The bullet casings authorities recovered during their investigation of Charlie Kirk’s killing make at least one thing clear: The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was speaking the language of memes.
“Hey Fascist! Catch!”, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao,” and “O Bella ciao…” read some of the engravings on bullets, both used and unused, in the shooting last week. Their meanings are hard to parse — they’re ideologically inconsistent, wrapped in layers of irony and earnestness, and reference various online communities and video games.
In a text exchange with his roommate and partner, reproduced by authorities in charging documents, Robinson references the inscriptions, calling them “mostly a big meme.” “[If] I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new[s] I might have a stroke,” Robinson allegedly said.
It all suggests this act of violence, which seems to have been driven by opposition to “hate” Robinson thought Kirk was spreading as well as some left-leaning ideas, was also wrapped up in a kind of dark, nihilistic, deeply online meme culture that has been spawning, or at least inspiring, acts of violence over the last half-decade. Memes started to make more of an appearance in the killings carried out by mass shooters, beginning most notably in 2019, during attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Memes, and deeply online references, also appeared in Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health insurance CEO and in school shootings this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
It’s a complicated world to parse, so we turned to Elle Reeve, someone who has a history of investigating and explaining the shady corners of the internet that have started dealing serious damage in the real world. Reeve is a correspondent for CNN and the author of the book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics — all about the kinds of (mostly) men who get sucked into dark worlds online, and as she’s put it, “talk themselves into doing strange, cruel, or violent things because it all started with just jokes, man.”
Below is an excerpt of Reeve’s conversation with us, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
It’s been almost a week since Charlie Kirk was killed. What do we know at this point about his alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson?
To me, we still don’t know enough. We know that he was a young man, he is referred to as very smart and quiet by a lot of his friends that have talked to the press. He scored well in his ACT, according to a post his mom made, but he dropped out of college after the first semester. He was a big gamer — really into video games. And according to investigators, he was dating his roommate, [who they say is transgender].
The first tranche of information we got about this alleged shooter was when investigators revealed what he allegedly wrote on the bullet casings. Could you help us understand what exactly he wrote?
So the first one is “Notices bulge OWO what’s this?” This is a furry meme. This one has thrown a lot of people for a loop. Luckily, people aren’t trying to attribute a lot of politics to it because it’s so confusing. But it’s a reference to furries. It’s a 10-year-old meme. It comes from an image that’s a drawing of two middle-aged, unattractive men role-playing with each other online, making sexy talk as furries. And if people don’t know, that’s kind of like a sort of sexual thing where you like imagining yourself as an anthropomorphic animal, usually a specific one…
He wrote a whole bunch of jokes. He wrote dumb internet jokes. Some of them, if it were in a movie, would be funny. But he wrote them before killing a person. That’s what’s, honestly, pretty chilling. It’s one of the details that’s hard for me to get past.
So this can be interpreted as a pro-furry joke or an anti-furry joke because hating furries on the internet is a big thing both in the right-wing world and in other very online spaces. But it’s also been reclaimed by furries, kind of like the word “queer.” So the point of saying all that is that an outsider trying to establish with certainty what exactly was being expressed by this message — that’s a fool’s errand. You just don’t know. We just don’t know. We’re getting a few more details, but it’s still pretty ambiguous.
Which feels similar to another casing, which said, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao.”
Exactly. That’s the fourth cartridge. And that one — again, I saw other people pick this up on the internet — for me, what it conjures is, like a grizzled law enforcement veteran, bulletproof vest, bends down in the dust to pick up a piece of evidence. And it says, “If you read this, you’re gay,” right? You’re supposed to laugh, or the image is funny. And yet he did it before killing somebody. So it’s not a strong statement about how you should vote in the midterms, that’s for sure.
What do the rest of them say?
So the second cartridge says, “Hey, Fascist! Catch!” and has these arrow symbols. It’s a reference to a video game called Helldivers 2, which is kind of like a fascist satire. The arrow symbols are what bring the biggest bomb in the game. The third cartridge is, “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao.” So that’s an old anti-fascist song, history buffs are very familiar with this…I’m told it’s a meme among anti-fascists — I have done quite a bit of reporting with them and I had never come across it. But that’s the internet, I guess… It’s become more popular because it’s in a Netflix show called Money Heist. And if you go on TikTok, you can see people doing goofy dances to it while ordering coffee. And it’s in a video game as well. But broadly, this could be taken as a left-wing anti-fascist message.
