Charlie Kirk is the Harambe of Gen Alpha

Let’s get this out of the way now. Charlie Kirk died for nothing.

He was, as I wrote last year, killed by a meme. Literally gunned down by bullets that read "Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️, ➡️, ⬇️⬇️⬇️,” "O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” and “If you read this you are gay lmao." And he has, in death, become one himself. An ugly misshapen digital phantom cursed forever to appear in AI edits of WorldstarHipHop videos, porn clips, and TikTok slop. But he has become something even more embarrassing than a meme. He’s a true, inescapable failure for MAGA.

A year on, it’s clear that his death was the exact moment the wheels came off the conservative movement he dedicated his life — and death — to. As Luke Winkie wrote in Slate, “Charlie Kirk’s death was supposed to change everything. And maybe it did — just in the opposite way anyone expected.”

In the wake of Kirk’s death, the great and terrible machine that President Donald Trump spent a decade building exerted all its supposed cultural power in one cacophonous burst. Flags flew at half-mast, Kirk’s widow Erika pranced across the stage of the State Farm Stadium at his funeral in Glendale, Arizona, Fox News chyrons buzzed for days, and hundreds of Americans who didn’t mourn properly were doxxed or chased out of their jobs. Only for Kirk to end up as the Harambe for Gen Alpha. A meme so strange and hideous that no brand or government can ever co-opt it. Which means it could, in theory, stay a meme forever.

In life, Kirk served three core functions for the broader MAGA movement. The first, and most important, was as a foot soldier of the conservative vibe shift. When he founded his organization Turning Point USA in 2012 with a big dream and a little Tea Party money, he was savvy enough to know that the job wasn’t about actually converting college kids to conservatives. It was about making enough polarizing digital content to distract anyone from questioning their extremely suspicious membership numbers.

In this way, TPUSA was the perfect microcosm of Trumpism. Flush with conservative dark money, wildly unpopular irl, but loud and dumb and unavoidable online and on cable news. And thanks to the dynamics of social media, that made Kirk very powerful.

Which is how he ended up serving as a bridge of sorts between all the disparate groups that live under the MAGA label. From the outside, MAGA may look like a monolith, but if you lift up the rock and take a magnifying glass to all bugs squirming underneath, you see how much they all hate each other. But he was easily the biggest — and least insane — of the Trump World influencers. Before his death he had over four million Instagram followers and three million YouTube subscribers. His regular podcast The Charlie Kirk Show was in the top 50 biggest podcasts in the US, according to surveys by Edison Research. And unlike, say, someone like Alex Jones or even Tucker Carlson, in the last year of his life he was getting very close to graduating beyond the right-wing filter bubble.

He was the first guest on everyone’s favorite podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom (which never made the top 50 charts, in case you’re wondering), and the first person to be Surrounded in Jubilee’s infamous YouTube show.

Which is how he emerged as, in my opinion, Trump’s natural successor. Kirk never had any official position in the government, military, or church, but he was routinely touted as MAGA’s answer to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A tacitly agreed upon solution to the core anxiety underpinning Trump’s second term: What happens next? Even if Project 2025 were to succeed in dismantling American democracy once and for all, there was still the question of what happens after Trump finally shits his pants in the Oval Office for the final time. And an influencer president would have been the perfect 21st-century replacement for a reality TV president. A figure that could, like Trump, at the very least project the idea that he’s popular somewhere.

All of this made Kirk a weirdly vulnerable node in the network. He was both the present and the future of Trump’s astroturfed cultural revolution and his death was a test for Trump World. A moment when they had to finally face the bizarre contradiction that defines them, and all authoritarian movements. That they both represent the silent majority of America and have to use state violence to punish anyone not in that silent majority. It was a test they summarily failed.

Kirk’s death meant they had to walk an increasingly absurd tightrope last September when they tried to turn him into a martyr. Simultaneously pretending that every American knew who Kirk was and cared that he died, while also using the power of the state to explain why he mattered and why it was so sacrilegious to criticize him. For a brief moment, especially online and in the media, where MAGA is far more comfortable operating, it looked like it might work.

The day after Kirk died, MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for saying on air that “hateful words lead to hateful actions.” And a doxxing site originally called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” started a mass-harassment campaign against any suspected of celebrating the murder. By the end of the day, 10 more people were reportedly fired for social media comments about Kirk. A week later, The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah after she described Kirk as, “a white man that espoused violence.” And ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke its broadcast license over Kimmel speculating that Kirk’s killer may have been far right. Per a Reuters report last November, over 600 Americans were fired or suspended for social media posts about Kirk.

