In a good and just society, it would have been possible to bury Charlie Kirk without either threatening mass violence toward his enemies or making light of his death with a furry sex meme. But America in 2025 did not remotely resemble a working society, let alone a civil one, and Kirk’s killing came prepackaged with its own desecrating shitposts.
There was, briefly, an attempt at a national mood of somberness. The president ordered flags across the nation to be lowered to half-staff. Politicians, celebrities, and other public figures — even those not aligned with Kirk on the right — rushed out with condolences and grief, painting completely unrecognizable pictures of a man who was a once-in-a-generation talent at getting a rise out of other people. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” wrote the liberal pundit Ezra Klein in The New York Times, describing him as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel became the most prominent victim of this crusade after making a fairly mild joke on his late night show. The actual upshot of the quip — which mocked Trump for his apparent disinterest in Kirk only days after the young man’s death — was completely ignored, and Kimmel was lambasted for showing insufficient grief over the newly canonized saint of MAGA. The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, successfully threatened Disney into taking Kimmel off the air — only to be mogged by the general public, which berated Disney into reinstating Kimmel’s show.
In a sense, this circus was business as usual. The amnesia of the elites, the tone-policing witch hunts, the pageantry of memorialization: these are the reflexive acts of a society on the verge of launching a systemic assault on civil liberties. But as much as the right wing tried to channel 9/11, and as much as corporations and media organizations and left-wing politicians played along, something about the way Americans communicate with each other was fundamentally different. Perhaps the first indication of where we were as a country was a video posted by a TikTok user at the Utah Valley University event, recorded just moments after the shooting. “It’s your boy, Elder TikTok!” he shouted. “Shots fired!”
“It’s your boy, Elder TikTok!” he shouted. “Shots fired!”
Despite the mass reprisals against Kirk’s shitposting detractors over the following weeks and months, the memeing continued apace. And very shortly after Kirk’s death, influencers on the right-wing fringe — like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes — had almost compulsively fallen into conspiratorial theorizing about the shooting, their instincts settling the blame on (of course) Israel. Even the center of MAGA could not hold; the long, sustained sainting of Kirk was simply too incongruous with the deportation ASMR memes. Vice President JD Vance tried to stick with the serious tone — now, months later, he is the subject of an AI slop musical tribute to Kirk that has gone viral on TikTok, with the soaring hook (“We are Charlie Kiiiiiiiiiiirk”) a popular target for mockery.
2025 has been defined by Charlie Kirk, though not by what Charlie Kirk espoused, nor who he was, nor who his allies purport him to have been. The hysteria, the inanity, and the sheer incoherence surrounding his death has become emblematic of America. It took a decade before 9/11 jokes could really land, but Kirk’s death had been turned into a joke before the bullet even hit him. Politics is fully immersed in its postliterate era, and political violence, too, has become illegible.
Two days after Kirk was shot, law enforcement announced the arrest of his alleged killer. In a press conference, the governor of the state of Utah proceeded to read out loud a series of internet memes that had been scratched into bullet casings recovered with the alleged weapon.
The first — “notices bulge OWO what’s this?” — was a mocking reference to furry online sexual roleplay. The next, which ominously opened with “Hey fascist, catch,” ended with a series of arrows encoding a button combo strike in the video game Helldivers 2, a third-person shooter that satirizes fascism. The one after that was a reference to the Italian song “Bella ciao” (historically an antifascist anthem but also a generally catchy jingle). The governor wrapped up the list with the most ignominious possible conclusion, saying, “if you read this you are gay lmao,” making sure to carefully spell out each of the letters in the final abbreviation.
This should be understood as a genuinely humiliating moment for America, one in which our elected leaders succumbed to the murderous version of calling Moe’s Tavern and asking for Heywood Jablome. A civilized society does not heap furry sex memes on top of a grave.
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