Republicans have spent a lot of energy making sure you remember Charlie Kirk.
After the conservative influencer was shot and killed in September, his funeral was televised live from Arizona’s State Farm Stadium. Flags flew at half-staff in red states across the country. President Donald Trump declared Oct. 14, 2025 — Kirk’s birthday — an official National Day of Remembrance. Fox News awarded Kirk’s wife, Erika, with the first “Charlie Kirk Legacy Award.” And, online, there has been a never-ending stream of posts venerating Kirk as a martyr who died defending white Christian values. To say nothing of the hundreds of people who lost their jobs after the right-wing mob doxxed them over critical posts about Kirk.
So it is somewhat notable that in the past few weeks, Kirk’s face has begun appearing all over the web, not as respectful tributes, but as tasteless photoshops and deepfakes. Kirk’s face has been super-imposed on Japanese porn stars, Na’avi from Avatar, popular memes like the viral image of Elvis Presley being operated on by aliens, and even FBI Director Kash Patel.
During normal times — and with a normal conservative movement, if you can still remember what those are like — trashy memes probably wouldn’t matter all that much. But the American right has spent years turning X.com, the site we used to call Twitter, into their main social network. What was once a hub for journalists, artists, celebrities, and, yes, anarchic shitposters has become the front lines in the decline of democracy. Where the official account for the White House gleefully posts AI-generated images of migrants being shackled and the official account for Homeland Security posts fake Pokémon cards of alleged sexual predators arrested by ICE. And, as their vast troll army will tell you, if you can’t handle it, go to Bluesky.
But the Kirk memes might be evidence that things are shifting. Within that shitposting, amid the “lol nothing matters” slide into authoritarianism, you can see hints of a schism. No matter how much Republicans flirt with the idea of a third Trump term, he is still pushing 80 and the movement will soon need a new cult of personality to hold it together. Kirk was, in many ways, meant to be that personality: A reality TV president replaced by an influencer. And poking fun at him — especially after his assassination — is a line even the White House cannot cross. But on X, and across the internet, a faction of burn-it-all-down, far-right extremists is competing to take the heart of the party. And though the memes may be more of a symptom than a cause, it seems to show that Kirk’s death is opening the door for one political pundit in particular to sneak his way back into relevance: the Holocaust-denying, white nationalism-embracing, and increasingly popular livestreamer Nick Fuentes.
The most common mistake liberals make when dealing with the modern American far right is assuming they’re a monolith. A top level glance at X.com, for example, gives the impression of a vast and decentralized network of influencers, trolls, and actual Trump-appointed government officials working in lockstep to intimidate enemies, swarm trending topics, and wage a constant culture war, raging over immigrants, Cracker Barrel, Sydney Sweeney’s jeans, and random women they find on TikTok.
But up close, the movement is actually made up of different factions vying for both attention and ideological supremacy. Mapping out these factions is complicated, but there is a hierarchy to it all. You have your standard Trumpists, your reactionary Silicon Valley CEOs, your anarchic white nationalists with their anime profile pictures, your podcasting muscle men, and the list only gets more niche the further down you go.
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It’s a fragile alliance, says Melissa Ryan, disinformation researcher and author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete newsletter. “Trump’s superpower has always been his ability to keep this coalition constantly at war with itself together,” Ryan tells Rolling Stone. Trump can be seen as a bastion of free trade for the Silicon Valley capitalists, a beacon of white Christian America to the heartland Evangelicals, and a fascist demagogue to the blood and soil nationalists.
Ryan believes that canonizing Kirk as the patron saint of MAGA may have backfired in a subtle but important way. “It’s hard to believe the White House has a line of anything that is totally unacceptable,” Ryan says. “But given how many in the current administration were personally close with Kirk and how his death impacted them, this does seem like a line they wouldn’t cross.”
So far, not one prominent right-wing figure has commented on the huge influx of Kirk memes online — notable for an administration as online as the current one, nakedly desperate to turn every new viral trend into propaganda. But acknowledging, or god forbid, scolding the internet for laughing at Kirk would only give it all more power. And this has turned into a game of trying to trigger Trump supporters just as easily as you can trigger the libs. A game Fuentes and his followers are eager to exploit, mixing in with everyone else testing the new boundaries of taste. A perfect way to make the MAGA movement look old and out of touch and, worst of all, like they have standards.
