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.
Making the Falklands Great Again
Argentina’s wild-haired “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, has in recent months been getting a lot of help from Donald Trump. His effort to conduct a full overhaul of his country’s government and economy — think DOGE, but ongoing for years, not months — has hit some rough patches. His current approval ratings are similar to, but not quite as bad as, Trump’s. Perhaps their experiences of governance have prompted some fellow feelings between the two men, with Trump doing Milei such favors as importing tons of Argentinian beef, pissing off American cattle farmers in the process.
They’ve also decided to restart the Falklands War. I’m joking — or, rather, they’re joking … but also maybe not.
The Falklands War began in 1982 when Argentina, then under a military dictatorship, invaded the Falklands, an archipelago in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and 750 miles north of Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of the UK since the mid-1800s. The war ended after 74 days in a humiliating defeat for the Argentines, a key factor in the collapse of its autocratic government and the return of democracy to the country.
Now, Milei, whose administration has winked and nodded in various ways to last century’s junta, is stirring the pot again. The islands are ”Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said last week. His government then barred oil companies that operate in the Falklands from also drilling in Argentina, and sued at least one.
But, oddly, Trump is also getting in on the action — seemingly not because of any true interest in the Falklands dispute and more out of a desire to troll the UK, and liberal governments in Europe more generally. Last week, he complained to a British news outlet that the UK and NATO were “not there to help me” when he declared war on Iran, and suggested he likewise would not help the UK were Argentina to invade. The U.S. then sold Argentina some Black Hawk helicopters.
The whole thing feels a little bit like a weird joke sustained by the two eccentric right wing leaders, reminiscent of Trump’s Greenland news cycle. But the line between trolling and official policy can be thin in the U.S. in 2026 — a fact the British, perhaps, recognize, as they are taking this all very seriously. Milei’s position “tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands,” the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence said on X. “The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British. Our commitment to the Falklands is absolute and unshakeable.”
How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?
- Rep. Chris Pappas (D), who this week won the New Hampshire Senate Democratic Primary, hails from Manchester where his family owns the Puritan Backroom restaurant. Which popular pub food does the Puritan claim to have invented?
- When he was working as a doctor, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (R), took what action against more than 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests?
- “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” decided to place its interview with this Senate candidate on YouTube instead of airing it during the broadcast — the latest sign of a network muzzling itself in the face of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s pressure campaign to punish networks that broadcast things Trump doesn’t like.
Answers below
The (Pet) GOAT
When President George W. Bush was first informed of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he was famously sitting in an elementary classroom in Florida. The president listened and followed along as the children read aloud from “The Pet Goat.” When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered into Bush’s ear that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, Bush stared like a deer in headlights and waited a full seven minutes for the children to finish reading before taking action. Whatever he was thinking in those seven minutes, the moment would become an indelible image of his presidency, and his subsequent actions would lead Americans on a disastrous course of war, surveillance and xenophobia.
Now, 25 years later and having retired from public life to pursue his passion for painting, W. is unveiling a new collection of paintings reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11. In one of the paintings, he depicts that moment in the classroom with Card leaning over him. It’s a faithful enough depiction, but no more a window into what he is thinking in this moment than the original imagery was to what he was thinking in that moment. Maybe W. painting one of his more embarrassing moments is a sign that he is doing some soul searching; perhaps he is contrite, sees the role he played in leading us to this current moment and wishing he could go back and do things differently. However, if we learned anything from his presidency it’s that “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.'”
The Other Post Warning That AI Will Be Humanity’s Ruin
WNBA Culture Wars and the Overblown Panic About Leftists
Kate Explains Why the Right Is Pretending to Care About Women’s Sports
Kate joined the excellent Cancel Me, Daddy podcast to talk about the intersection of her two main interests: reporting on the far right and obsessing over the WNBA. As a five-year season ticket holder for the Washington Mystics, Kate has been closely tracking the bad-faith anti-Black and anti-trans crusade that right-wing media is waging against the W.
“I think these ‘culture war’ kind of issues are necessary to keep their base in marching formation with a party that has always primarily sought to enrich the wealthiest Americans,” Kate points out. “You’ve always kind of needed the bigotry to keep these camps together.”
Hunter Wishes Everyone Would Chill About Hasan Piker
Hunter joined MS Now’s The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi to talk about the New Hampshire primaries and how the two parties are faring in the final countdown before the midterm elections. He expressed frustration with the ongoing media obsession over podcaster Hasan Piker’s support for a handful of progressive candidates, pointing out that, “the top donor in the GOP, Elon Musk, is a man who is basically spewing white nationalism every other day on Twitter.”
25 Years Later
Trivia answers: 1) Chicken tenders 2) Sued for outstanding bills 3) James Talarico
Charlie didn’t start the fire. It’s been always burning since the world has been turning.
“We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”
The far right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk is almost completely forgotten outside of the shrinking MAGA fascist cult.
Soon the few times the name will be said and the response of almost everyone will be “Charlie who?”
The Trash Future podcast has an ongoing segment called the Charlie Kirk Memorial Fund for people who were wrongly fired or punished in the feverish aftermath of his death. I don’t know what the grand total is currently, but there are many examples of people getting $10,000+ payouts from their former employers after committing the grave crimes of quoting Kirk’s own words or simply writing that they wouldn’t lose sleep over his absence. The Right tried so hard to make Kirk a martyr, but the reality is the economy of right-wing personalities is utterly cutthroat and none of them is irreplaceable.
Th Frank Stallone reference made me miss Norm MacDonald.