How Charlie Kirk achieved internet immortality

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1:00No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Okay, Top Comment listeners. Today we're going to do something a little different. Welcome to our ASMR channel. This is going to be a sound bath podcast from now on. To detox your feet. Sorry, all that's happened is we've both discovered that if you hit the lamps in the studio, it makes a gong-like sound. And that was enough for us to run with.

1:38Marianna Spring:This is the first time I'm seeing you in person today. But I have seen a very, shall we call it interesting, AI edit of you as a rat on Tommy Robinson's Feed on X. Yeah, that's horrible. I really didn't like that one. I mean, yes. So for context, I have made a film about Tommy Robinson investigating his finances. It's on Channel 4. It's called Tommy Robinson. Where's the money gone? But I mean, at the time we're recording this, it's going to come out tonight. But before that, Tommy Robinson is going to release his own documentary about me and my documentary called The Dispatch's Deception. When one man has the ability to unite the nation and to bring millions to descend in our capital city, what reaction do you think the establishment has to that?

2:31Well, they simply use every weapon they have to destroy that. From plants to destroy the movement, from useful idiots at times, activists, paid activists, also their most favourable weapon of all. A weapon that's worked for them for many, many decades. The mainstream media. This is the third, quote, documentary that's been made about me. The first one was by Andrew Tate in response to my film about him. The second one was by Logan Paul in response to my film about him. I mean, I had such deja vu because he was sending me a voice note saying like, Matt, you're relevant and we're going to declare, in his exact words, he said, we're going to declare a declaration of war on you, meaning the media, right?

3:11It's almost exactly what Andrew Tate said to me on the phone when I made a documentary about him. these kind of social media right-wing superstars make a living and a career off of pitting themselves against the quote mainstream media and i guess that's the way that you

3:29Marianna Spring:deal with these kinds of allegations like back in 20 30 years ago people would do like pr spin or this is like their version of that right yeah but it's it's entered a new territory and i think not many journalists have to deal with the kind of level of content creation to attack you personally i mean i still to this day get like abuse from andrew tate fans you're getting abuse constantly but it becomes like it's like you accept that being a lightning rod for this kind of abuse is what comes investigating these sorts of topics and actually lots of it is designed to deter and stop you investigating it because it's not it's not a fun thing to experience exactly and you always have to make sure that the journalism you're doing is important enough to cause a dent in their kind of narrative they're spinning because they want the journalism that you're doing on them to a degree because it gives them attention right and then they feed off of that attention and get more followers so we're not going to start calling you matt the rat she yeah he's trying to start that that what is with these right-wing figures they always want to do a nickname don't they Matt the Rat Andrew Tate called me the DNG Dork Nerd Geek Trump's always I don't think of any of my nicknames mine are usually misogynistic slurs yeah yours are kind of not as funny it's like they're really horrible people occasionally edit me as like sort of North Korean newsreaders it just tends to be like whore slut oh god less of a ring to it yeah oh god I'm glad you could laugh about it.

5:03All right. Enough about Tommy Robinson. What are we talking about today?

5:07Marianna Spring:So we are going to be talking about the Kirkiversary. It's one year since Charlie Kirk was shot. He was assassinated. That is so hard to believe, by the way. A year, I know. And what we are going to be analysing on this episode of Top Comment is how and why he has been essentially resurrected by meme. Like he's got a whole other legacy life. I don't know how you want to describe it, post being killed. And he is one of the most absurdly memeable people to the point where people are saying, I don't even know what Charlie Kirk actually looks like anymore. Yeah, exactly. I mean, his life meant something.

5:43His death meant something totally different. His legacy meant something totally different. And his resurrection as this meme has meant something totally different yet again. And so we'll take you through all four stages of Charlie Kirk's existence and what they all mean.

5:55Marianna Spring:And one of the key things that we're unpicking today is how a lot of the people who are engaged in and sharing this kind of content about Charlie Kirk aren't actually haters, which I think is a misconception that these are a load of young people who just despise Charlie Kirk. This is about engagement nihilism and absurdity and memes for memes sake, rather than necessarily with an ideological purpose.