But those early victories have not exactly stuck. Many — though not all — of the Americans fired for critical posts about Kirk last year got big payouts. The Washington Post was forced to rehire Attiah. And Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air within a week. And a year worth of Kirk memes has made the idea of penalizing anyone for disrespecting his memory completely laughable. Poor ol’ Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, is still carrying the flame, it seems. Today she tried to incite a harassment campaign against students at University of Nebraska–Lincoln who wanted to hold a “Twerk for Kirk” event on the Kirkiversary today. All the replies to her posts are people calling it based. Congrats, Charlie, you’re finally popular with college students.

It’s also not clear that Kirk’s death has even really stuck in the popular consciousness, beyond the memes, of course. It’s far from scientific, but I asked Garbage Day readers what they remember from last September and the bulk of the replies I’ve received basically boil down to, “it was, briefly, very horrifying, but, ultimately, just annoying.”

One reader told me that he mainly remembers it as the moment kids started using “KIRK” as their user names in Rocket League. Others mentioned how it derailed the news cycle for a few days before vanishing into the background radiation of online discourse we all try and ignore every day. Others sent me very funny play-by-plays of their group chats who were, immediately, in private, sharing memes about Kirk’s death minutes after it happened. One reader told me she told me she found out about Kirk’s murder after she called her dad about something unrelated and he jokingly answered the phone, "Charlie Kirk hotline.” She fired back, “"God why are we talking about that moron?”

I thought for sure at the time that Kirk’s murder was going to be Trump’s Reichstag fire, but there was never any chance of that happening. No one gave a shit about the guy! But that said, it’s actually taken me a year to fully understand what happened — or, rather, what didn’t happen — last September.

Looking back at it now, I’d say it all fell apart at Kirk’s funeral. Like everything else in Trump’s America, it was, simply put, a flop. And, in retrospect, part of a larger pattern plaguing the second Trump administration. One I suspect will be looked back on as their undoing. They simply can’t throw an event. Or, perhaps put a better way, they have no idea how to project the same level of all-consuming spectacle in real life that they do online.

Compare the post-Kirkening reign of terror online to what Republicans did in real life. Last year, on September 11th, no less, 16 Republican lawmakers wrote a letter demanding a statue of Kirk be installed in the US Capitol. It went nowhere. And any attempt at erecting a statue of Kirk anywhere else has resulted in almost immediate vandalism. Trump awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but that really didn’t amount to much for the average person. And Kirk’s funeral was a shockingly prescient glimpse of how the Trump administration would celebrate America’s 250th anniversary a few months later. It was a ghastly star-spangled convulsion of violent nationalism dressed up like a WWE regional showcase that, just like every other event Trump World throws, also somehow involved Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA.”

Make no mistake, I am not saying that all is good in America. Kirk’s death led directly to Trump’s Executive Order National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which classifies “antifa” as a “terrorist organization.” But no part of Trump World is stronger post-Kirk.

Even Erika Kirk has faced a year of criticism for her inability to cry properly — and her brief stint where she wore a weird hat. And it’s not surprising that the Trump administration seems to have lost interest in eulogizing him. TPUSA leaders are reportedly furious that Republicans scheduled the midterm convention for today. And it seems like the only thing the Trump administration has planned for the Kirkiversary today is a two-minute video shared to the White House X account. The comments are full of Kirk edits and demands that Trump release the unredacted Epstein files. Trump, it seems, has moved on to more important matters, like claiming he was a 9/11 first responder.

And so here we are, 12 months later. MAGA has never felt older and weaker and more out of touch, just like their president. The revolting aesthetics of Kirk’s funeral turned out not to be an aberration, but just the house style of the federal government, apparently. There is no one waiting in the wings to replace the GOP’s rotting figurehead. And the gulf between Trump’s big talk online and actual irl followthrough has never felt wider. Which brings us back to the memes.

Not only was the Trump administration completely unable to make people care irl, they now have a meme they can’t touch. Kirk is trapped forever in a cyberhell that, fittingly enough, only makes MAGA look dumber and more irrelevant the longer the meme lasts. Trump’s digital team is, obviously, never going to acknowledge it. Vice President JD Vance, who was quick to try and “own” the narrative around his ugly AI caricature last Halloween, will never post a Kirk edit. And no matter how deranged the federal X accounts are, I am confident we will never see an Agarthan Charlie Kirk deliver a can of white Monster energy drink to ICE agents in a video shared by Homeland Security. And while none of those words probably mean anything to a normal person, if you’ve reconfigured your entire political movement around recruiting psychotic 13-year-olds into your unpaid cyber army, that’s a problem! It’s not an accident that six months post-Kirk all the kids started smashing their faces with hammers like Clavicular. Live by the vibe shift, die by the vibe shift.

[Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.]

P.S. here’s one more Kirk meme for you.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***