Making Charlie Kirk happen
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 169
POPULAR POLITICS DEP'T.
A Nation Is Told That a Nation Mourns
YESTERDAY WAS THE stadium memorial service for Charlie Kirk, which amounted to a stadium Donald Trump rally, featuring the leading figures of Trumpworld, streamed online or broadcast live by major news organizations. Turning Point USA, Kirk's activist organization, claimed that more than 100 million people viewed the event—which would have been about three times as many as watched the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs in a Super Bowl rematch the week before, a broadcast that tied the mark for the biggest regular-season Sunday NFL audience ever recorded.
Was Charlie Kirk really bigger than the NFL? Variety reported that Sinclair Broadcasting, the right-wing local-TV conglomerate that helped pressure ABC into taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air, abandoned its originally announced plan to have its 38 ABC stations broadcast a tribute to Kirk in Kimmel's Friday time slot. Instead, the stations joined the rest of ABC's affiliates in carrying a rerun of Celebrity Family Feud; Sinclair's Kirk tribute was relegated to YouTube, where Rolling Stone, Variety's sibling publication, noted that it had "generated just 26,000 views" between Friday night and Sunday morning.
Ever since Kirk was killed, there's been a persistent effort to turn him into something bigger than he was—to recast a successful partisan influencer and second- or third-tier national radio host into a national icon. The incentives for the Trump movement to push this vision of Kirk are obvious: Trump is unpopular and becoming even less popular by the day, and the idea that Kirk was some sort of universally admirable figure stands in for the idea that Trump himself could be such a figure. Trump and his supporters want Kirk's killing to be treated as a crime against all of America, to be punished on a national scale.
The major media seem to have gone along with the claim of Kirk's importance for reasons that overlapped with Trump's. The people who make decisions about news coverage are unable to let go of the idea that Trumpism is a mass movement, expressing the desires of a majority of the American public. Kirk's history as a synthetic figure, a sort of one-man boy band hired by rich people to go on tour and scam the attention economy, is as irrelevant as the fact that Donald Trump had to hire his first crowd of campaign supporters.
If Charlie Kirk was the voice of the masses, then even after Trump is gone, the American politics of the future needs to incorporate Charlie Kirk's opinions—the way Bill Clinton incorporated hostility to welfare and enthusiasm for vigorous law enforcement into his politics, to show some reachable fraction of the people who had voted for Ronald Reagan that a Democrat could be on their side. Charlie Kirk's popularity would mean that liberals need to be more respectful of masculine prerogatives, more critical of diversity, less committed to trans people; that is, that the left side of American major-party politics would need to conform more to the consensus of news editors, publishers, and owners that things went too far around 2020.
STREET POLITICS DEP'T.
While I was being quietly annoyed by the hideous use of cheapo AI in the current Skechers ad campaign in the subway, someone passing through my nearest subway station decided to do something about it. Death to sloppers!
OUTSIDE READINGS DEP'T.
Max Read
IN RESPONSE TO the coverage of how Charlie Kirk's alleged killer put meme references on his ammo, Max "Read Max" Read set out to write a story about the cultural meaning of the "groyper" movement for a leading publication, only to interview a well-informed and very online 23-year-old, who posts under the name "Ettingermentum," who demolished the premise that the suspect could credibly be linked to the groypers at all. So the interview ran in Read Max instead, where it was both illuminating and capable of withering the middle-aged reader to dust:
Ettingermentum: I lived through the same kind of cultural, memetic era that he did, and the moment that I heard about the bullet casings, I instantly recognized what kind of person this was, because I knew them. I went to school with these kinds of kids. I was also active playing video games like everybody else my age when I was in middle school and high school, and I just instantly recognized the humor. It brought me immediately back to middle school and high school.
It's kind of funny and a little embarrassing for the guy. Beyond all the other shit he has to be embarrassed about is the fact that all of his classmates remembered him as a “Reddit kid,” with this kind of corny internet humor. Not really confident enough to make his own jokes. I mean, I could describe it a thousand different ways. He's like--people know these guys as band kids, because they always happen to be in marching bands and stuff.
Read Max: Okay. Right. I'm 39, “band kids” is familiar to me. That's a long-standing type.
Ettingermentum: So this is the latest evolution of band kids. Kind of cloying, desperate for approval, really liable to get into unfunny in-jokes, furry references. "Hey fascist, catch this"--an epic video game reference. I don't know if you could use the word "epic" in [redacted publication], but that's really the best word to describe this. He's trying to be epic. He's trying to be cool. He's trying to put these little references to video games and online in-jokes and stuff. And it's not funny. I know this isn't the relevant thing here, but I was just immediately struck by how unfunny it was. It's just making these stupid references to these stupid memes that were old a decade ago.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 21, 2025
★★★★ The weather app said it was to be a cloudy day, but the morning clouds were the kind that let blue tones through, and by lunchtime they'd thinned and come apart so the sun was shining. It was chilly to be sitting out and reading, but perfect for walking. The honeylocusts in the cross street had left golden drifts of leaves to catch and return the warm light from the sky. Rose hips hung deep red in the thinning underbrush of the Park. Slightly ivory-tinged cumulus stood below slightly blue-tinged washes of wind-pulled cirrus. Metal flared on high rooftops above and beyond the North Meadow ballfields, which were now doing business as the North Meadow soccer fields. A big rat, pale-bellied, crawled out of a sun-struck fissure in the rocks by the waterfall entering the Pool. Another rat followed. The slanting light caught the dust on a streetside window, revealing where a finger had traced the name "Goku" on the pane.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from British Everyday Cookery, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1910 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
EGG AND GHERKIN SANDWICHES.
Boil the eggs hard. Pass the yolks through a sieve, and mix them with the butter, pepper and salt. Mince the whites fine; mince the gherkins. Mix all well together, and spread the mixture between slices of thin bread and butter.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
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