And, to continue the sentence in the headline, you should feel better that such a satire would be too unmoored to the current reality to justify writing. You have every reason to hate the current reality of American politics and government where we fell just a few hundred thousand votes short of our terribly shitty president being in prison for the rest of his life, yes. But you would have so many more reasons to hate it if “Trump killed Charlie Kirk to justify a massive, sweeping crackdown on civil liberties,” was the headline and the parody of the usual MAGA conspiracy shit was just a grim way of saving face against a dark, bottomless onslaught into a full-on permanent Trump autocracy.

Here and now, that satire simply isn’t going to hold up because, as the last 365 days have proven, the Trump regime is just too goddamned feckless and incompetent to capitalize on Kirk’s death in ways that even this website expected more vigor from them. What happened to dropping the hammer on Antifa, put James Comey behind bars, take Jimmy Kimmel off the air permanently, destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center, appropriate George Soros’s billions and distribute them to shell companies owned by Kirk’s allies, redraw Indiana’s congressional districts to squash two safe Dem seats, successfully firing public college professors for their anti-Kirk Facebook posts without consequences like millions in taxpayer-funded judgments and reinstatement eight months later?

unfortunate — the big Charlie Kirk Show on the one year anniversary of his death is being wrecked by technical problems pic.twitter.com/X8cF1KOOnU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 10, 2026

It’s almost like there’s no shortage of metaphors available for how the Trump Regime and its allies spent the capital that fate had suddenly gifted them that September day in Utah, and as such it would be a uniquely mortal sin of pseudo-journalistic malpractice to print some pablum like “Dick Cheney secretly attacked American freedom on 9/11, Donald Trump finished it off on 9/10.” Such a non-Euclidean counterfactual simply would have imputed an even more fictitious air of competence and agency onto the MAGA establishment led by a pants-shitting old degenerate who sits at a desk filled with candy wrappers and 1980s Hustler issues with the pages stuck together.

Now this has been written here before. Hell it wasn’t even three weeks later that under the headline of “Disney+ cancellations went up 436 percent during Kimmel exile” this site observed the significance of the media conglomerate reversing on firing the late night host:

How’s some elaborate but not particularly-inspired joke about Tyler Robinson secretly being on the payroll of a major to contractor to ICE, therefore connect the dots about Mirk’s murder being a false flag operation aimed at solidifying the Trump’s regime’s power supposed to play out? Shit, even some of Kirk’s own employees believed he was killed by Mossad agents because he was starting to privately sound kinda antisemitic as evidenced by a text conversation just days before his death.

Kirk’s own people (and Candace Owens) say Kirk was killed in a revenge hit. How is anyone supposed to be able to satirize it as a Trump Regime false flag op when elements of the right wing grifter space – in which Kirk was very much a major node – are still in an endless internecine war over who killed him? Who can truly compete in such an environment of self-inflicted madness?

Can scarcely imagine the state of grief among that small slice of MAGAmericans truly cognizant of just how fucking badly Kirk’s death was squandered away by their leaders in their political and media ecosystem. It’s about the same size as the subset that can spell or define the word “cognizant”: Those amoral nihilists who celebrate knowing lies for their political impact – like JD Vance admitting the Haitians eating pets line was bullshit but still pushed it regardless – that wince with pain when they see the visage of Saint Charles the Exsanguinated bathed in the glow of a sunwashed, joyous hereafter. They know this because they’re not living under the recreation of 1936 Berlin or Rome of their dreams, but a 2026 DC and an ever increasingly grim midterm cycle.

We lost a future US President. https://t.co/fai2ix8K7K

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) September 10, 2026

Exacerbating that sickening, everpresent pain over what could have been if the Trump Regime had reacted to Kirk’s death with focus and competence to seize more control but the actual would have been of if he hadn’t been shot dead at all. Kirk was one of the most innovative and effective organizers in American political history, no question. Yes, he was pretty mediocre at best as a podcaster and right wing grifter but his ubiquity in that sphere really kind of obscures his talent at the brass tacks shit of actually getting people to vote in a certain direction. He was damn good at it and while it will be impossible to quantify the impact of his death on turnout for Republicans this November, nobody can seriously deny that there will be fewer ballots cast for the GOP in this timeline than in the one Kirk is still alive. That Scott Presler scumbag is simply not filling this void.

