Charlie Kirk Memes Are Taking Over The Internet

Charlie Kirk is sitting down, leaning forward and speaking into a microphone. “Counting or not counting gang violence,” he says — the last words he ever spoke. The video cuts to a sniper rifle, apparently aimed at Kirk. Then things start to get really weird: A techno remix of the song “We Are Charlie Kirk” kicks in, and Jeffrey Epstein, dressed in a quarter zip, hands Kirk a bullet. Kirk and Epstein smile and begin to dance around in a circle, holding on to rally attendees, and wave at the assembled crowd.

This is all depicted in an AI-generated meme that has been shared and viewed millions of times across X and other social media platforms. And it’s just one video in a trend that has been sweeping the internet since Kirk’s killing in September. The movement is called the “Great Kirkification” or the “Kirkening.” Kirk critics — whether on the left, the far-right or those who are simply irony-pilled and contrarian — are using AI to create videos and photos that look like the conservative influencer and even put his face on everyone from David Bowie to Kim Jong-Un.

As Kirk continues to be valorized as a modern martyr throughout much of the mainstream conservative movement, “Kirkifying” someone, or grafting his face onto someone else — as the practice has come to be known — is a way of making fun of them on the internet. But the trend has done something larger: The proliferation of the memes, which are shared by critics and mostly apolitical posters online, have, according to some, had the effect of collapsing the context around his death, turning his actual face into a joke in some parts of the internet and reducing the political power of his legacy.

When asked if he was concerned whether these memes would affect how Americans see Kirk or his legacy, Turning Point Spokesperson Andrew Kolvet gave a simple answer: “No.” In certain corners of the internet, though, the meme version of Kirk has reached total saturation. In a bizarre twist, some observers now believe certain AI image generation tools have received so many requests to “Kirkify” that they are now making other, non-Kirk requests look like Kirk. The image generators may have become “poisoned” by the requests, the theory goes — trained on so many Kirk memes that they can’t help but reproduce his face everywhere. This possibility, though, has been disputed by some AI researchers, who say it is based on an erroneous understanding of how the tools work.

Still, the phenomenon offers a window into how memes and AI can shape political meaning. As AI makes it faster and easier than ever to fabricate content involving public figures and as social media apps increasingly define how Americans engage with politics, a memeified version of a person can distort the real one.

While he was alive, Kirk had an ongoing feud with the groypers, an anti-immigration, racist, misogynistic and antisemitic group known mostly for its offensive and crude online presence.

But the groypers were far from the only ones who were longtime critics of Kirk. Participants in online left groups also got their licks in at Kirk over the years. Notably, many of his opponents created a meme that caught hold while he was alive, increasingly shrinking down his eyes, nose and mouth in relation to his face.

After Kirk’s shooting on Sept. 10, conservatives bear-hugged his legacy even more tightly. Many activists attacked those they felt were disrespectful of Kirk’s legacy online, leading to a spate of firings among those who criticized Kirk or made off-color jokes after his death.

But those on the left and far right who always criticized Kirk persisted in their mockery. According to the website Know Your Meme, the first popular Kirk faceswap appeared on Sept. 23. Ryan Broderick, an internet culture expert who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, says that he saw “a lot of activity” from groypers posting Kirk memes and getting them into the bloodstream of social media apps soon after his death — suggesting that they were a driving factor in the memeification of Kirk.

Things escalated from there, and by November the Kirk memes were really beginning to take off, as his face was mashed up with any pop cultural figure you can imagine.

At the same time, the song “We Are Charlie Kirk,” which was entirely AI-generated and originally distributed as an honest paean to his legacy, became frequently remixed and turned into the background music for many of these memes. The sincerity that animated the days after his death has been largely replaced by a nihilistic absurdism. And the evolution is not surprising to anyone who’s been online of late — just think about how common 9/11 jokes have become across the last quarter century. Tragedy becomes farce much faster on the internet.

Kirk was deeply identified with an older-school brand of American conservatism that prioritizes ideas like in-person voter persuasion. “He was an old conservative person’s idea of what a young person should be like,” said Aidan Walker, an internet culture researcher and content creator. And thanks to the combination of his large social media presence while he was still alive and his more traditional beliefs about politics, he was a flashing target for internet-addicted edgelords of all stripes. That’s continued in death.

Posting a Kirk meme soon became a way to signal an internet-native, anti-institutional streak.

“The internet wanted to take control of his image,” said Walker. “People took these Kirkification memes and used them as a way to destabilize whatever image [conservatives] wanted to create. And so I don't think anyone will be able to look at Kirk 100 percent seriously now.”

Then things took an even weirder turn: social media seized on an AI-generated video of an influencer “meeting Santa” that, according to some, made the influencer look a bit like Kirk. Multiple viral posts on social media suggested that this could be evidence of AI beginning to “hallucinate” Kirk’s image.

“We do know AI poisoning is real. There are trends in how LLMs generate stuff. The use of em-dashes, for example,” said Broderick. “It’s happened before, and the [Kirk generating] just adds to the meme.”

The way that these AI tools are trained is something of a black box, so it’s impossible to know for sure whether they have been overloaded by Kirk content and are doing this as a result. But many say it’s a misunderstanding of how the tools work: “There’s a lot of disinformation which flows around AI image generators ... ‘Kirkification’ is probably no more present than any other viral meme in the training set of any given image model,” said Justin Bennington, an AI researcher who is the founder of Somewhere Systems, a media and engineering consultancy. “If it were to be an issue, teams could train a classifier to detect his face.”

Bennington says it’s not possible to “poison” most image models even if that is your goal. And some of the stated Kirk “hallucinations” don’t look a lot like him, unless you’ve been staring at images of Kirk online for months on end. It’s possible that it’s the humans whose brains have been poisoned by the “Kirkification.” But the very fact that there is even a debate over whether it’s happening speaks to how AI can have destabilizing effects that can shape politics and reach far beyond it.

For years, astute political observers have feared deepfakes, AI-generated images or videos that can be easily confused with a real person. But the Kirkification has provided evidence for another, even weirder future. That even in death, someone’s image can be shaped and changed by a deluge of fake images that don’t even pretend to be real.