And is this what leads people to immediately say that this guy is left-wing?
That and the bulge thing, I heard Ted Cruz say it was a transgender meme, which is false.
Is there some sort of throughline in what Tyler Robinson may have written on these casings?
Well, he’s really into video games. And the dominant pose in these very online chat rooms is ironic detachment — so many layers of irony that you can’t even fully understand the author’s meaning, other than that they’re implying “we’re part of an in-group and the people outside don’t understand.”
And what do we know about the online spaces that Tyler may have lived in?
We don’t know enough. We just don’t know enough. We know he was in a few Discords at minimum.
Discord is a gaming chat platform, but you don’t have to be using a video game to use it. If you have Slack at work, or something like that, it’s kind of like that. There’s a group chat function, you can do one-on-one chats, you can talk by audio and by video. I’ve done quite a bit of reporting in these Discord servers that become cultures unto themselves. They become almost cult-like. I’ve interviewed incels who spent like 18 hours a day in their Discord server. The Discord server of white nationalists became very important evidence in a federal civil trial involving Charlottesville [and the Unite the Right rally].
How can I put this? The culture, it can become this bubble that leads to very intense groupthink. But what we’ve seen so far of his messages on Discord — and Discord did confirm that Tyler Robinson had an account — it isn’t like that.
We know he had a server with about 30 friends. They messaged him being like, “Bro, you look like these pictures of the alleged shooter.” He’s like, “My doppelganger is trying to get me in trouble. Ha ha ha. Better throw away my manifesto and exact copy rifle.” So if he was in a very political space, we have not yet seen evidence of that.
And Discord itself does not necessarily have a right lean or a left lean.
No, no, it’s not for that. And there are anti-fascist servers and communist ones and right-wing ones and fascist ones and incel ones.
The part of the culture that is unsettling is that you see in a lot of these spaces is just this nihilistic, black-pilled, ironic culture where nothing is taken seriously. Like you’re a loser if you take something seriously.
Which maybe explains why the bullet casings have a bunch of absurdist memes written all over them.
Right. Exactly. Which is how you possibly could get to the place of writing on a shell casing, “if you read this, you’re gay.”
Is the bullet casing thing becoming like the new manifesto? It’s not the first time we’ve seen this in one of these high-profile killings in the past year.
So a lot of these mass shooters or public assassinations, they reference each other. So Luigi Mangione [allegedly] wrote on three bullets, “deny, defend, depose,” a reference to how health insurance companies deny people coverage for care that they need. The first time I remember this being a big thing, specifically with messages written on the weaponry in order to be a message to not the wider world, but the circle of online people, the crowd or gang that they hung out in, was with the 2019 Christchurch shooting. That man wrote all kinds of memes all over his guns before killing 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand. That guy had been on this website, 8chan, which is now called 8kun. And…I mean, it was clear from that that he wanted to be a meme. He wrote it for that audience. … It was about speaking to people on 8chan. And he did become a meme there. There are all kinds of illustrations and cartoons and memes about him there. And that’s when I started noticing it happening over and over on these weapons.
There was the recent shooting at the Annunciation School in Minnesota. That person also seems to be part of a very strange, nihilistic Discord, and they wrote a lot of messages in English but with Cyrillic letters. But yeah, this is a recurring thing, writing memes on the gun.
And is that to say that these shooters, though they may have very different politics and beliefs, are influencing each other?
Oh, definitely. They obsess over each other. The shooter [who] killed several people at a grocery store in Buffalo in 2022 — his manifesto and actions very directly referenced the Christchurch shooter.
What more did we learn about the alleged Kirk shooter from the charges yesterday?
The really fascinating thing is his texts with his significant other/roommate after the shooting.
It’s clear from the transcript that the roommate was surprised by this.
And he’s obsessed with the rifle that was his grandfather’s rifle, and particularly that his father will be angry if he has lost the rifle. It’s one of the other just surreal things in this exchange. You [allegedly] just killed a guy, and all he can think about is, “my dad’s gonna be so mad if I don’t bring back grandpa’s rifle.”
I think it speaks to the unreality of it all. And there’s another message that’s related to what we’ve been talking about. He says, “Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see, ‘notices bulge, uwu’ on Fox News, I might have a stroke.”
This whole incident, or at least what we know of it so far, just feels like a very uncomfortable clash of I live online versus I live in the real world.
