'It’s not cool anymore': How Charlie Kirk’s legacy became 'really cringe'

After Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in Utah on September 10, 2025, countless critics of the MAGA activist — from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — condemned the killing in no uncertain terms. AOC called out the "depravity of Kirk's brutal murder." But President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Fox News' Jesse Watters and many other MAGA Republicans blamed Kirk's critics for the murder, exalting Kirk as a martyr for the MAGA movement.

According to The Guardian's Noah Kirsch, however, the rhetoric on Kirk has changed dramatically since then.

"Ten months since his assassination," Kirsch explains in The Guardian, "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 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."

Kirsch continues, "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."

Author/media analyst Alex Turvy notes that after Kirk's murder, MAGA Republicans were canceling people for even mild criticism of him.

Turvy told The Guardian, "For the first few weeks, the only safe thing to say was praise. When you mandate reverence on a medium built for irony, (the internet), you don't freeze the image, you load the spring. A lot of the mockery was that pressure releasing."

Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, told The Guardian, "The jokes about Charlie Kirk are symbolic of what have been pretty seismic shifts happening within the online culture. After his passing, there was really a power vacuum when it came to who was going to be the next big voice for young conservatives and for MAGA…. A lot of young people (are) looking at him and the legacy of his messaging and thinking that it's really cringe. It's not cool anymore."

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