Taylor Lorenz’s Power User17 Dec 2025

How Charlie Kirk Memes Are Radicalizing Gen Z w/ Ryan Broderick

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After Charlie Kirk was killed in front of a crowd of students in Utah, right wing influencers and pundits claimed that his killing would result in millions of Charlie Kirks. Almost immediately, mini me Charlie Kirk clones began cropping up, and far right Gen Z influencers began attempting to mimic Charlie's viral debate formats.

But pretty soon, things went off the rails. Hardly a month after Charlie died, his widow Erika Kirk was pictured giving an awkwardly close embrace to JD Vance in skin tight pleather pants. Donld Trump all but forgot Charlie existed, and very quickly, Charlie became a meme.

Ryan Broderick is an online culture journalist and he's been covering The Great Kirkification. He joined me to talk about the rise of Charlie Kirk slop and what it's morphing into. Because as fun as it is to laugh at absurd memes featuring Charlie Kirk's face plastered into some mpreg emoji, the whole thing has taken a sharp turn lately and is now funneling a lot of people right back into the far right.

We dig into this new hyper online esoteric form of Naziism, explain the lore behind the mythical city of Agartha, and explain what all of this says about the current state of the internet, politics, and culture.

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