I am pleased to read that Charlie Kirk’s reputation is rotting as fast as his corpse. While he shouldn’t have been murdered, of course, he was a terrible person whose influence was built entirely on right-wing idiocy and fomenting hatred and contempt of women, immigrants, and brown people, and supporting a political agenda built on the same. I’m only surprised that it has taken this long for his legacy to be properly recognized.
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.
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).
Yeah, there was a ridiculous (and fortunately brief) phase in which the right-wing advocates of free speech harassed anyone who expressed their dislike of Kirk. Like, for example, this woman:
It was the afternoon of 13 September 2025, just a few days after Charlie Kirk had been killed by a sniper’s bullet on a college campus. Shortly after his assassination, Strebe had posted on her personal Facebook page: “Empathy is not owed to oppressors.” In comments underneath, she did not mince words. She called Kirk a racist, a sexist, an antisemite and the kind of person who wants to see gay people, like her own son, stoned to death. “I don’t feel bad,” she says, months later, speaking from her home. “I refuse to feel bad for this man, and the hateful things he stood for.”
She was fired for her honest and accurate opinion.
But now that vengeful attitude towards Kirk-critics is waning. Part of it, I suspect, is that Kirk’s popularity was always artificial, propped up by the wealthy supporters who funded his organization, and those props are being kicked out from under it by the rich maggots who no longer see any profit in idolizing a dead man. I also think that making Erika Kirk his successor was a major misstep — she’s a graceless, over-reaching wanna-be who is easily mocked. Just ask Druski.
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.
That’s the bad news: Fuentes is even worse than Kirk ever was, but he is such a hideously overblown bigot that the billionaires who favor his ideas are going to be reluctant to openly support him.
‘shouldn’t have been murdered, of course’
I quite agree. A stern finger wagging is definitely in order here.
“but he is such a hideously overblown bigot that the billionaires who favor his ideas are going to be reluctant to openly support him.” Is the sort of thing that may have been said about kirk a decade ago.
Yeah, I got a piece of last month mail from that outfit, supposedly from her. My only thought was that they must’ve paid a lot to use some very poor search terms if the results included my address.
Why the halo? I don’t think any of us actually believe Heaven exists, but can we agree that if his “soul” went anywhere, it would be to the other place?
Horrible people that are dead/close to death.
Here is something I read at Youtube:
🤬
“Women of America should be allowed to decide what to do with Mitch McConnel’s body, since he decided what to do with their bodies”
Make it creative, ladies.
@ ^ birgerjohansson : Yup. Great idea and same should apply to Kirk and Trump and other rapists and sex offenders.
I think it’s too bad Kirk died, because he never got a chance to realise he was a bigot and repent. It does occasionally happen.
As I’m pretty sure I’ve said here before I’ll be unsurprised if Erika Kirk eventually writes an unflattering to Charlie tell all book, hoping to keep the cash flow going.
His over hyped fervently iconic Trump cult “martyr” status seems to have pretty much died and rotted away as soon as the inconvenient facts of him being killed by another nazi came out I’d say.
Actually altho’ I am not an expert in human composition, and I’m sure it depends what they did to it I’m pretty sure his corpse has rotted away quicker?
Either way there’s still quite a lot of unanswered questions over what’s happened to the bad non Star Trek skipper Kirk’s corpse since the other nazi killed him as Lauren the Mortician explains here – Charlie Kirk Autopsy Rumors EXPLAINED (From a Mortician.) (12 mins long.)
@8.timgueguen : Well , she celebrated his death with fireworks (& rumours say with JD Vance too) so .. yeah. Wouldn’t surprise me one little bit.
When they eventually tun on her – more than they already have & she realises that the misogynists are , surprise, against her perhaps she’ll switch and do that. That might mena we end up learning a lot even if far too late to be much use beyuodn satisfying curiosity..
I forget who it was — maybe another FTBer? — who said “I am not okay with what happened to Charlie; but Charlie was okay with what happened to Charlie.”
Also, I kinda suspect, just a little, that Kirk was shot because someone, somewhere, made a rational and understandable decision that he would be more valuable to their movement as a dead martyr than as a living debate-bro-bloviator (let’s face it, his shtick was really starting to wear out). It might have been a conscious conspiracy, or it might have been fellow bigots just reacting with “Shit, let’s milk this for all it’s worth!”
@Raging Bee:
While that’s an understandable suspicion, really, his death can still be just the result of two facts:
– Both Kirk and Fuentes were experts at dehumanizing others and stirring up stochastic terrorism; even if Kirk was much better at using ‘civil’ (read plausibly deniable) language for it, he was still very much a ‘let’s have a debate over whether or not you have any right to exist’ sort of person.
– Fuentes and his people thought that Kirk wasn’t horrible enough (and specifically not anti-Semitic enough) precisely because he was better at pretending to be civil and not pissing off sponsors.
I don’t see any need for anybody on his own side thinking that he would work better as a martyr, because the current slow-motion collapse of Turning Point without him was a far from unforeseeable consequence. The man had too much of an ego to allow for training any obvious successors, and honestly the sort of person who would be able to lead an organization like that probably wouldn’t be willing to join it as a lowly volunteer.
And, of course, the fact that his shtick was starting to wear out is part of the problem: none of the next generation of right-wing ideologues is willing to be his sort of ‘let’s walk right up to the line without going over it so I can pretend to be nice’ (the debate version of kids in the back seat going “I’m not touching you!”). They’re pretty much all either followers, minions waiting for a master, or they’re folks like Fuentes, people who are angry that any sort of line on civil discourse even exists and will happily jump over the line and start swinging.
Folks like Kirk helped open the door for worse things that then trampled them. You can’t afford to let go of the tiger once you’re riding.
Also, frankly, “This contemptuous, at times nihilistic humor […]” is a major part of the problem.
As the famous line from Voltaire goes (translated), “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” And nihilism is all about treating things as absurd, that nothing is actually worth treating as serious. There’s a reason that a lot of the younger branches of the political movement seem to have crawled out of 4chan and its even worse spin-offs.
I didn’t think much of Charlie Kirk before he died.
I think way less of him now.
That’s absurdism; nihilism is the belief that life has no inherent meaning or purpose.
(You got confused by the term ‘nihilistic humor’ I reckon, which by definition is humourous instead of serious)