On Sept. 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The next day, a crypto coin commemorating his death reached a market cap value of five million dollars. Within one week, over two million were placed into online bets as to the sexual orientation of his killer. Within two months, I watched an AI generated video of his face superimposed onto Lebron James’ body as a Brazilian phonk edit of the hit single “We Are Charlie Kirk” plays. Lasers shot out of his eyes.
Charlie Kirk and I grew up in the same collection of Chicago suburbs. I played at band festivals with his high school. He attended (and dropped out of) the community college where I completed dual enrollment courses. My childhood was spent surrounded by the same breed of mild-mannered, midwestern Romney-era Republicans he described his parents to be. There was not a single stance of his that I found agreeable, but I couldn’t help but feel an odd sense of familiarity to the person behind the insufferable debate voice and repulsive rhetoric. A man that grew up one town over was publicly executed and I saw the footage live.
It was so graphic that I couldn’t even process for a moment that it was real.
Before the official announcement of his death, the crypto coin $RIPCharlieKirk was minted on pump.fun. X user @elonconomy claimed credit for the coin, stating “We’ve made a memecoin in [Kirk’s] honor so he will live on forever in the blockchain.” One comment on the pump.fun page posted by user @5mwu9z with an AI generated Trump profile picture before the official death announcement reads “shot in the neck and throat he died LETS GO TO THE FKING MOON.” Within the day, the market cap value shot to $5.6 million.
Two days after Kirk’s assasination, Tyler Robinson was named the shooter. That morning, Polymarket created the prediction market titled “Fact Check: Is Tyler Robinson queer?” By the time it was resolved (to “Yes”) on Sept. 16th, $2.4 million had been traded. The top trader (user “WhiteLivesMatter”) profited $25,050.72.
Five days after Kirk’s assasination, presumed AI artist Spalexma released the eleven track album “Charlie Kirk Forever Alive,” with the last track being the now infamous “We Are Charlie Kirk.” It later served as the main backtrack to the “Kirkification” meme, which consisted of popular memes with Charlie Kirk’s face superimposed on top with AI.
It may feel ridiculous to recall now, but in the weeks following his death Charlie Kirk was treated with such extreme reverence by the Trump administration and general right wing political apparatus that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom. Flags were flown at half staff. Then the witchhunts began. Anyone who made any slightly negative comment about Kirk was at risk. Vice President JD Vance encouraged people to report offenders to their employers. Visas were revoked and people were fired. Late night host Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off air for his comments. With Kirk’s death, Trump rallied against the “radical left” and pushed all the typical talking points, but with a newfound intensity. There was now a martyr to rally behind.
President Donald Trump posthumously presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk | Image Source: Kevin Dietsch
Despite the attempts to push him to martyrdom, Charlie Kirk’s online afterlife resembles that of Harambe rather than Jesus. His name and face became the punch line of semi-edgy mainstream brain rot humor, nearly completely detached from his actions and having him join the likes of P. Diddy and Epstein in the AI “brainrot” character Mount Rushmore. One such AI TikTok video features Kirk as Captain America, Epstein as Iron Man, and Diddy as Nick Fury with over 4.5 million likes and 36 million views. These men have nothing in common beyond their shared surface-level shock value. Their place in news headlines as highly controversial, serious figures makes their AI morph into Minecraft or the movie “The Black Phone” even more attention grabbing and provocative. Kirk himself was also edited onto every possible internet celebrity, from Cynthia Arivo to Cristiano Ronaldo to the 6 7 Kid, all scored to the song “We Are Charlie Kirk.”
This meme-ficiation defanged the narrative, like pantsing a school yard bully. Whatever previous reverence and forced formalities morphed into the setup to some punchline that the entire nation was in on. His supposedly grieving widow, Erika Kirk, now was the subject of online mockery from both right and left and endlessly shipped with the Vice President. She has a viral drag queen impersonator. But does that really mean anything? As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. “Charlie Kirk” topped the Google Search trends of 2025 (beating out “Labubu” and “KPop Demon Hunters”). His killer and wife sat respectively in second and fourth place on the Most Searched People list. His organization, Turning Point USA, saw massive growth in membership across college campuses. However ridiculous and bizarre, his name and face have now permeated into every corner of the internet. AI fuels this movement. With a simple text prompt, anyone can create thousands of images, videos, and audios to flood the internet instantaneously. The apolitical masses are now intimately aware of this far right pundit, inadvertently fueling this morbid marketing campaign.