“There is a void, and lots of people are trying to fill it, but no one will be able to do what he did,” RNC Chair Joe Gruters told CNN in an article they printed after the previous paragraph was written (this piece’s production process has been a little sporadic given other news interrupting).

You are correct.

The Gloves are Off.

We will not allow these people to take our country.

They are 21st Century Brown Shirts https://t.co/OgZlYlHgH8

— Derrick Van Orden (@derrickvanorden) September 11, 2025

Put simply, life handed the GOP lemons so they promptly squashed the lemons in their own eyes to induce tears and that was it. All those LibsOfTikTok firings, all the several days of Jimmy Kimmel’s removal from television, all the hopes and dreams of a systemic dismantling of the left’s power structures, all the performative screaming of “YOU CAUSED THIS” directed at Democrats and the media, and we’re left with no suffering inflicted on the left plus a void in youth organizing.

No addition, only subtraction for MAGA, the suck embracing them no matter what.

ADDENDUM

Less than three years earlier he infamously said “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” in response to a question over whether trans people should be allowed to own guns after that ambiguously transgender psychopath Aubrey Hale massacred three schoolchildren and three teachers were at the Covenant School in Nashville. So maybe “karma” is insufficient to describe how that quote fits into the context of the partner of a transgender person is now accused of fatally shooting Kirk while he was sitting on a college campus and answering a question about transgender shooters. Maybe “thematic” could be the right word conceptually.

And still a wife lost a husband, two toddlers lost their father, two parents lost their child, and people who we disagree with morally lost a dear friend and leader who knew how to throw a party.

Neither of those two realities about his death have to be in tension with each other. You can say that he had it coming in that very specific way outlined above while also acknowledging the grief and suffering caused by his murder. Erika Kirk may be weird but she lost her husband so suddenly and cruelly. Human beings are, despite what Kirk’s politics led some to believe, capable of nuance.

Tim Miller said it first and said it better at some point during this podcast episode the day after (he too overestimated the right’s capacity to effectively capitalize on the killing) and yet it bears repeating: Charlie Kirk is forever the fucking racist right wing grifter who said he wouldn’t get on a commercial flight if he saw the pilot was Black. This of course wasn’t ackshually racist because it’s not that he has anything against Blacks he just thought that it’s more likely than not that Black pilots are underqualified and only got the job because of DEI-based hiring quotas… And yes of course it was racist but that kind of self-enabling sophistry is how MAGA voters live with themselves.

But that’s who Charlie Kirk is forever. Full stop and not in the rhetorical sense. His death closed the door to a decades-long career in politics in which he had time and space to grow as a human being, develop empathy, maybe even stand up there and admit he was wrong about this or that particular line of hateful right wing bullshit that he had espoused. Miller himself is a former Republican, Jeb! 2016 comms guy, who is friends and colleagues now with the former Obama comms guys on the Pod Save America crew. Miller counts among his colleagues George Conway, the hardcore conservative anti-Bill Clinton lawyer who once dated Laura Ingraham and then three decades later unsuccessfully ran in the New York 12th District Democratic primary. Miller personally regularly texted with Kirk and had something of a mutually respectful relationship with him.

You can say that it was unlikely that Kirk would get better instead of worse and you’re probably right. But only probably. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene is already on the 12 step program. Did you ever expect her to quit and turn heel against Trump? It’s never too late.

Well maybe it is when you’re 80 and yeah, the world would actually be a better place if you were dead. Maybe that’ll change during this live feed of the Kirk-less non-youth organization show inspired by the kind of productions he put on. You never know until it’s over.