6:23Marianna Spring:okay so we should say from the outset here that obviously what we're talking about is something very distressing dark Charlie Kirk was shot he was killed he has a family he has two little kids it was a very distressing event and one that raised all sorts of questions about freedom of expression the right to express your opinion and not be killed when doing that But what we are going to be focusing on is the digital legacy, like the way this has unfolded on social media and why it's unfolded on social media in this way. And actually, like from a tone point of view, it can be quite hard to chat about because what's happening on social media feels very at odds with the tone set by politicians and the media when it comes to, say, an assassination like this.

7:05Marianna Spring:It's like almost two parallel realities that we inhabit a lot of the time. Yeah, it's an incredibly difficult story to talk about for a number of reasons. He's also someone who's highly controversial, who a lot of people had a lot of hatred towards. He had a lot of very extreme stances, including on abortion. He opposed exceptions for rape, even for children as young as 10. He promoted conspiracy theories about George Floyd. He condemned the Civil Rights Act. You know, he said a lot of very controversial things. So it's hard for people to think about what they should feel around his death. But then, of course, the way he exists online now is a mainly comical meme.

7:44Like it is a funny thing. And we've covered him in this show when we did the Agartha episode, which for those of you who haven't listened to it, it's a mythical realm underneath Antarctica where neo-Nazis...

7:53Marianna Spring:And Charlie Kirk's hanging out with a can of monster. Yeah, you've really got to listen to the episode. Long story short, it's a neo-Nazi mythical realm underneath Antarctica and it's ruled over by a reincarnated Charlie Kirk with blonde hair and blue eyes and you have to drink a monster energy drink to get in. But that's just one example of his meme-ification, right? Yeah, and if we start with the anniversary coming up. What up, my lovely females? Behind me is Charlie Kirk's house. Today is Charlie Kirk's birthday, and this is Kirkiversary. Merry Kirkmas Eve, everyone. Remember to leave out Starbucks mint tea and cookies for Santy Kirk.

8:28Come with me to surprise my girlfriend for the one-year Kirkiversary. Do we think with the Kirkiversary coming up that Charlie is down in hell, like, looking up at us, like, mad about all the memes? Like, I would love the attention. Hey, real question. Do we have enough water on Earth for the amount of videos and images that are going to be produced? Because let's be honest, it's going to be a lot. And I'm not sure we might survive that game. Happy Kirk Day to you. Happy Kirk Day to you.

9:01Marianna Spring:Basically, people are joking about celebrating it or saying things like, will you be my Kirk in time? Right. And you also have words like low-kir-kenually. Well, there's a whole language. There's a whole language. Low-kir-kenually, which is a portmanteau of low-key, genuinely, and Charlie Kirk. Everything is Kirkified. Like, I've been messaging quite a few of the accounts who are sharing this kind of content and will reveal a bit more later on in the episode about what they're saying. Like, one of them I messaged. The first thing they did, rather than reply to my questions, was just send me a Spanish meme of Charlie Kirk.

9:34Marianna Spring:It has the date in Spanish of when he was killed. and then it says año uno después de Kirk. So this idea of like post-Kirk. This was like the first message I got from someone. It like shows you the level of... People speak in Kirk. Yeah, it's like they're fluent in Kirk-a-lise. Yeah. Before Kirk, after Kirk, BK, AK. Which is how we're going to frame this episode because actually in order to understand what has happened AK after Kirk we do need to get into the not before Kirk but during Kirk and understand more about his death essentially. And like with his, I mean, you started to mention it there, but just for a kind of potted history for any top commenters who want a refresh about who Charlie Kirk was and why he was particularly notorious or famous in the online world.

10:19Marianna Spring:Let's do a quick sort of recap. So you mentioned some of his views before, Matt. He's best known for being the founder of Turning Point USA, right? And like a really prominent young political activist. Yeah. And what he did incredibly effectively was he understood social media. he understood the kind of clip that went viral. And he did these campus tours where he would go and he would debate liberal students. It often appeared that he was looking for the easiest target. If they had blue hair, big bonus. If they kind of looked very liberal, big bonus. If they were trans, big bonus. He would win the debate and then that would get clipped and shared so much across the internet.

10:59And so the Republican Party began to see him as a kind of youth whisperer. he was doing numbers online for them.

