In the days following the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, there’s been a scramble to understand the politics of the situation.
The effort to ascribe a specific political affiliation and motive to 22-year-old suspect Tyler Robinson—with President Donald Trump and his followers blaming “the radical left”—has led to serious investigation and scrutiny being applied to all the publicly available details of his life before, during and after his alleged crime. In particular, there’s been an enormous amount of focus on the elaborate internet memes inscribed on the bullet casings authorities say were found at the scene as well as the fact that Robinson was a gamer who was active on Discord.
Unfortunately, the desperation for concrete answers amid a criminal investigation and extremely fraught political climate means people are trying to find deeper meaning in edgy jokes and video game references—often ignoring the possibility that it might not exist. Even commentators presenting themselves as experts on the internet are going down false trails in attempts to connect Robinson to established online movements. It’s understandable to look for meaning in what authorities are calling a political assassination, but it’s also easy to see why we’ve come up short on finding that meaning, when there's so little mainstream understanding of the “terminally online” culture Robinson’s friends reportedly said he lived in.
In the aftermath of the shooting, critic Kate Wagner wrote on X that “the epicenters of online life are now suburbanized—they are in private Discords, livestreams, and Telegram chats.” The web’s foundational spaces—forums for niche interests, group chats on IRC—were similarly “suburbanized.” They were largely small, impersonal and existed purely for leisure and fun. These factors meant humor, irony, and deliberate obscurity emerged as the most desirable and popular tone—nothing was too serious, and if you didn’t get what the joke was, you just needed to lurk moar.
Robinson, whose mother once posted a picture of him dressed as "some guy from a meme" for Halloween, is a member of the first generation to never know a world without this type of internet culture, even as the web as a whole has gotten so much larger and more serious. He would have been a tween for the mid-2010s height of “irony poisoning,” where the internet-native impersonal and ironic tone can become so all-encompassing that it becomes hard or impossible to be sincere. Crucially, this coincided with a wave of support for right-wing extremism online, including the birth of the Groypers, an extreme far-right movement organized in the late 2010s by Nick Fuentes, a longtime rival of Kirk’s. Since nothing was truly serious, there was nothing stopping hate speech and inflammatory rhetoric. Anyone with a problem was taking it too seriously.
Based on what we've learned so far, Robinson, who has been charged with aggravated murder, does not appear to have been a supporter of right-wing extremism. And he didn’t seem to attach a lot of importance to the memes, one of which said, “If you read this you are gay LMAO.” In charging documents showing an alleged text exchange where Robinson confessed to his roommate, he wrote that he “might have a stroke” if Fox News mentions “Notices bulge UwU,” a reference to a furry-related meme law enforcement said it found on one of the casings.