One year after Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to students on a college campus, Americans gathered to remember him.
Others took a very different approach.
As supporters marked the anniversary of the Turning Point USA founder’s September 10, 2025, killing, hostile social-media posts resurfaced attacks on Kirk and, in some cases, openly celebrated his death.
One post attributed to the Instagram account The Culture Beat began with an unambiguous declaration: “Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit.”
The account attacked not merely Kirk’s political positions, but the enormous media operation he helped build around them.
Its complaint was revealing.
Turning Point USA had made Kirk famous in part by sending him onto college campuses, putting him face-to-face with students who disagreed with him and distributing videos of those exchanges to millions of people online.
The account criticized the familiar viral format in which Kirk was shown “dismantling” opposing arguments and clips were packaged under provocative headlines designed to attract enormous audiences.
But those videos worked.
Kirk’s campus debates escaped the confines of the universities where they were recorded. They spread across YouTube, TikTok, X and other platforms, introducing young people across the country to Kirk and Turning Point USA.
That reach helped transform TPUSA from a campus organization into a major force in conservative politics. A year after Kirk’s death, Reuters reported that the organization had grown to more than 3,500 high-school chapters and 1,500 college chapters.
The Culture Beat portrayed that success differently, arguing that Kirk and TPUSA helped introduce young people to a broader right-wing media “ecosystem” and accusing that ecosystem of fostering resentment toward women, immigrants, LGBTQ people and racial minorities.
It conceded that Kirk and TPUSA might not have been “personally responsible for radicalizing people,” but argued that they nevertheless should not “be remembered kindly.”
Then came the conclusion.
“Thanks for the hate, rest in piss Charlie.”
Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s politics, the timing was unmistakable: the remark was being circulated as Americans marked the first anniversary of the assassination of a 31-year-old political activist.
And elsewhere, the anniversary looked dramatically different.
Thousands gathered Thursday at Utah Valley University, the same campus where Kirk was killed, for a Turning Point USA memorial honoring his life and political legacy. The organization called the event “Freedom Built to Last.”
Kirk was also remembered at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where a memorial video was shown and Vice President JD Vance spoke about Kirk’s influence on the conservative movement.
The anniversary therefore became another illustration of the enormous political divide Kirk left behind.
To his supporters, he was a gifted organizer who built one of the country’s most influential conservative youth organizations and made political debate accessible to millions of young Americans.
To his critics, he promoted ideas they considered harmful and helped construct a political media machine they continue to oppose.
Those arguments did not disappear when Charlie Kirk was murdered.
But neither did a more fundamental distinction: condemning a man’s politics is one thing. Celebrating his murder is another.