In a recent conference, Kalshi (another major prediction market platform) CEO Tarek Mansour said, “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion.” In the case of Charlie Kirk, the crypto meme coins and prediction markets accomplished just that. Millions of dollars exchanged hands because of someone’s death. However, it rots the foundations of political discourse by introducing an alluring financial incentive that, in all truth, does not really care about the actual difference in opinion. Beyond financial, what actual value does the debate about Kirk’s killer’s sexual orientation have? What actual value does speculating over how many times his name would be mentioned in a given Fox News segment have? It rings empty and rotten, like some modern techno version of grave robbing.
In a video, creator @etymology_nerd claims that the Kirkification trend was created artificially to garner more attention to the $KIRKIFY crypto coin. While it is difficult to verify this connection, it is true that both the coin and the trend began around similar times. So does it matter if there was a purposeful connection when it is ultimately just the same outcome: a cycle of AI spam and profits driven by attention? This is the future of political discourse. Computers are now generating content at rates and quality unthinkingable just two years ago. The financial incentive structure has been established. The well has been poisoned.
I first learned of Charlie Kirk not through his death or the subsequent memes, but during my freshman year at Christian school. The summer prior was a time of great political turmoil in the U.S., racialized police brutality and protests dominated headlines alongside the ongoing pandemic. My classmates and I, like many other young people in our country, began our foray into political engagement online. However, as I absorbed liberal and leftist online discourse, my classmates purchased Trump flags. Kids that I grew up alongside for ten years, who I bowed my head in prayer next to, who I passed the soccer ball to in recess, were now posting white squares on Instagram with the caption #AllLivesMatter. They shared Charlie Kirk video clips and parrotted his talking points. Maybe in their minds, this was a natural progression into maturity. Adoption of conservative thinking was just the mark of creeping adulthood, and my opposition was just childish resistance against the inevitable. The style of young politically active conservative Christian that Kirk modelled was aspirational.
It was sometime in spring of 2021, after Donald Trump’s stunning defeat in the 2020 election and after the failed January 6th debacle, that my classmates created our school’s branch of Turning Point USA. It was no coincidence that this came at this grand moment of conservative defeat, where the movement could only tuck its tail between its legs to brace for four years of Biden. Defeat fed the narrative of growing oppression of traditional conservative values. And now, the youth must band together to defend those values. As Gen Z grew into progressive political engagement, there needed to be an equal force of young people to meet that challenge. Kirk led the charge and my classmates happily joined the ranks.
Charlie Kirk speaking at the 2020 GOP Convention | Image Source: ABC News
Charlie Kirk was 18 when he dropped out of Harper Community College to run the newly founded and growing Turning Point USA. At 18, my father sat me down before the security line of O’Hare International Airport and made a last ditch effort at evangelism. “Conservative is the new cool, young people are now increasingly conservative,” he tried. The concept was so absurd I scoffed. I was going to Berkeley, arguably the most liberal college campus in America, after all. He scoffed back, stating there was space for conservatives everywhere, even in the most liberal of bubbles. “Like Turning Point. You should join that.”
To some, Berkeley’s left leaning reputation and intellectual elitism clash with the image of Turning Point, but it made perfect sense to me. For all its rallying against corrupt elite “leftist” academic institutions, there was no shortage of well educated members of the conservative movement. Charlie Kirk may have dropped out of community college, but he was an outlier in the young conservative pundit circles. Ben Shapiro and Brett Cooper both hold degrees from UCLA. Nick Fuentes briefly attended Boston University. Among the young of this administration are alumni of even more elite universities. J.D. Vance with Yale, Pete Hegseth with Princeton and Harvard, most notably. My dad did not want me to be merely convinced by a Charlie Kirk debate clip, he wanted me to be the one in Kirk’s place doing the debating, driving the message, and the movement. That was the place of the educated in the movement.
Lu’s father with Charlie Kirk, 2021 | Image Source: Alexandra Lu
I politely turned down my dad’s proposition. I had long completed my tenure surrounded by conservative peers and I was not looking to continue that experience.
It was the summer of 2024. The nation was watching the incumbent stumble through his words, losing mental lucidity everyday as Trump drew increasingly larger crowds to roaring rallies. The victory of 2020 had long rusted over and the approaching dread of election night loomed closer and closer. “The movement needs more young people,” my dad tried again. And in less than half a year, the movement had the young people. Five months after that moment in O’Hare, Trump won his second term. Harris lost ground with young voters in nearly every swing state.