11:05Marianna Spring:And as we know, if you want to go viral, have an argument with someone. And that was his whole MO. But I guess the people who liked Charlie Kirk, some of whom disagreed with him politically, but what they liked about him was that they felt he tried to engage in a debate, even if they felt sometimes that was in bad faith. There are lots of young people who did debate him who since he's been killed have come out and sort of said, look, I actually really rated and liked that he was up for putting himself in situations where he would have arguments. And then when he's killed, so he's killed on this college campus while he's essentially engaging in one of these debates.

11:37Marianna Spring:And the clip, I'm sure lots of top commenters have seen it before. The clip is so graphic. Like you see him be shot. I mean, I remember getting a message from someone saying, Charlie Kirk's been killed. And I was like, what? And then I got the notification on my phone, but I went straight on X. And the first clip was just like a very graphic, him being shot in the neck. Yeah, his life was incredibly online. and his death was incredibly online. And it took his death, I think, for most older people to learn who he was, right? A lot of older people, a lot of adults didn't know there was, but their kids did because that's where he lived.

12:12He lived on their phones. And then the world began to notice. Then he became even more famous from his death.

12:17Marianna Spring:I just witnessed Charlie Kirk get assassinated. It was the most awful thing I've ever seen in my life. He shot him in the neck and blood went everywhere. Imagine being a 12-year-old. you know watching your dad fucking die i nobody deserves that not even charlie kirk and i think that the way that he was killed and the clues or evidence we have about the person who is accused of killing him help to explain why he has become such an absurd meme in his death because he was killed in such a graphic way that was so sort of like visceral and almost unbelievable right and And then there were all of the tweets in real time, like people saying, you know, kind of like I hear he's going to be OK.

13:01Marianna Spring:And then obviously he wasn't OK. Yes. So it's live streamed. It's captured on phones. You know, it's on campus at Utah Valley University while he's doing a debate, while he's talking about trans issues. And quite quickly, a battle began between the left who were trying to claim that the killer was a far right Groyper, a follower of Nick Fuentes, who for whatever reason had fallen out with Charlie Kirk. and on the right who tried to claim the killer as a kind of trans activist. At that point in time, no one knew who the killer was. We had no information. There were so many theories, so many conspiracy theories.

13:36But what was important was both sides had already claimed the killer for the other side.

13:41Marianna Spring:And I think what actually happened in the kind of sort of mini earthquake that occurred when he was killed was that people missed that a lot of younger people were just like, wow, this very, very online person who I kind of knew of or had popped up on my feed has died in this really graphic way. And I don't really know what to do with it. And one of the answers that's really stayed with me was one account called Tippity, who I spoke to. I asked, when did you start posting about Charlie Kirk? What triggered it? And in their answer, they said, him getting assassinated was a huge shock initially for me.

14:12Marianna Spring:And my first instinct when I'm in an emotional and a raw state like that is to tweet my raw, unfiltered thoughts online. Naturally, the day, no, the hour it happened, I immediately went into a flow state and just tweeted about it and him relentlessly. The footage that got posted online was so visceral and foul, I actually threw up in my mouth when I first watched it. It was horrific. I played it a few times and even still to this day, I find it really hard to look at if it's not edited to absurdity. I think that's a really important point. It's like the absurd edits almost came from the fact that the death was so sort of like shocking and violent.

14:45Marianna Spring:And then this person goes on to say, I think that's what made the posts as emotionally charged and reckless as they were. I was fueled by the morbidity of the entire situation. I'm not a moralist when it comes to this. I was a huge piece of shit that day. I felt less of a human and more like a vessel for Twitter bangers. Wow. So this person was kind of a conduit for all of the feelings that the internet had about Charlie Kirk's death. I mean, then we had a suspect, right? Tyler Robinson. And there was this whole story of the bullet casings, right? Which had these chronically online memes. So that was chewed over further by the internet.

15:19the left began to promote this i think we can call it a conspiracy theory that the fbi under the direction of cash patel who is a fan of charlie kirk had fabricated the conversations between tyler robinson and his trans roommate and it led to a whole trend of people on tiktok doing

15:38Marianna Spring:dramatic readings of because they were very like formally written quite bizarre it sounded formal and i guess because it is the loudest and craziest people that that post online but they were like oh of course the FBI fabricated this conversation. And the evidence for that is it doesn't sound like the way an older young person would speak. It's like, but this isn't a normal young person. This is a young person who killed someone. Yeah. As ever, there was kind of sleuth disease occurring. I think that had his death not been so visible in the way it was on X, none of what has happened subsequently, I don't think it would have happened in quite the same way.

