A Radicalism That Is Empty: Memetic Politics and The Death of Charlie Kirk
September 13, 2025
The crucial issue is that the shooter Tyler Robinson’s motive is a mystery. He appropriated a few symbols from popular subcultures that blend video games and niche forums, but without any referential intent, decontextualizing them from their political histories. The symbols spin in a void, their content hollowed out. I argue that this is the politics of our time, a politics based on simulacra,¹ whose hallmark is the political meme—an entertainment form that thrives in the crevices of the internet and occasionally surfaces into the mainstream.
The meme is the smallest unit of culture,² and its essence is self-proliferation. Like a gene, a meme’s content or nature is irrelevant. In other words, a meme possesses only a form conducive to its own transmission; its empty core can be filled with any content. Unlike Limor Shifman,³ I believe that today’s political memes, or memetic politics, more closely resemble what she calls viral spreading, lacking a necessary connection to affective structures or collective issues. Although they may be born with a specific intent, they quickly adapt and mutate for the sake of propagation, thereby shifting from ambiguity (irony) to emptiness. The left and right can vigorously contest or negotiate the power of interpretation, but the political meme will only focus on enhancing its own capacity to spread.
This transmissibility relies on radicalized expression. By proclaiming a form of activism, a political engagement, and an intention to solve problems, political memes fulfill a lack felt by the populace in the current era: the sense that their political ideas (however unsystematic or primal) cannot be accommodated by the system, and that they even lack the proper language to describe them. This lack drives them to embrace political memes, transforming this engagement into a form of jouissance. It is for this reason that political memes sometimes share an affinity with grassroots or populist movements. The aphasia maintained by the establishment—which prevents people from producing a vocabulary to express their own needs and positions—ultimately leads to this present state of jouissance in self-proliferation.
In summary, I argue that, like image macros, shitposts, or the phrases etched on the shooter’s bullet casings, the political meaning of meme-forms is unstable and often allows for multiple interpretations. They are merely the shell of political engagement, a superficial radicalism, a form of non-politics disguised as politics. This empty radicalism ultimately manifests as activism without content—we must act or resort to violence, while the reasons for doing so become secondary. In my view, it is precisely this empty radicalism that precipitated the tragedy of the shooting. Therefore, it can indeed be said that our era has returned to a state of politicization, but the discursive confrontation between left and right has created a vacuum: a site devoid of substance, where only radicalism itself remains.
However, the real problem behind memetic politics may be that the environment for legitimate discussion has been constrained, and a vocabulary of dissent has been erased. It is too easy to critique jouissance; the problem lies in the lack.
1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Originally published in French in 1981.
2. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
3. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014).
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