During his life, Fuentes used Kirk as a stand-in for what he saw as the more moderate MAGA movement. In recent years, he would send his followers — who call themselves “groypers,” named after an obese Pepe the Frog meme — to heckle and disrupt Kirk’s live events. Fuentes’ fans hated Kirk so much that, briefly after Kirk’s murder, it was assumed his killer was a groyper themself.
The president himself has kept Fuentes at a distance but never outright rejected him. “Trump has always been careful not to alienate Fuentes or his supporters completely,” says Ryan. “From refusing to denounce Tucker Carlson for interviewing him [a couple of weeks ago], to having dinner with Fuentes three years ago.”
But as The Washington Post reported this month, Fuentes is still deeply hated even among the conservatives in the White House — even if his mask-off antisemitism, open hatred of Israel, anti-war isolationism, and complete and total embrace of race-to-the-bottom meme warfare have made him exciting to a very specific kind of young conservative.
“Hardcore young people on the right often hold antagonistic attitudes toward mainstream Republicans,” Jared Holt, a senior researcher for extremism watchdog Open Measures, tells Rolling Stone. “They may support Trump, but in recent years have grown fairly resentful and disillusioned that he will deliver the right-wing fever dream they often fantasize about.”
When it comes to Fuentes, much like with Trump, being a fan doesn’t mean you believe or even pay attention to everything he says. Conservative writer Rod Dreher recently published a piece on the great groyper schism currently dividing the MAGA coalition, writing that though “30 to 40 percent” of young conservative staffers like him, they don’t blindly agree with his politics. “Not every D.C. Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it,” he wrote. “What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.’”
And so while the Charlie Kirk memes flying around the web right now might not be coming directly from groypers — Holt says it would be a stretch to pin them on any specific political subgroup — it does reflect a huge cultural victory for them.
“The Trump administration has grossly over-indexed on social media chatter as a barometer for public opinion,” Holt says. “Social media incentivizes outrage and tribalism, and it’s naive to think anyone can shepherd it for prolonged periods. The administration has lost control of the conversation, even within their own base, and any efforts to reassert their grip on it is bound to backfire.”
As much as Fuentes has been a wedge issue for the Trump administration over the years, he’s also been the figure who has come the closest to filling the void now left behind by Kirk — and the memes seem to be telling that story.
Aside from Kirk, we’ve seen an even greater instance of meme warfare backfiring this month, with the arrival of memes depicting Trump giving oral sex to former President Bill Clinton. The meme, which flooded every corner of the internet after the emails were released, is based off a newly released 2018 email chain between Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark, claiming that there are pictures of Trump performing sex acts on someone they call “Bubba,” a nickname often used within Epstein’s inner circle to refer to Clinton. Mark Epstein has denied that “Bubba” is Clinton, and it’s unclear exactly how serious the initial email was meant to be read. Nevertheless, memes spread across the web and were, like the Kirk images, another piece of internet culture the MAGA meme machine could not embrace, co-opt, or even subtly dogwhistle. Which, once again, is a problem if you’ve spent years rebranding conservatism as the “new punk rock,” to quote Info Wars contributor Paul Joseph Watson.
“I think a lot of these people are realizing that Trump is on the way out,” right-wing researcher and journalist Mike Rothschild tells Rolling Stone. “I think they’re realizing that the clock is really starting to tick on Trump, and somebody’s got to take control of this movement.”
And the first step toward taking control of the movement happens online and is best observed by the memes they are and aren’t sharing. None of the major MAGA influencers have even mentioned the viral rumor about Trump and Bubba. But Fuentes was quick to address it on a recent livestream, laughing about it and telling his audience, “I don’t think that’s real. It is funny though.”
It’s a powerful signifier to angry young conservatives that the MAGA world now has standards and allegiances and Fuentes does not. MAGA doesn’t seem like much of an outsider movement once there’s someone defining themselves as outside of it. Rothschild explains that Fuentes used to be a pretty mockable figure, even among the right, but he’s become much more popular because he’s found a space beyond MAGA he can easily attack them from.
“Content only gets attention if it’s totally over the top and ridiculously insane,” Rothschild says. “And so I think we are kind of racing each other to sort of weaponize this kind of crudeness for our own political aspirations.”
And the only way to win that race is by leaning into whatever comes across our screens, no matter who is offended by it. Even if it’s your fellow conservatives. And this race to the bottom really only leads one direction: to a Republican party swallowed up by a wing that is even more fringe, and even more extreme, hateful, and nihilistic. And the question, at least for normal voters, is exactly how far right can the Republicans get before the average person is repulsed by them, just as they would any other offensive meme on their feed?
From Rolling Stone US
