[Essay]

We Carry the Flame

You can hear it in the viral and almost certainly AI generated refrain: “We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”

That bit of digital slop has never proved more true than over the past week when our total Kirkification was on display in the beating heart of the American empire. 

For a brief moment this week, New York City’s Times Square played host to a misshapen monument to Charlie Kirk. The statue was part of a half-baked plan to raise a million-dollar sum that was cooked up by Sergio Furnari, an eccentric artist and self-described scientist. The statue’s unveiling was a gaudy display of scams, attention seeking, and hatred that was truly in keeping with Kirk’s real legacy. 

And, when I sought out the spectacle, it was clear the grift and grotesqueries were not confined to the makeshift memorial. 

Thursday marked one year since Kirk was shot while doing the thing that made him famous: Trying to draw college students into the far-right culture war. Kirk was a walking internet comments section who became rich and loud thanks to a dark money war chest. Among other things, Kirk pulled in clicks and dollars by staging live versions of the angry, misinformed, and pithy sparring that has defined our digital discourse. He was arguably shot down by the very forces he riled up: his alleged shooter was an extremist with apparent left-wing leanings who was enraged by Kirk’s trolling and took the fury offline with scrawled references to memes on the bullets. 

Since that moment, President Donald Trump and others on the right have tried to use the awful circumstances of Kirk’s death to turn him into a martyr and talismanic proof their movement, which has taken over national politics for the better part of a decade, is somehow entitled to victimhood. As we have already chronicled in this newsletter, the disingenuous veneration of Kirk has spawned a wave of AI slop souvenirs and songs. It also inspired a purge in which dozens of people who dared to point out that Kirk was a hatemonger who almost certainly encouraged violence were doxxed and fired from their jobs. 

Online, young people have responded to the awkwardly forced (and painfully enforced) efforts to sanctify Kirk by turning him into something else: a meme. They’ve made their own avalanche of AI slop with bizarre caricatures, inserting exaggerated versions of Kirk and his prodigious forehead into other scenarios and celebrity bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed “Kirkification.”

Sergio Furnari’s sculpture reveal in Times Square was ostensibly a more earnest tribute to the slain right wing activist. It proved no less absurd. 

Furnari calls himself a “master in sculpture and painting.” Based on his website, his signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools. Furnari also has some kind of vision to help Elon Musk get us to Mars based on his supposed expertise as a “scientist of thermal tile surfacing.”

Furnari’s Times Square event was apparently part of a broader effort to bring in cash. According to an online fundraising page, Furnari hopes to raise $1 million to erect a “colossal monument” to Kirk. 

“Sadly none of the politicians/entrepreneurs/supporters have contacted him,” the page says. “Sergio has sold his own apartment to fund this project.”

Faced with these issues, Furnari seems to have downsized. His fundraiser has currently set a more modest $150,000 goal and the statue, that he showed off in Times Square on the anniversary of Kirk’s death is a smaller version of his dream Kirklossus. 

That prototype features Kirk sitting at his debate table as he was in the moments before his death. While the setting is clear, the attempted likeness evokes the warped memes of Kirk’s face more than it does the man himself. As of this writing, the distorted Kirk and its associated fundraiser have only raised $12,950.

At the event, Furnari was joined by Jake Lang, a far right influencer, Jan. 6er and erstwhile Republican candidate with a fondness for giving Sieg Heil salutes who has spent the past couple years staging theatrical demonstrations targeting Muslims and Jews. Based on his own social media, Lang and the band of “crusaders” at Furnari’s Kirk event were in the Big Apple for a Sept. 11 march to “stop Zohran Mamdani from going to Ground Zero.”

Lang provided a vivid example of the types of people who see Kirk as a fellow traveler and icon for their cause. He also showed how much Kirk and the supposedly more respectable, official side of MAGA share an agenda with extremists. The blatantly Islamophobic push to exclude Mamdani from the annual commemoration 9/11 Memorial was also amplified by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump associate, and a slew of MAGA media outlets.

TPM’s invitation to the event was lost in the mail. I tried calling Furnari a few times right after the event as clips were spreading online. It didn’t exactly yield a coherent conversation. First, he told me the statue was in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to Times Square. I rushed there to see the Kirk for myself. Upon arrival, I called Furnari again. He couldn’t tell me where he was but promised to share his location. About a half hour later, he called back and said he didn’t know where he was. 

At that point, I gave up. 

During that fruitless wander through midtown Manhattan, the streets were filled with shoddy AI merch. Walking through the Diamond District, I overheard dubious entrepreneurs taping podcasts. As I passed through the center of Times Square, it was clogged with passersby taking pictures of themselves. Vendors hawked more elaborate photo opportunities with vintage cameras and polaroids. Dingy costumed characters including superheroes and at least one Labubu ambled around offering to join the shots for a price. 

Everyone wants to be part of the feed. America’s heroes have been reduced to shoddy renditions of themselves. Our world has been Kirkified. 

Like it or not, now, we are all Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. And everything is on fire.