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Charlie Kirk spent most of his adult life feeding the internet pieces of himself.
He recorded thousands upon thousands of hours of his voice and his facial expressions, not to mention his political beliefs and arguments. He was a podcaster, and he traveled to colleges across the United States, recorded by the country's youth.
"Young people were very familiar with Kirk already due to his presence and clips on places like TikTok," said Don Caldwell, editor in chief of internet history database Know Your Meme. "Kirk was an enormous figure prior to the assassination."
His sudden and gruesome killing at age 31 as he spoke at Utah Valley University was broadcast to untold millions of people. A year later, Kirk's face has been grafted onto rappers, athletes, superheroes and cartoon characters. Online, he sings and dances and makes incoherent moans and yelps as he shifts bodies across race, gender and age.
People call it "Kirkification," the seemingly inexhaustible meme format that almost immediately followed Kirk's killing on Sept. 10 last year. One could interpret Kirkification as a form of endless afterlife, shattering Kirk's essence across infinitely rearrangeable pieces and condemning him to perform anything everywhere all the time. He died, but the machines absorbed and remembered everything about him.
The borders of his AI-generated faces quiver across social platforms, grotesque revenants representing the bargain we never knew we made as we post pieces of ourselves online, feeding machines we do not control, never knowing what they might eventually do with us.
His surname mutated into other forms of words, such as adjectives and verbs. The word "lowkirkuinely" is a mash-up of low-key, Kirk and genuinely, with his surname jammed into the middle of a word for emphasis like an expletive, akin to abso-freaking-lutely.
This linguistic evolution began as mockery but quickly destabilized into a meme stripped of meaning.
It is tempting to dismiss Kirkification as internet humor absurd for its own sake, which has existed since online cultures formed. But that nihilism is a consequence of how politicians, institutions, activists and media organizations competed to define what he represented and how his death should be understood. Kirkification offers no coherent alternative, instead allowing anyone to take his image and refuse to give it any meaning.
That vacuum gives the meme its power. Kirk can be a hero, villain or punch line. People making these posts do not have to offer a competing argument. The expression can just be a rejection of anyone else's version of him. It extended to his wife, Erika Kirk, too, whose grief was mocked and scrutinized across the internet.
Turning Point USA, Kirk's political organization, did not respond to The Washington Post's request for comment. In the past, Turning Point has condemned a TikTok trend that used audio of his killing for fashion videos.
Caldwell said the intensity surrounding Kirk's death helped give the meme its early momentum. His supporters elevated him as a martyr, and anyone who joked or expressed apathy faced outrage and, in some cases, professional consequences. The more Kirk was treated as a sacred cow, Caldwell said, the more the internet was compelled to turn him into a posthumous lolcow, slang for a public figure who is humiliated online for entertainment.
"When something is ... treated as sacred and people are told you're not allowed to meme something, people are going to do it even harder," said Caldwell, a longtime journalist who has worked at New York-based Know Your Meme for 16 years.
Unlike many internet jokes, which can run dry after even a day or so, Kirkification remains strong to this day, with X users anticipating new memes one year after his killing.
But who is doing the Kirkifying can sometimes be tough to sort out.
Days after his death, a production company that creates patriotic and Christian music published "We Are Charlie Kirk," an AI-generated song that had 750,000 views on YouTube by December last year. The song now has 6.7 million views and has been streamed on Spotify more than 12 million times.
Many of those listeners are not mourning Kirk, as the song has been appropriated as a joke by people who oppose his politics. Political pundit Hasan Piker, who knew Kirk and was scheduled to debate him before the killing, has sung it repeatedly on his Twitch streams and recently led a live audience in a sing-along.
"These things happen quickly, when political opponents try to take the wind out of the sails of a meme by adopting it," Caldwell said.
Authorship and worldview collapse under Kirkification. It can be mockery, celebration, irony, lament or nothing at all. Generative AI made doing it even easier; no photo or video editing proficiency required.
"Now you're able to put Kirk on anything," Caldwell said.
Then something else started to happen: It felt as though we were seeing Kirk everywhere. Viewers of the horror movie "Obsession" remarked that actor Michael Johnston kind of looks like Kirk. Weeks after his death, images and videos of random men started to go viral for their supposed resemblance to Kirk.
People began posting images with variations of the same question: Am I going crazy, or does this look like Kirk? Like Jesus on a piece of toast, Kirk's face seemed to appear in places that were not actually manipulated, or his face had been manipulated so much that it seemed to be imprinted everywhere.
And that actually makes a lot of sense, says Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University at Albany who studies visual perception and face pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces where they do not exist.
"Vision is actually a constructive process. People think of it as opening your eyes and seeing what's there, and it's not quite like that," she said. "Our brain is constructing a pretty good approximation of what's there, but it's having to do a lot of computational work behind the scenes because the information the eye receives is these patterns of light which are changing constantly."
That construction is also influenced by attention and context. Wardle compared it to learning the definition of a new word, then suddenly feeling as though you hear it all the time.
"It's this attentional lens we have; it's how our brain deals with having too much input to process," she said.
People see faces in clouds, trees or fruit, Wardle said, because humans are social animals. Our brains prioritize faces because they carry information important to our behavior - and sometimes tolerate false positives.
"Humans and other primates do see these illusory faces. Faces are really important to us and we have to filter all this visual information, so we're hypersensitized to faces," Wardle said.
Our brains have a natural familiarity with faces we've seen in real life, in real lighting, versus in two-dimensional photographs. Wardle pointed to a 2011 experiment that demonstrated how much that distinction matters. Researchers gathered 40 photos of two men, varied naturally with different expressions, angles and lighting.
They gave the pictures to people who did not know either of the two, and participants guessed there were about seven to 10 different people. When researchers gave the pictures to people who did know the two men, they were almost completely accurate in identifying them.
That familiarity allows the brain to learn the range of appearances one face can have. Kirkification presents a bizarre, macro version of this exercise. For millions of people, Kirk's face was only encountered through a screen, and now artificial versions of his face stretch across people who look nothing like him, causing some people's brains to play tricks.
Wardle doesn't believe AI has changed how the human brain sees. Yet Kirkification instead feeds the tendency to find patterns in an overwhelming amount of visual information, particularly patterns that become important.
"It's to do with the vision being constructive and vision being a filtering of things that are important to us," Wardle said. "And right now, Charlie Kirk's face is important to a lot of people."
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