Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on Sept. 10 during an event at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, 22, was charged with aggravated murder.Meredith Seaver/The Associated Press
The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk came from a casing engraved with the nonsensical-sounding phrase, “notices bulges OWO what’s this?” For certain factions of the extremely online, however, it was an inside joke.
It’s a reference to a mid-2010s meme parodying furries, the online subculture who role-play as anthropomorphic animals. Three other casings featured inscriptions that invoke a mishmash of memes and video games, spurring Utah Governor Spencer Cox to conclude that the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was radicalized by social media and the “deep dark internet.”
On Tuesday, Utah prosecutors charged Mr. Robinson with aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and three other charges. The state is seeking the death penalty.
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In the days since the conservative activist was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University, authorities, politicians and internet sleuths have pored over the etched messages, trying to reveal the truth about Mr. Robinson’s alleged motive.
Alleged text messages between Mr. Robinson and his roommate, who’s also his romantic partner, released this week in charging documents help piece together some of that puzzle. The messages indicated Mr. Robinson was opposed to Mr. Kirk’s views and that he had “had enough of his hatred.” Mr. Robinson’s mother also told investigators that her son had moved to the left politically, becoming more “pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the past year.
Tyler Robinson appears remotely via video during a hearing on Sept. 16.Pool/Getty Images
As Mr. Robinson’s motivations come into focus, experts who study how extremist ideas spread online say he also fits into a troubling pattern: Instead of being motivated solely by ideology, in recent years, experts say mass shooters have also been inspired by the act of trolling.
“We’ve been seeing less ideological, or not at all ideological, attackers who just like violence, want notoriety and because they’re steeped in meme culture, want to troll the media and observers while doing it,” says U.K.-based Jakob Guhl, a director of research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international think tank that studies extremism online.
Along with the furry meme casing, authorities found an unspent bullet casing that read “Hey fascist! Catch!” followed by a series of arrows that correspond with the sequence to drop a bomb in Helldivers 2, a video game satirizing a fascist regime. Another said “bella ciao,” a nod to an anti-Fascist Italian Second World War anthem that’s been used in the video game Far Cry 6. Another casing was inscribed, “If you read this you are gay LMAO.”
The incongruent messages suggest that Mr. Robinson may have been interested in gaining notoriety online, rather than being driven by a coherent ideology, says Mr. Guhl. In fact, in text messages between Mr. Robinson and his partner, which were released in charging documents, he summed up the inscriptions as “mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new [sic] i might have stroke.”
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Memes are now the lingua franca of political mass violence, explains Mr. Guhl. He traces the shift back to 2019, when a man livestreamed himself on Facebook attacking a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He told viewers to “subscribe to PewDiePie,” referencing the popular video game streamer, and released a white supremacist manifesto that included racist memes originating from the anonymous message board 4chan.
In subsequent domestic terrorist attacks, perpetrators have followed a similar template.
“All kinds of copycats took inspiration from him,” says Mr. Guhl. “It’s part of the game, part of the currency online. It’s almost how people expect these attacks to unfold: There is footage and there’s memes. It’s very strangely become part of mass killings.”
Mr. Guhl notes that part of the drive for these perpetrators is the opportunity to gain notoriety within their niche online communities, which are part of a larger ecosystem that includes 4chan and message board platforms Discord and Telegram. He points to Terrorgram, a network of neo-fascist Telegram channels that shares instructions for how to carry out mass shootings and venerates mass shooters as “saints.”
Although Mr. Robinson used Discord to chat with friends, there is no evidence so far that he belonged to any extremist online communities. However, whether intentionally or not, by allegedly referencing memes and shooting Mr. Kirk at a livestreamed event for maximum social-media impact, Mr. Robinson was following an established “aesthetic,” says Mr. Guhl.
A makeshift memorial for Kirk outside of Turning Point USA’s headquarters in Phoenix, Az.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images
Rachel Kowert, an Ottawa-based visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge who studies extremism and video games, says online gaming communities can become vectors for misinformation and radicalization.
“If you fall into an echo chamber, in which slowly more and more extreme ideas are being presented to you, those ideas start to become normal,” she adds. “And for people who live chronically online, those echo chambers become your reality.”
Shortly after the shooting, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed “radical left lunatics” were behind the attack, a sentiment echoed by Deputy White House Chief of staff Stephen Miller on Monday. But without a manifesto or a digital footprint neatly tying Mr. Robinson to a larger political ideology, there’s been much speculation from social-media users on both the left and right about Mr. Robinson’s alleged motivations: He was part of the radical left, since some of the phrases implied Mr. Kirk was a fascist. Early on, others argued he belonged to the most extreme contingent of the far-right. Now, some are alleging that the texts released by Utah authorities are fabricated.
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Ms. Kowert is concerned about how Mr. Kirk’s grisly shooting was turned into content, with the graphic video making the rounds across social media.
“Why aren’t we talking all about the problem of the fact that we’re scrolling in between dance challenges and memes, and then we’re seeing video footage of livestreamed mass attacks or the assassination of this man on the stage?” says Ms. Kowert.
“How is that shaping and warping our perception of reality? When did that become content that we’re just consuming?”