Deepfake 'Kirkification' memes are running rampant on social media

Charlie Kirk's image has begun appearing across a wide range of internet memes

Photoshopped and deepfaked clips of the recently killed conservative media influencer have flooded social media, his face pasted onto some of the internet's most recognizable memes. It's as if the web collectively decided to resurrect him through morbid irony.

According to Know Your Meme, the first major instance appeared Sept. 23 on X — just two weeks after Kirk’s death — when a user swapped his face with streamer iShowSpeed's in a clip of Speed trying not to laugh. The post racked up more than 96,000 likes and spawned dozens of viral quote-tweets.

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But things really snowballed in late October. One TikTok montage stitched together obscure reaction memes — all with Kirk’s face edited on — captioned, "RIP Kirk, your sacrifice meant something."

That post alone garnered over 65,000 likes, and many others have achieved similar numbers.

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Why this happened is harder to pin down. The simplest answer: This is what the internet does. Meme culture often thrives on transgression, and nothing spreads faster than a joke that crosses a line — especially when it involves someone like Kirk, whose death has been mythologized in right-wing media for weeks.

Folks online have joked about and memeified the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and George Floyd's murder. To the internet, Charlie Kirk is simply the latest entry in that long, dark tradition.