Think back to Sept. 10, 2026, the one-year anniversary of the death of conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk. Did you kiss your partner’s neck in the same place Kirk was shot? Did you follow the “protect your neck” dress code and wear a cute little scarf? Many students of the Claremont Colleges suggested such trends on Fizz, an anonymous social media app, on what was dubbed the Kirkaversary.
The colleges were abuzz when Libs of TikTok, a right-wing account on X, posted a compilation of Fizz posts wherein students joked about celebrating Kirk’s assassination. The posts were leaked by 1AmericanExcept, a self-described anonymous Claremont McKenna College first-year who has since disabled their account. The original X post from Libs of TikTok garnered 18,000 likes. It summed up their thoughts on the matter, reading, “These messages are absolutely vile. I am sick to my stomach.”
I don’t share the political ideology of Libs of TikTok, but I still felt a little queasy scrolling through many of the posts on Fizz. My friends quickly told me it was all in good fun, a reassurance often followed by questions like, “Wait, but you didn’t like Charlie Kirk, did you?”
For the record, I did not. Nor, however, do I like what appears to be a growing trend online: the memeification of real violence, be it gun violence, war crimes, assault, deportation or any other harm to one’s life. Memes usually mock a surface-level concept. However, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and again following the brief TikTok ban of 2025, social media and memes have taken on increasingly serious content.
As access to a relatively free platform for speech has grown, political jokes within these apps have also spiked. Consider the current state of our country: political parties and opinions are incredibly polarized, and political conversations are often fraught with tension or an outright lack of civility. As this hostility in real-life discussions continues, resorting to pessimistic, superficial humor online can feel like an easier alternative than working with the issues in good faith.
However, I believe these brief, simple forms of online political humor downplay genuine causes for concern. I love a good giggle as much as the next person, but making light of issues tied to human suffering can foster apathy toward more productive discourse about the changes we can make to the situations we love to joke about.
Nowadays, many Gen Zers are familiar with this particular variant of humor: the political meme. Satire of political events has long been a successful and entertaining way to mobilize viewers through popular media and gain public attention. But unlike a satirical talk show, a thoughtfully structured form of political commentary or a quippy protest sign used to take direct political action, the memes in question are, essentially, catchy yet oversimplified forms of political commentary. This phenomenon is known as “Memetic Warfare,” in which “memes function as tools of information warfare, shaping how power is projected, contested, and perceived.” The danger lies in normalizing disengagement from serious, newsworthy topics. Because we access newsworthy information more readily on social media than by watching the news or listening to a podcast, our knowledge of current events is more likely to come as jokes or other rudimentary content.
Kirkaversary is the tip of the memetic iceberg. Social media platforms are overrun with misguided political memes. These memes are not exclusive to a single political party or generation. On Sept. 9, for example, the official White House Instagram account posted an image captioned “Transformers: Age of Deportation” with a fiery, brutal image of a Transformer protagonist bearing the ICE logo, a mocking threat to continue violence against immigrants in the U.S.
Additionally, a recent online trend terms personal dislikes, such as an undesirable teacher or a disliked celebrity, as being “spiritually Israeli.” This term emerged as a way for users to show disdain for the country’s military attacks while associating them with something unlikeable but much less significant. Since 2023, roughly 73,910 people in Gaza have been killed by Israeli attacks. Though the ridicule of Israel is ideologically in support of a free Palestine, these sorts of comments detract from the impact of the message itself. A pumpkin spice latte or Sombr’s new album being coined “spiritually Israeli” just because people find the product or individual commercially hallowed takes focus off of genuine human suffering. In any case, no matter the poster’s intentions or affiliations, I see the same formula for disaster: meme-ifying conflict dilutes the severity of genuine crises, reducing our understanding of them and our ability to generate a compassionate response.
For many, our online identity is the curated avatar of the self, where we can express our thoughts at any given moment through a post or a comment, often anonymously. This makes it especially easy to use these memes to signal political affiliations without needing formal involvement in material political action like protests or community support. However, it’s important to reflect on whether short-form online humor simply helps people avoid the responsibility of working toward genuine education and change, beyond the screen.
Making half-baked jokes online cannot be the primary method of political change. Anyone engaging with, creating or redistributing memes on the internet should recognize that, inadvertently, such content raises the palatability of violence and lowers our motivation to take greater action against it. And there’s nothing funny about that.
Calli Taffel PZ ’30 is from Newburyport, Massachusetts. She has never laughed a day in her life, and her smile has been known to cause vital organ failure to all who witness it.