Yes, yes. And particularly when talking to older colleagues who did not grow up online, it’s been very hard to explain. And you see it in the national discourse, too. This is not about supporting Trump, anti-Trump. It doesn’t break down into easy political motivations. Many of the young people that I have talked to who are like…locked into these worlds, they think that’s absurd, rooting for one party or another. You’re a dupe or a fool if you care about that stuff.
It’s probably helpful to clarify what we mean by these people being “very online.” It’s something very different than what a lot of us know.
Right, it’s not just like scrolling Twitter a lot and being appalled by it. Just to talk about the specific people I’ve talked to, I got really deep into this incel Discord, where people literally were spending 18 hours or more online, sometimes they go on binges, more than 24 hours, and the computer was their whole life. They’d be popping in and out of other related Discord servers, chatting, or going on camera or just going on voice.
The server that I was particularly investigating, these guys were obsessed with not being able to get laid, feeling doomed by the way they looked or their personalities, to never get a woman to have sex with them, much less have a relationship and be a normal part of society. But, well, you could start by going outside.
A guy I interviewed in southern Florida, he lived really close to the beach. But he said he’d only been a couple times. He even said to me that one time he was standing in the water looking out at the waves at the horizon and thought, “This is beautiful, but I would like it better if it were on my computer screen.”
Sometimes I’ll interview people, and we’re talking about this person [as if they’re someone] I should know, a celebrity, and I look them up and maybe it’s someone with a YouTube account with 300 subscribers. And I’m like, Why am I supposed to know about this? But it has been an object of fixation within that chat room for so much time, they forget that the outside world doesn’t think that way.
One of the reasons this meme world talk has blown up is that policymakers and normal people are wondering, How big is this world? How big is this threat? Is it poisoning the minds of young people? How do we understand the scale of it all?
Well, one way to think of it is like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, for them, the internet is the mainstream media, right? It’s not like maybe we watch the Emmys and we’re checking Twitter on the side as old millennials. But their main stuff is TikTok, Discord, for whatever they’re into.
Does that mean we can expect more of this element of absurdism, deeply layered irony in future violent extremists or shooters or gunmen? Will that be the case because of how widespread this online culture seems to be?
It kind of depends on the subculture. I did a lot of reporting on accelerationists who are trying to accelerate the collapse of society because they think it’s irredeemable. So what comes after will be something valuable, a golden age, something better than what we have now. The people I interviewed, that’s how they give themselves permission to do bad things. “I’m bringing down this corrupt society.” So all of that is permitted.
So this isn’t something that we should expect to not happen again.
Of course, there will still be people who believe in regular stuff, you know? But it is a very large contingent of online culture.
So what do we do to stop this, to combat this? Is it about isolation and loneliness? Is it about regulating online time?
You can look visually at what a lot of the memes communicate. There are a lot of depictions of lonely men who are sad, standing in the middle of a ruined society, some kind of grim atmosphere, and I think that does speak to the way people are feeling. And also like, a lot of kids who spent their critical years locked up during Covid, and it wasn’t good for their brain. I mean, even in regular life, post-Covid, I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel this way, like the work happy hour is more awkward than it used to be, than it was before Covid when people retreated from the world.
Once you stop forcing yourself to confront social anxiety, it gets bigger and bigger and I think that leads to a lot of alienation. There’s a nihilistic blackmail cult called 764, the FBI is investigating it, but they look for kids in these online spaces, convince them to send them nudes, and then blackmail these children into doing horrible things, like killing their own pets.
I’m a parent of a toddler. I just want to be like a crazy fundamentalist about my kid not going on the internet. That can be the adversity you have to overcome — a crazy mom who saw an incel shit his pants on purpose in front of her just to troll her. Like, sorry dude, you’re just not going on the internet or you’re not getting unfettered access to a phone until you’re…I don’t know, 35?
So I have these incels I first interviewed in 2018, I thought doing a story on them, maybe they would see that they’re not so hopeless if they just went outside and joined society. They were still chatting me from it four years later, but I just reached out to them during this to ask, “What’s your take?” And they’ve left. They rejoined, they have jobs, they go outside.
Some people that I thought were in like the blackest possible space have left, so it is possible. And when I go in that old Discord server, the incel one, I was scrolling up through it, all the chats were from deleted user, deleted user, deleted user. “Deleted user” being — their accounts are gone.