My Illinoisian Christian school and UC Berkeley could not be more different from each other, but there is a connecting reason as to their conservative communities. The feeling of being under attack and other-ness, whether in the grand national sense like the Republican defeat in the 2020 election or the overwhelmingly “woke” cultural reputation of Berkeley. My former classmates and the people my dad wanted me to join see themselves as a cultural minority, under threat by mainstream secular progressivism, and maybe they are even correct in that assumption in strong blue regions such as the Chicago suburbs and the Bay Area. They preemptively see their beliefs as offensive or shocking, wearing those labels like badges of honor and calling all that oppose “snowflakes.” I recognize it in the distasteful TikToks my classmates made in 2020 and I recognize it now walking down Lower Sproul past a man seated under a canopy yelling random hot button issues and buzzwords to bait passerbyers into a filmed debate. This feeling of moral isolation and superiority is not just contained to the youth conservative movement and it is not even strictly political. In fact, I have seen shades of it in all communities dominated by pre-teens and young adults, from K-Pop fandoms to niche fashion subcultures. However, unlike these youth fancultures, there are clear incentives for youth conservatism to evolve past fandom and into real world movements. Figures like Kirk gave these young people a way to direct their feelings into effective political organization. Turning Point promises community and reason, a clear reason to be a cultural provocateur. And the enemy wasn’t just fandom outsiders, but the entire American political and cultural environment.
In the aftermath of his death, there has been a never ending game of tug and war for Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Is he a national hero? Scum of the Earth? The resounding answer seems to be the unexpected third option: a meme. But in a way, it is fitting. Kirk tried his adult life to be a meme. He spent his time touring college campuses and debating students ten years younger for clips and sound bites to go viral on TikTok. It would’ve brought him such delight to know that he has wormed his way into the minds of young people, dominating algorithms and discourse, both mainstream and counter culture. Almost every young person in America now knows his name, and knows (to varying degrees of clarity) what he stood for. Was that not the same goal of my classmates and my father? Who cares if it was because of an AI meme or a crypto coin or a Kalshi market? The posthumous indentation on youth culture Kirk has made eclipses any work of his life and has gifted Turning Point a strikingly recognizable rallying point and platform.
It is a worrying indication of our post-ironic society that this was able to happen. Ever intensifying political discourse is drowned by the indifferent majority and a profiting minority. Bombarded by a constant stream of content, AI generated and degraded, carried by that said indifferent majority, and real issues get lost in the undercurrent.
In Kirk’s death, there is a real irony. His last action on Earth was spent debating the topic of gun violence with a college student. The student asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” Kirk replied “Counting or not counting gang violence?” and then he was shot to death. Whether one finds humor or horror in that is a personal decision, but the real irony of his death has been lost under this digital burial.
In the hours after Kirk’s death, I got into a disagreement with a close friend about her sudden alignment with his beliefs, especially on guns. That same day, a student brought a gun to my hometown’s middle school. Eight miles from where Charlie Kirk grew up, on the day that he spent his last moments on Earth defending gun violence in America before being shot. What if that student’s gun hadn’t been confiscated? What if it was my town joining the likes of Parkland, Uvalde, and Sandy Hook next? Would my friend still believe in what she does? When my friend was confronted with this, she did not respond. Maybe she was imagining the faces of the kids she knew who attended that school, weighing their injuries and deaths in her heart and mind, assessing their life against the right to possess the gun that shot them. Is that the mental calculus of Charlie Kirk’s family? Do the people that called him a husband, a son, a friend, a loved one weigh his life against what he spent that life defending? Is it still “worth to have a cost of … some gun deaths every single year”? This question, this contradiction, and not AI memes and songs, that is Charlie Kirk’s true legacy.
In his death, it may only be his detractors that still regard Charlie Kirk with humanity. Not as a meme, or a marketing opportunity, or a financial investment, but a real life human made of flesh and blood from Mount Prospect, Illinois with real opinions and a real tangible impact on this world, however harmful or negative. A man from a town over, who spent his last moments in hubris.
A memorial honoring Charlie Kirk outside of Wheeling High School, Kirk’s alma mater | Image Source: Chicago Tribune
It is difficult to go a day on social media without seeing Charlie Kirk. His name has even infiltrated our vocabulary, spawning such abominations to the English language such as “lowkirkuinely.” I too see him everywhere, but not just in the hollow lifeless AI imitations, but in my former friend, in my father, and in my elementary school yearbook. I see him as the neighborhood creep who tempted children into his ideological white van with the promise of community and freedom. I see him as the rotting corpse, whose stench clings to our clothes, demanding attention and decaying all that sits around it.
I do not mourn Charlie Kirk. In living or in death, I do not honor him or his beliefs. However, I care about Charlie Kirk. I care about him because I care about the harm he caused, the movement he represented, and the future he signified. I care about him because I see the influence he has had on the people around me. I do not wish to continue in the political discourse paradigm his death has created. I do not wish to be surrounded by his digital corpse, puppetted by the uncaring and indifferent driven by profit, AI animated and undying.
Featured Image Source: KSL