16:11Marianna Spring:And obviously Twitter of old was not perfect. There were loads of criticisms about it, but this sort of content would have been probably labeled or removed or not promoted in the same way that it was on elon musk's ex where he's made various changes to policies staffing etc because he wants to champion freedom of expression but i think if it hadn't felt like you were living this assassination kind of in real time on your feed i don't think he would have become the absurd meme that he's become like say he for example died in a car crash and there'd not been any footage of it and we'd not really seen it or he'd been unwell i don't think he would have become this sort of cult figure on social media in the way he has.

16:53We've seen how his life was online, how his death was online. Next, his legacy and what it means for especially the right online is it began a new thing for the Republican Party and for the American right, which was that it started clamping down on free speech. So immediately you had people like Elon Musk. He said, you know, the left is the party of murder. A lot of people on the right, Trump, Vance, Pam Bondi began blaming people who said negative things about the right. They lumped this in with the assassination attempt against Trump. And they said the left discourse has become too volatile and dangerous and it's leading to people dying.

17:29And hundreds, over 600 people were punished or fired because of what they said about Charlie Kirk. So all of a sudden you see the right becoming this party of anti-free speech, of kind of policing people's language.

17:42Marianna Spring:And I think that the absurdity in some ways arose from that because it was almost taking the mick out of you're telling us that we can't have an opinion about an influencer who's been killed, whose views we may or may not have agreed with. So therefore, we are going to take it to the kind of next level of weirdness because you can't make us not post. It feels like that is partially why some of the people who knew Charlie Kirk existed before he was killed had engaged with this content and then saw this response from politicians or the media and were like, I want to sort of have a bit of fun here.

18:18And also, it wasn't just that clamping down on free speech and saying you can't say things like this about Charlie Kirk. It's that they also lionized him and essentially they turned him into a saint. He was given a military-style funeral, despite not being in the military. Kash Patel said his famous line, We have the watch, see you in Valhalla, right? They're asking us to all take this death seriously, to see this man as a saint. But they're asking the internet, and the internet is a place created for irony and jokes and memes. So this conflict between how we are meant to feel about Charlie Kirk as this saint, and we have to be very reverent and serious, and what the internet is, which is mainly a meme factory, led to him being one of the most meme people ever.

19:03And if you think about that Valhalla comment that Kash Patel said, you can trace a direct link from that to Charlie Kirk later becoming this Viking-like meme in the Agartha trend, which is still going to this day.

19:16Marianna Spring:It's worth saying that two things can be true here, which is a lot of these politicians knew Charlie Kirk personally. Remember, also, there'd been assassination attempts on Donald Trump's life. There was a level of kind of fear, understandable fear about assassinations, whether you like or dislike these politicians. That's kind of besides the point. But what actually I think happened and where you highlight that dissonance that existed between the social media world and then the sort of like mainstream political world. It backfired to say to people, you need to take this really seriously. Because actually, in some ways, that's probably not how Charlie Kirk himself would have necessarily even have responded to an event like that, because he was born of or courted that internet world.

19:54Marianna Spring:And the way that, for example, his widow has, you know, she's become so memed herself. A lot of that is because of the way that the funeral and the various kind of rallies or events played out afterwards. But the way I think that the political establishment responded to his killing actually then further exacerbated and worsened the meme experience. Because then everyone was like, let's now take the mick out of Erica Kirk. But the let's treat Charlie Kirk as a saint thing reached absurd levels when Erica Kirk began claiming that like when he went on a jog, the streetlights would flicker on and off.

20:33Right. As though he is some kind of like Japanese RPG super saiyan that can control the electrical field around him. People began to like turn him into a saint, a wizard, like a magical figure. And it just made it more memeable for the left. And I think one of the things that can only be learned in his death is, yes, he was incredibly successful at courting online controversy and online attention. But the thing about the internet is it moves on very quickly. And that online legacy that he was creating for himself turned out to be quite ephemeral because Turning Point isn't still doing the numbers it was.