC applied pressure on ABC affiliates to pull a major late-night show. These are some of the most substantial and consequential speech-policing instances in years on their own, and all occurred in the wake of Kirk’s murder.
Similarly, the mournful, the fandom, and the revenge-seeking have all collectively poured an insurmountable amount of cash into the Turning Point machine in the wake of Kirk’s death. Erika Kirk has stepped up as Charlie’s heir and has subsequently been the butt of a deluge of jokes, conspiracy narratives, and skits. It’s likely that an average TikTok user is more aware of the Druski skit about Erika or the weird (AI-generated) staring/heavy-breathing clip than they are about what her specific political and policy views are now that she’s head of TPUSA. hampton, one of the authors of this piece, is a student at a big Southern university, where Erika Kirk and JD Vance planned a big event on campus last academic year following Charlie’s death. Erika didn’t show, and the crowd didn’t really turn out either. The student and community protest was probably larger in attendance than the TPUSA event and made a bigger wave in the press (a couch that someone lugged into the protest probably got more coverage than any individual line from the event).
More on this in our next section:
Kirk as Currency - One Year Later
The last saga in our Charlie Kirk work discussed the proliferation of commemorative memecoins launched after his death and subsequent memeification. Reporting from Ryan Glawdin for Yahoo Finance found that, just hours after Kirk’s death was announced, three different memecoins referencing Charlie Kirk had reached the top 10 trending cryptocurrencies, with one somehow reaching a $36 million market cap.
For those unsure of what a memecoin is, they are somehow an even more scornworthy form of cryptocurrency that make reference to a specific meme or online joke. Their value is tied solely to the online attention the relevant meme or joke receives. Our research found an entire ecosystem of memecoins launched in the wake of high-profile violent acts — the same day the $CHARLIE coin was the top trending cryptocurrency, right behind it in the rankings was $IRYNA, a memecoin launched to commemorate the death of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian immigrant murdered in North Carolina. Even today, as of writing, a memecoin commemorating HeeHaw the donkey, recently shot dead by police in Georgia, is in the top 100 trending memecoins with a current market cap of $756,000.
Kirk’s death was a boon to not only individual memecoin holders, but also TPUSA more broadly. In the days after September 10, TPUSA was quickly inundated with donations and reported over 32,000 new chapter inquiries. Since then, the organization has launched various t-shirts commemorating Kirk’s death, with some based on the now well-known “FREEDOM” shirt Kirk was wearing when he was shot.
As the new head of TPUSA, Charlie’s widow Erika has overseen this spike in funding. She’s also been the center of several major controversies following her rapid ascent. These include a suggestive hug with Vice President J.D. Vance, a series of conspiracy rants by Candace Owens, and an internal TPUSA purge after a self-reported deluge of new chapter growth. Charlie’s death has also spooked many people on the right even as Erika ascended, as Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned, saying she was afraid of being “the next Charlie Kirk” (admittedly, amidst a firestorm of Trump-directed hate over her disagreement with the president over Israel support).
That individuals and organizations would capitalize on Kirk’s death for financial and political gain is not at all surprising. What is, however, is the extent to which initial promises of both a sort of modern Reichstag moment and continued gains on Kirk-related memecoins have stagnated. The various cases brought against individuals who made light of Kirk’s death on social media have been largely thrown out on First Amendment grounds. Current polls, while certainly subject to change and historically not always reliable, point to large Democratic electoral gains, despite the immense influx of cash TPUSA saw last fall. Meanwhile, most Kirk-related memecoins have also depreciated — $KIRKINATOR’s market cap, for example, is down to just $24,000 a year after its initial spike up to $1.65 million. Similarly, $CHARLIE, launched the same day Kirk was killed and once reaching a market cap of $1.5 million, is now down to just $32,000 at the time of writing.
In various ways, it appears that anyone eager to leverage Kirk’s death into a large-scale assault against the left, into broad conservative political gains, or as a way to make continued gains on cryptocurrency, may have been sorely disappointed. With that in mind, we turn to the Kirkiversary.
Our First Kirkiversary/Kirkmas
The first anniversary of Kirk’s assassination, dubbed the “Kirkiversary” or “Kirkmas,” occurred last week, to much online and offline fanfare. Some have remarked that it was unclear which “holiday” their Gen Z coworkers were referring to this week (Labor Day, Kirkmas, or the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – the last of which has also been the subject of endless ironic memes).
Kirkiversary activity spanned a wide gamut, suggesting that this may be an ongoing facet of online and offline life for the next few years. Jake Lang, a far-right provocateur and J6 pardon recipient with the apparent goal of trying to rack up as many arrest warrants and attempted ass whoopings as humanly possible, celebrated the first Kirkiversary by taking to Times Square and unveiling a hideous sculpture of Kirk. A trumpet player at Utah Valley University played the melody to the AI-generated “We Are Charlie Kirk” song from the spot Kirk was standing when he was shot. Students at Georgetown University held a Charlie Kirk look-alike content. People across various platforms marked the occasion by posting themselves wearing shirts that referenced Kirk, his toxic legacy, and his violent death.
Since Kirk died, it has been difficult to go one day without seeing his mug edited onto some familiar video in a way that can only have been made possible by Charlie’s outsized presence while he was alive. In comparison, our forthcoming work on memes depicting Luigi Mangione, a much better-looking subject than Kirk, indicates that while Mangione saw a spurt of online left-wing support for the killing of a CEO, his likeness never hit the volume or stickiness of Kirk in contemporary meme discourse.
Looking to the next year (and the second Kirkiversary), we anticipate that Kirkified memes will still be circulating, evolving and combining with other Internet trends into some unforeseeable future form. Current Kirkification content trends involve people seeing Kirk in the faces of others, many of whom are decidedly not Kirk, in both artificially generated and regular content. Like we said, Kirk’s likeness is now a spectre for most online users, appearing in the least likely, and most unrelated, of places.
Whatever the future may hold for the Kirkening, you can bet that we will keep an eye on it (part 5 when?). Until then, thanks for reading WXQT, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already: