For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.
A few months ago, the pro-Iran group Akhbar Enfejari (Explosive News) was just another unknown YouTube channel, a hapless content farm posting memes to an audience of hundreds. But after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, setting off a regional conflict, the group’s overtly propagandistic Lego-themed videos began racking up millions of views. It’s not hard to see why: their messaging is straightforward—U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bad; their wars are misguided—and the A.I.-generated animations tend to dramatize violent, salacious scenes soundtracked by bot-made rap music. It’s slop in every sense of the word—a copy of a copy of a digital artifact designed to push a particular political agenda without the substance or depth to flesh out its purportedly radical messaging.
In a recent piece on the rise of “slopaganda,” the Times argued that the Trump Administration itself may have kicked off the meme war, creating a template for the kind of pro-Iran content we’re seeing now. After attacking Iran, the White House—which has been circulating trollish political content online since Trump returned to office—began posting videos on TikTok and X that mix, say, bombing footage with clips from “Iron Man” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” But the most popular Iranian memes have been the Lego-styled brain-rot videos, which, in the past year, evolved as a sort of pro-forma shitpost on social media. A potential precursor to the genre’s popularity was when Charlie Kirk-themed Lego videos began emerging on TikTok, at the end of 2025—clips that re-created his assassination with either real Legos or via A.I. prompt. It is one of the many meme formats that fall under the category of “Kirkslop,” a species of content that has spread rapidly through the internet and become a blueprint for how to simultaneously engage and enrage audiences.
Charlie Kirk took off as a meme shortly after he was killed, last September, during a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University. Thousands of people witnessed the murder live; millions more watched footage of it on social media. It was a shocking, gruesome killing of an activist and influencer that seemed to demonstrate just how perilous our political boundary lines had become. Trump and the MAGAsphere were quick to anoint Kirk as a martyr and a “great American hero,” and threatened to go after anyone who might complicate this narrative. Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was temporarily pulled from the air after he said that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize” Kirk’s alleged assassin, the twentysomething Tyler Robinson, “as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Ordinary people, too, faced professional consequences for their rhetoric about Kirk. Educators were fired for making insensitive comments about him on their personal social-media accounts; a firefighter in Toledo lost his job for posting a derisive eulogy on Facebook; various airline employees were suspended for disparaging Kirk online. Any criticism of the conservative commentator’s life and politics, it appeared, was grounds for state or private retaliation.
Many people on the internet did not take kindly to such a puritanical crackdown on free speech. In the wake of Kirk’s murder, and the high-profile punishments incurred by those who weren’t properly remorseful, Kirk morphed into one of the most widespread memes in recent memory. A.I.-generated videos and images, many of which have millions of likes and views, reimagined the late right-wing activist as any number of characters, face-swapping him onto Ice Spice, Hitler, Taylor Swift, Bart Simpson, the Rizzler, Shaquille O’Neal, the Silver Surfer, a random e-girl, Drake, the Joker—whomever, really. In the world of Kirkslop, there are no limits, or logic, to whom Kirk can or cannot be. (There’s even a theme song: “We Are Charlie Kirk,” an A.I.-generated gospel-trap hymn that topped Spotify’s viral chart after being ruthlessly parodied across TikTok and Instagram.) A few months into the trend, a new vocabulary developed alongside it, one that fused preëxisting terms with Kirk’s name, despite having no definitional meaning: “lowkirkentologicalowstate” or “lowkirkenuinely,” for instance, combine random, algorithmically prevalent words—“low-key,” “ontological,” “flow state,” “genuinely,” and, of course, “Kirk”—to create inside jokes for those familiar with the references. “They’re not really trying to mean anything,” Don Caldwell, the editor-in-chief of the website Know Your Meme, told me. “To get the joke, you have to know the memes around it.”
What is it that makes Kirk so easily memeable? Even before his death, he was a prime target for online derision, with pictures of his gummy smile posted to social media whenever users felt the occasion to neg him. Kirk invited this type of algorithmic attention, and his career benefitted greatly from the new crop of acolytes and enemies he attracted every time he published a fresh piece of content. He was a master of saturating the internet with himself, whether that be via his daily three-hour digital broadcast, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” or through the barrage of debate clips he posted to TikTok that trumpeted his verbal dominance over underprepared college kids. Fittingly, Kirk hosted the inaugural episode of “Surrounded,” the YouTube debate series designed to produce viral and controversial moments. (With more than forty million views, his video remains the most-watched in the series.) No matter the outlet, Kirk delighted in expressing his aggressive ideological positions and promoting misinformation. He said that if he saw a Black pilot, “I’m gonna be, like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ ” He called transgender identity a “social contagion.” He spread conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election results. He claimed that immigrants were “trying to replace us demographically. They’re trying to make the country less white.” In a clip that circulated widely after his death, he suggested that some gun deaths were “worth it” if they guaranteed the protection of the Second Amendment. Kirk understood what it took to become the main character on the internet—he played the troll, the scholar, the shitposter, the debater, the mensch, the huckster, the newscaster, the renegade, the traditionalist, the savior. This malleability made him one of the most influential and powerful voices in right-wing politics.
Even after his death, this malleability lives on in clips of Kirk commenting on current events. Most recently, montages of Kirk describing why it “would be a profound mistake for our country” to go to war with Iran have gone viral, alongside contradictory clips of him stating that “if you are serious about actually protecting human rights, you should want to make Iran Western again.” “What would Charlie Kirk think?” has become fodder for cable-news debates, segments that center on a late pundit’s hypothetical position on a geopolitical crisis. This pliable guise is partially what makes his persona such a durable meme. Caldwell explained that while “Kirkified” content may have initially represented an oppositional political agenda, it eventually outgrew any obvious ideological direction. “The types of people making Kirk edits weren’t always just people left of center or into left-wing politics,” he said. “A lot of the edits and Kirkified memes are really just goofy and bizarre.”
Yvette Granata, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in media art and digital studies, theorized that this goofiness was like “playing fiddle while the Titanic sinks.” “We’re talking about an actual assassination,” she told me. “It’s not satire because it’s past the point where it can be satire. . . . It’s metabolizing the situation into dark comedy.” In one popular A.I. edit, a Kirkified Captain America confronts Iron Man, overlaid with Jeffrey Epstein’s face, who tells Kirk that “everything special about you came out of a meme.” Although it’s often inadvisable to overintellectualize A.I. slop, Kirk’s pairing with Epstein here proves instructive. Both obviously occupy charged spaces in the current cultural imagination, and by caricaturizing them in a brain-rot edit, they are transformed into absurdist avatars whose complexities are flattened into a winking shrug: Isn’t it weird how much everyone cares about these guys?
Still, even as the memes become borderline unintelligible, Kirkslop contains an air of transgression that imbues the otherwise inane edits and images with perverse political undercurrents. After his assassination, as conservatives attempted to silence criticisms of Kirk, it became clear that parodying a victim of political violence was about as edgy and high-stakes as a meme could get. “People are always looking for the edge,” Granata said, “and so the edge keeps getting pushed.” Now the edge is getting pushed yet again, as the culture transitions from the memeification of one man’s death to delighting in the real-time memes of wars. Kirkification began as a process of nihilistic disenchantment: churning out content that captures the confusion and cynicism of a generation trying to make sense of, and detach from, the brutal realities of contemporary political life. Today, the same tools are being used by state actors for geopolitical propaganda. Maybe more than his mobilization of young conservatives or countrywide campus-speaking tours, this is how Kirk will be remembered: as a meme so moldable it can fit any agenda, all the time. ♦