Following the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, confusion has mounted about the motives of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson. Despite uncorroborated claims by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox that Robinson was steeped in “leftist ideology,” Robinson’s personal politics aren’t yet clear and may never be. Pundits and other commentators have struggled to fit him into the familiar mold of a politically motivated killer.
Part of the confusion is the memes. According to a police affidavit, the shooter inscribed bullet casings with references to furry and gaming memes as well as phrases such as “hey fascist! CATCH!” Based on these phrases, many internet sleuths have tried to tag Robinson as far right or far left. Yet if Robinson is the perpetrator, it’s still unclear whether he was motivated by politics at all.
As details about his online life emerge, so does the possibility that Robinson performed a violent, real-life “shitpost”—an intentionally meaningless act. The shooting came just weeks after the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic School shooter, who also inscribed their weapons with messages, carried out a similar crime for the sake of violence and little else.
While that shooter filmed videos about the crime, Robinson has been opaque and reportedly uncooperative with police. What makes it so difficult to tell the shooter’s intent in Kirk’s killing is that both extremists and normal internet users often use the same linguistic markers: byzantine in-group language, impenetrable memes, and heavy irony. All of this makes their messages difficult to understand and, crucially, difficult for outsiders to monitor.
At a glance, the bullet casing memes don’t seem to have a unifying theme, though all are obscure. The one from the fired bullet, “Notices Buldge OWO what’s this?” originates from furry subculture, though the origins may not even matter: In-jokes frequently travel out of their spaces and into other internet communities, a phenomenon known as context collapse.
The shooter also paired the phrase “hey fascist! CATCH!” with “↑ → ↓↓↓”—a series of up and down arrows referencing the video game Helldivers 2. The arrows represent the keyboard shortcut for a move in the game that drops an enormous bomb on the target area. Using it as a meme implies nuking one’s opponent—in a setting where the protagonists themselves are serving a fascist regime but one that uses the language of liberty.
Then there’s “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Ciao, ciao!” a line from an anti-fascist Italian song. Obvious conclusions that the shooter is anti-fascist can’t be drawn from these references, however, because the lyrics have also been incorporated ironically into the “groyper” movement—fans of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who frequently clashed with Kirk, whom they viewed as too moderate.
In other words, even though the shooter may have referenced anti-fascist themes, it could have been done ironically. Other alleged evidence Robinson may have leaned right: He was photographed in 2018 doing the “slav squat” as Pepe the Frog, a notorious far-right symbol. So why isn’t that compelling enough evidence of a far-right motive? Because Pepe got reappropriated and he’s often still used as nothing more than a fun meme.
All of this further complicates the alleged shooter’s message—if he even had one. Multiple media outlets have tried to definitively identify Robinson’s politics, only to issue retractions. Yet few of these hallmarks are inherently political. Robinson could certainly still be a far-right extremist, a leftist gun-loving furry, or something in between. In fact, if anything can be gleaned from the memes at all, it’s the sense that the shooter could have been motivated by something far more nebulous than politics: a strain of chaotic nihilism that permeates many online subcultures.
In other words, this could be extremism not for a cause but “for the lulz,” an old internet phrase meaning for sheer entertainment value.
The trajectory that took us here arguably began around 2019. That year, three different mass shootings occurred whose perpetrators all announced the shootings on the far-right message board 8chan just before they took place. In the most high-profile of these, on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the shooter uploaded a manifesto mixing far-right ideology with a litany of internet memes, suggesting that the time had come to turn online talk into offline actions.
While 8chan was shut down as a result, more extremist communities have since sprung up in its place. Anonymous public forums such as 8chan’s successor 8kun, niche far-right hub Soyjak Party, and extremist corners of 4chan still exist, but now so do private chat servers. These group chats are mainly housed on the gaming-centric platform Discord and messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal. Many of these communities form a loose cross-platform network known as “The Comm” that peddles extreme ideology (and serious criminal activity) while overlapping with normal internet spaces such as gamer Discords.
Communities such as these gamify violence by rewarding escalating expressions of it; even just laughing along ironically can become encouragement to take the “joke” to the next level. Extremists often count on this use of humor to obfuscate their serious intent: to “[p]retend to joke about it until the punchline /really/ lands.”
The humor makes extremism more palatable and also makes it easy to mobilize, flowing upstream until the language and linguistics of the far right have become a part of mainstream culture. If you’ve ever referred to “chads” and “beckys,” called someone a “cuck” or a “normie,” discussed “globalism,” joked about being “-pilled,” or even said you “got clowned,” you’ve adopted the language of far-right and adjacent internet communities, likely without even realizing it.
There’s a flip side to all of this. Couching noxious ideas in memes makes it easier to dismiss them. But exposure to violence also desensitizes one to it. Couple that with a cultural sentiment that the internet has become more chaotic, and you inevitably find internet communities that weaponize that chaos. In a recent study, researchers identified far-right “resignationist eschatology” on 4chan “where individuals learn to cope with a world devoid of agency, order, and meaning.”
Often these ideas overlap with accelerationism, a worldview that aims to destabilize global society through violence and destruction and has been adopted by white supremacists. Even without having a political focus, a “normie” community can harbor violent ideas. Researchers who studied 18 years of interactions in one nonpolitical online community recently published findings that the community weaponized violence for reasons including “sadistic entertainment.” That community? An electronic dance music forum.
The implications for offline violence are bleak. The Kirk shooting was just one of a string of recent high-profile shootings in the last 15 months where the perpetrators mixed violence and mayhem with memes and arcane references to deep corners of the internet, without seeming to have a larger referent. Two of the shooters—at schools in Madison, Wisconsin, and Nashville, respectively—interacted in the same online spaces, and while they both seem to have had ties to The Comm, their primary motive seems to have been joining other school shooters before them in acts of violence.
That’s fairly familiar territory for school shooters; it’s far less common as a motive in cases such as Kirk’s killing. Yet it appears as though Robinson treated the alleged act as just another stop in his day. If he did do the shooting, afterward he logged back on and resumed his regular posting schedule, joking with friends on Discord about his similarity to Kirk’s then-unknown alleged killer and about Luigi Mangione, another accused shooter whose ideology has been difficult to pin down.
If indeed it turns out that Kirk’s shooter was uninfluenced by any larger ideology, it could indicate a troubling new direction—both for violence in the United States and for an internet culture few understand, whose darker impulses no one seems to know how to curb.