I hoped Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder would change something.
A year ago when the Turning Point USA Founder was assassinated, his murder livestreamed and replayed for days afterwards, I worried about how it would affect our children. I also hoped it was an inflection point, one where people began to reckon with the the sickness of political point scoring and meme culture.
I wrote about it here. I wanted my son to know violence is never ok, regardless of politics.
One year later I’m not so sure that’s what our youth, or frankly America, learned from Kirk’s tragic death. In fact, there’s more evidence that things are getting worse, that from the President on down we are getting dumber, less serious, more flippant with our rhetoric.
It was called the “Kirk-a-versary.” This was what I heard from many young men and some young women. Several news organizations wrote of this troubling trend, an anniversary of sorts at the one-year mark, and moreover how very bizarre the TikTok videos were promoting it.
Much like the song, ‘We are Charlie Kirk,’ an AI generated song (likely from a foreign source) that has now been in more than 50,000 TikTok videos and sung both reverently and irreverently, it seemed to pop up out of nowhere.
In Los Angeles it wasn’t just young men who were part of the trend, young women were equally involved. The videos, social media feeds, it’s all some weird stuff. From the guy who rented a truck to cart a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square leading to an altercation, to the conversations in the schools of Los Angeles.
Depending on the circles, it was like there was no room for this man to both have questionable views and be a human: someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s husband. It was all black or white; all good, all bad, all meme culture.
It all left me more worried frankly than I was a year ago.
Death Chants in Texas
While the spectacle of reliving Charlie Kirk’s death played out, President Trump hosted a rather bizarre midterm election convention in Texas.
He promised $5000 checks if he won the midterms (I hope people see through that, given how many times he’s promised cash hand outs, and how those cash hand outs would only cost our kids even more).
He spoke for hours. I honestly don’t know how a President has that much time to speak uninterrupted (I did work for one and a President’s plate is quite full). But this President has always made time for long, tangent-filled speeches. He’s fighting in court to throw out mail voting (thankfully with the Supreme Court rebuffing his efforts), he’s making the case for his DC renovations and continues to press for his deeply unpopular war with Iran, which simultaneously is somehow, according to his telling, close to over and already over every day for the last almost 200 days since it started. And he wants to talk about it all at length.
When you add it up — the ranting President, the Internet-coded response to a murder — you can’t help but think we’re at a deeply unserious moment in time.
What would Kirk make of this moment? Some of his allies have certainly turned on the President for the war in Iran. As I said last year, I do wish I had gotten to see that evolution.
But we don’t. And now a year later I’m deeply disturbed by the things I hear, not just from our youth, but by grown adults about murder.
At that same convention, Texas Senator Ted Cruz stood onstage belittling New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. From the crowd a voice very loud, certainly loud enough to be heard: “He should be shot.” Over and over the shout came to names of different Democrats.
A year after a searing American political murder, what was Ted Cruz’s response to this?
Silence.
It’s not just rhetoric, either. I should note there was already a foiled attack near Mamdani’s residence.
The ‘Kirkification’ of the Internet
Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, many deeply troubling trends have played out in social media around his likeness and his legacy. “Kirkification” evidently is when someone replaces someone’s face with Charlie Kirk’s face for memes.
It got so widespread and popular that literal websites sprouted up to “help.” Likely built from AI for searchable popular terms, these websites sold packages to users to generate AI images.
Sometime after his death another social media trend would claim Kirk was now the gatekeeper of “Agartha.” They would use edited pictures of Kirk, now turned blonde and blue-eyed, claiming he was in a magical realm. What most young people posting, repeating and verbalizing this fictional location didn’t know was that the idea of Agartha came from the Nazis. They were unwittingly spreading the gospel of a very dark history.
These things happen so quickly it’s almost uncontrollable, many parents don’t even know what their kids are talking about. I’m glad the AI guys are finally starting to see that what they’ve created is so very dangerous.
I don’t know how we’ve gotten here.
The murder of a father, an outspoken one who I disagreed with, became a culture of AI brain rot. The things people have done, using AI, to his widow, Erika Kirk, is somehow worse. AI videos of her dancing and smiling. I can’t imagine their children seeing these images.
I keep coming back to where I was a year ago. Sitting here typing, wondering how we as a nation would respond to something that was so searing, so public, so awful. Yes, Charlie Kirk’s politics were deeply polarizing. But couldn’t we all see this was an important moment to reassess? To get serious?
Apparently not.
And that’s why I’m so troubled. Money seems to be corrupting our politics, and memes seem to be corrupting our youth. It seems so little is actually getting done that could go a long way to save us.
I might laugh if it wasn’t so sad.
Note to readers: I’m sorry that this week isn’t more optimistic but I guess that’s just where I am on this particular subject. I always welcome your take.