Turning Point USA struggles to maintain influence after Kirk’s death
Ten months after his assassination, Charlie Kirk’s name and likeness are still proliferating online, but in ways the conservative activist would not have wanted. The audio of the gunshot that killed him has become a TikTok meme, and ironic reposts of the AI-generated tribute song “We Are Charlie Kirk” have circulated widely. A trend known as “Kirkification” superimposes his face on unlikely images, including the Mona Lisa and Jeffrey Epstein. The mockery reached a national stage during the Netflix roast of Kevin Hart in May, when Kirk was the butt of a crude joke.
The shift from suppression to widespread satire was rapid. In the period immediately following Kirk’s death in September 2025, conservatives sought to suppress any criticism of him, and hundreds of people were fired or disciplined for denouncing him, several later reaching settlements over alleged First Amendment violations. The attempted censorship intensified the satirization, said Alex Turvy, a media sociologist and author of an upcoming book about internet culture.
“For the first few weeks, the only safe thing to say was praise,” Turvy said. “When you mandate reverence on a medium built for irony, you don’t freeze the image, you load the spring. A lot of the mockery was that pressure releasing.”
The meme-ification of Kirk has distracted from the prosecution of his alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson. Preliminary hearings began in Provo, Utah, this week, during which prosecutors reportedly showed graphic videos of Kirk’s final moments. Robinson has not yet entered a plea. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
The online noise also demonstrates how Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, has struggled to retain its grip on online discourse since his death, even with his widow, Erika Kirk, at the helm. Turning Point did not respond to a request for comment from The Guardian. Other rightwing influencers, including Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, whom The Guardian describes as a white nationalist, have sought to supplant Kirk.
“The jokes about Charlie Kirk are symbolic of what have been pretty seismic shifts happening within the online culture,” said Eviane Leidig, director of research and outreach at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate. “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.”
Leidig said Kirk had already begun to fall out of favor with the younger generation of conservatives while he was still alive. “A lot of young people [are] looking at him and the legacy of his messaging and thinking that it’s really cringe,” she said. “It’s not cool any more.”
At his peak, Kirk was a prominent organizer for young Republicans who frequently generated viral clips that extended the Republican party’s reach. The Guardian reported that his comments were often incendiary and that he was accused of outright bigotry. During a 2023 stream, he declared that “in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people. That’s a fact.” In 2025, he commented about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor.”
Kirk himself was a product of internet culture, traveling the country to challenge college students to debates — the reason he was at Utah Valley University on the afternoon of his assassination. Jamie Cohen, associate professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College, described Kirk as part of a collective of “media martyrs” who claim to be bravely countercultural. His tactics appealed particularly to young men who saw him as a “truthsayer,” Cohen said, adding that “they rarely realized that Kirk was basically making it up for clicks and views.”
After the assassination, Turning Point USA experienced a surge of visibility. The U.S. Senate established a National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk roughly a week after his death. Erika Kirk took the podium at his funeral in front of an audience of millions, and the White House announced plans to counter “domestic terrorism,” citing his death as a factor. Some of that visibility has since receded, particularly among youth.
“Without broad buy-in of Erika at the helm, Turning Point is a weakened enterprise,” Leidig said. Under Charlie Kirk, the group pushed its messaging through a calculated “top-down approach” with cohesive strategy, funding from prominent Republican operatives, and support from the White House. This contrasts with amorphous grassroots entities such as the Groypers, who have ascended in the vacuum left by Kirk.
Turvy noted that the meme-ification of Kirk filled a space where a settled meaning of his death used to go. “What’s different now is that online everyone has a roughly equal-sized megaphone,” he said. “Every camp can reach for the meaning of his death, and none of them can make theirs stick. The memes are what fill the space where a settled meaning used to go.”
He added that the speed of the mockery was accelerated by generative AI and image-doctoring. “Political beliefs aside, it’s been really graphic and dark on a human level,” Turvy said. “Ultimately, a 31-year-old was shot in the neck in public. There’s a real widow and two real kids.”