Surfer magazine shutters forum boards after 21 years following “obnoxious” Charlie Kirk posts

“Everything flushed down the toilet thanks to some non-surfing kook.”

In a shock message that has sent ripples of fear down the spine of any surfer who finds meaning in the below the line trenches, Surfer has announced it will be shuttering its forums effective September 29.

“It is with heavy hearts that we share that the time has come to sunset the SURFER forums. On September 29, 2025, the forums will officially go dark. We can’t thank you enough for your years of engagement, conversation, and surf banter. We are currently exploring other community-focused opportunities to keep the chatter going. Stay tuned for updates in the months to come. Until then, we hope plenty of waves are headed your way. The next set wave is all yours. Thanks again for helping make the SURFER community what it is today. –SURFER Magazine.” 

The sudden closing of the forums comes, according to one of its habitués, after a raft of anti-Charlie Kirk posts following the Master Debater’s assassination.

“What’s interesting about the SURFER forum closing is it was a non-surfing fellow who got the place shut down. A non-surfing guy  for whatever reason decided to start posting on a surfing forum promoting left-wing politics… He wouldn’t STFU celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and went on a posting marathon about it. Completely obnoxious. And then, suddenly the word came from the publisher via the admins the place would be closing. Fucking sucks.” 

The tragedy, says our reader, who has been posting there for over twenty years, “is there’s a lot of surf babble wrapped up in that place and a ton of design info. Everyone from Matt Biolos to Tomo have posted in the Design Forum over the years. The Design Forum has been responsible for a lot of different shapers and board designs getting the traction they never would have otherwise… because a lotta surfers all over the planet lurk on the forum. All that is now gonna get flushed down the toilet. Thanks to some non-surfing kook.” 

Somehow the anti-Charlie Kirk rhetoric was aired despite last year’s ban on political speech.

Surfer magazine, which most recently featured on BeachGrit when they advertised for a human to monitor its AI-driven content, had over one thousand pages on its politics forum covering everything from the Ukraine-Russian war, a political assassination in Slovakia, Peru’s decision to classify trannies as mentally ill, Biden’s “inflation explosion” and Trump’s “Hush Money” removed.

Written in what you might imagine as a creepy sing-song voice, Surfer magazine told its readers.

“IN AN EFFORT TO KEEP THE CONVERSATIONS SURF-RELATED, THE POLITICAL FORUM HERE HAS BEEN REMOVED. Let’s talk surf trips, surfboards, and the latest happenings from around this beautiful, blue planet. Thanks!”

And, as a sticky in the main forum, 

“Effective immediately, the politics forum here on Surfer.com has been shut down. Any political posts that are posted in the Surfer forums will be deleted and accounts will be removed. We want to continue to offer this forum as a surf-related area, and we know that bleeds into everyday life. With that being said, we will not have this forum devolve into a political area that is disrespectful of others and intentionally marginalizes or disrespects other groups/individuals.”

The fall and rise of Surfer magazine, heritage title driven into the ground before being rebirthed as a dystopian zombie site complete with AI-generated writers, was best documented by Santa Barbara’s Jen See.

As humans, story-telling is one of our most ancient traditions. We drew on cave walls, wrote on papyrus rolls, and scribbled illegibly on parchments and yellow legal pads. Now we tap out our Instagram captions and text messages. The medium doesn’t matter that much.

It feels like the deepest cut to replace this profoundly human process with a machine trained on the work of so many human writers. Who are we, if not our stories? And who do we become in their absence? What’s lost in this dystopian world of trained robots and hyper-efficient editors? Certainly what’s left starts to feel a lot like Roth’s “claustrophobic and airless culture.”