A year ago, Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University while holding a debate event for his non-profit Turning Point USA. In life, Kirk built the bulk of his notoriety through quippy online debate clips from identical events, so it was no surprise that video footage of his demise was disseminated with a similar, inflammatory force. Short clips depicted the moment of impact to the frantic evacuation in fragmented, varied angles, flooding social media feeds with unrestrained digital bloodshed. When traditional news caught up to the frenzied online investigation, and it was clear that Kirk was not stable but dead, it seemed for a moment that the apoplectic battle cries from the far right would have true political consequences. According to MAGA, Kirk’s martyrdom would surely ignite a fiery revenge tour. When U.S. Vice President JD Vance took his late friend’s place to host The Charlie Kirk Show, he stressed that Kirk’s death was emblematic of the irreconcilable divide between the right and left. He affirmed that compromise was not possible and that criticisms of Kirk’s legacy were in violent taste, worthy of job termination. In death, Kirk would be honoured and avenged.
But a year later, it doesn’t matter, and no one cares. Turning Point USA continues to operate as usual, albeit hollowed without its mastermind, and while some unlucky people got fired in the immediate aftermath, criticism towards Charlie Kirk is no longer huffed at but rather shrugged off. His death provided a brief moment of sincere panic, but as all sensational events online do, it settled into a cool indifference. While this sudden apathy could be partly attributed to our poor attention spans, I would argue that it is primarily a symptom of the internet’s indelible impulse to render the serious ironic.
To the left, the irony in his death immediately resonated. He was shot and killed while discussing gun violence, and that cosmic coincidence provided a large dose of schadenfreude and plenty of cheap jokes. But the laughter wasn’t contained to the left: even a bulk of the right disavowed Kirk as embarrassingly mainstream. While Kirk himself was more a political agitator than a sincere debater, his temperate, uninquisitive support of Trump became swiftly out of date to right wingers interested in a more vulgar, radical form of online political consumption. The abhorrently racist Nick Fuentes, for example, at least has a sense of humour and some establishment critiques. Also easily mockable was the Trump Administration’s eager co-optation of Kirk’s murder (and funeral). The pyrotechnics and hysterical bereavement immediately registered as mawkish and over-the-top and became an easy target for lampooning.
This ironic detachment from the left and Trump-sceptic right transformed into something decidedly apolitical. When the AI-generated song “We Carry The Flame” went viral, MAGA supporters and Turning Point devotees must have realised that their treacly sincerity was inevitably something for everyone to point and laugh at. Then came the Kirkifications, giving the song’s chorus “We are Charlie Kirk” a more literal meaning by superimposing Kirk’s face onto just about any other face on social media. This meme remains prolific, and it transformed Kirk’s death from a critical vacancy for the right into endless meme-able material. Kirk’s legacy thus exists shrouded in layers of ironic detachment, signifying nothing. It’s a flatulent punchline.
Even Kirk’s murder itself was an elaborate troll. While the motives of the alleged shooter Tyler Robinson remain contested, the agitator was clearly shaped by the same detached, edgy online humour fuelling Kirk’s subsequent memeing. Authorities discovered multiple bullet casings with engraved messages, and the fatal bullet was allegedly etched with the phrase “notices, bulges, OwO, what’s this?” It’s a reference to roleplay in the furry community, and needless to say, extremely online. Not even the shooter could take Kirk’s life in earnest.
But the fact that our modern media environment can generate such cynicism as to assassinate a social media influencer as if he were a Kennedy and immortalise him as a digital fart joke proves that it suffers from a poisonous taste for irony. But why can’t we take media—and by extension politics—seriously?
It’s obvious to the politically conscious and the chronically online alike that this comparison between modern media and politics is not frivolous. Ever since a sweaty Nixon shrank in comparison to the handsome John F. Kennedy on television in the 1960 United States Presidential debate, our culture understands that we buy into (and vote for) what entrances us. In modern media, the ironic is what’s hypnotic, and one personality understands this best. A former reality TV star himself, Donald Trump has mastered the art of ironic posting. His internet presence — once a prolific tweeter before moving to his own social media, Truth Social — is full of absurd contrasts. He’s the president of the United States, yet he’s abandoned the respectability required of him in the media. He’s both deeply unserious and a credible threat. His erratic tweeting habits generate meaningless memes like “covfefe”, but they also played a large role in inciting the January 6th insurrection on the United States Capitol. In the case of the Iran War, his ambiguous, sarcastic posting habits border on nonsensical. They leave us in a state of confusion, relying on memes or AI-generated videos as official White House communication, while Iranians face real instability and danger. It’s inflammatory, ridiculous, and highly ironic, and we can’t look away.
While it’s fun to laugh at the hopeless, meaningless state of politics, this infectious attitude poses real danger. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram”, writer and champion of the New Sincerity Movement David Foster Wallace declared that while irony is wildly entertaining and effective, it is also an agent of “stasis” and “despair”. Wallace relates this phenomenon to television, but the problem is only exacerbated by short-form content on a smaller screen. In an increasingly nonsensical political landscape, the easiest imagined solution to the gap between reality and expectation is to mock that irreconcilable chasm. But irony fails as an effective defence because it is ultimately a resignation.
Political irony and the apathy it inspires is a form of nihilism. It promotes the belief that because the world is on a doomed trajectory, and politics spiral down towards entropy, then the only thing left to do is shrug knowingly and laugh it off. But there is hope in sincerity, no matter how uncool it feels to verbalise. This sincerity doesn’t require stone-faced seriousness when Charlie Kirk’s face is inevitably superimposed onto the newest internet meme, but it does require your thoughtfulness. We should recognise that apathy eliminates consequence, and while the death of a political influencer is not grounds for revolution, our reaction to it should inspire an internet-wide wake up call: It’s time we take irony a little more seriously.
