The Kirkification of Our Troubled Times

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 puritanical belt-tightening. 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.”