We really don’t know much about the Kirk shooter’s motivation except some descriptions of etchings on bullets and retracted quotes from a few people who knew him. But it is clear that he was deep into online culture, which I posted about yesterday. This analysis from Vanity Fair was good, I thought:
As of yet, little is known about Robinson’s alleged motivations or ideology. But the few details surrounding the 22-year old point toward a troubling trend: young shooter suspects who communicate primarily via obtuse memes and digitally inflected irony.
All sorts of young adults are familiar with the culture of video games, Twitch streamers, and YouTube, speaking a language completely foreign to those who do not spend as much time online. Is that language inherently sinister? No more than, say “Skibidi Toilet,” a series of crude animated shorts about toilets from which talking heads emerge. (There’s a movie in the works.) None of the phrases Robinson allegedly wrote are known code words for anything nefarious; they signal little beyond a connection to a contextless internet, where memes take on a life of their own and are used by the benign and malignant alike.
Some memes, however, aren’t so neutral. The young men who admired, and still admire, Charlie Kirk tend to be extremely online—which doesn’t necessarily mean that they all share exactly the same ideology. Internecine conflict between conservative factions is common, both on social media and at events for young conservatives. The most notable of these are the “Groyper Wars” of 2019. “Groypers” are fans of white nationalist agitator Nick Fuentes who like to hide their racism behind ironic jokes; when Kirk began making an effort to mainstream his ultra-right-wing Turning Point USA movement, Fuentes instructed them to publicly troll Kirk.
A Facebook photo in which Robinson appears to reference a Groyper meme has led to early speculation that Kirk’s killing may have been an outgrowth of these intra-far-right skirmishes. But another feature of the modern far-right is an embrace of the post-truth huckster. In these circles, it’s always possible that someone is playing a character—or will claim to be doing so, muddying the waters so no one can accuse them of having a sincere belief beyond the desire to rile up their targets. For people like this, the whole world is a forum board, where lewd public comments and real-world violence are becoming increasingly interchangeable. (Consider the messages left behind by the deceased shooter of Annunciation Catholic School, which were full of references to both other shooters and innocuous memes.)
In every respect, the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s murder are alarming for those with the understandable impulse to make some kind of sense out of terrifying events. It is true that real-life violence is the end result of our cultural coarsening. It is also important to remember that Robinson’s generation is entering public life with frames of reference that are totally foreign to its elders, regardless of individual ideology. We cannot properly comprehend the harm of bad actors or the concerns of the innocent until we have taken the time to learn their language—and sometimes, even then we won’t understand.
This, by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic hits on the same theme:
This dynamic—a young shooter who seems to have no barriers between fringe online life and the real world—has become an alarming meme unto itself. Just last week, I wrote about the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis; the shooter there was also extremely online and apparently affiliated with a number of groups that defy normal political ideologies. These groups are better thought of as fandoms—a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls. They perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder. Though these groups might adopt far-right aesthetics, the truth is that their ideology is defined by a selfish kind of nihilism. To them, murder is the ultimate act of trolling, and they want to be remembered for it.
From the little we know, Kirk’s assassin seems to differ some from this profile. He appeared to have intentionally carried out a targeted assassination rather than attempting a mass shooting—both are horrific, but they are different. And he did not take his life in the hopes of becoming a “saint” online, as many mass shooters do. But the bullet casings suggest a desire to reach an audience—and to troll the media and law enforcement tasked with trying to find a motive.
This leaves the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination in an awkward position, deprived of the certainty that so many crave. The killer’s motive is not clear yet, nor is the full political and cultural impact of Kirk’s death. And yet, as this and so many other shootings have demonstrated, none of this matters to individuals who are using the tragedy to get attention for themselves online.
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The shooters who fall into this mold implicitly understand these internet dynamics. They seek an audience, but they are also acting out to get the world—especially the online world—to respond. “If you read this you are gay lmao” is a trolly, nihilistic thing to inscribe on a bullet casing, but the point is for people to see it, for people like me to write it down so that people like you can read it and feel something, be it shock, outrage, confusion, or sadness. The shooters may not have a coherent ideology, or even be particularly politically motivated per se, but they seem to know the ecosystem they are dropping their horrific acts of violence into.
For some shooters, online communities—with all their irony-poisoning, shitposting, and feuding—are more real, or at least more meaningful, than physical ones. With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality. They know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and, crucially, amplified by the justification machine. In this way, they will get what they’re after. The violence will continue.
It’s an attitude, not an ideology. And it’s not just online:
It was Saturday, and the police had finally called for everyone to clear the park. As I filmed officers opening up a blocked street, a young man ran into view, screaming for help. He wore the khaki-and-white uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. He had been separated from them and was being chased by at least one protester. He ripped off his shirt and begged the crowd for mercy. He wasn’t actually into white power, you see.
“Barely,” he clarified to me. As he shoved his polo shirt into a plastic bag, the fear on his face settled into a smirk. “It’s kind of a fun idea,” he explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”