Assassins and would-be assassins have become a sickeningly common feature of our polarized political landscape, and so have our rituals in the aftermath of the assailants’ heinous acts. First come the shock and the bipartisan expressions of regret. Then, almost as instantly, come the debates: Whose side was he on? Just as often as not, the clues come from fragments of the shooter’s life on the internet. Deciphering social-media messages, private chat-room records, and Google-search histories, we hunt for ideological bread crumbs.

Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of the right-wing activist and MAGA ally Charlie Kirk, used bullets that he had engraved with phrases that revealed less about his political affiliations than his fluency in deep internet culture. One bullet said “Hey fascist! Catch!,” then included a code for dropping a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2. Another said “If you Read / This, You Are / GAY / lmao,” and a third contained an emoticon-laced message drawn from furry subculture. (The symbol is not perverse because of its origins; it’s perverse because of how gleefully and literally it was weaponized, not unlike when Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them” on Israeli artillery destined for Gaza.) Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, has said that Robinson subscribed to a “Leftist ideology.” According to court documents released on Tuesday, Robinson’s mother told investigators that he had moved to the left politically in the past year, becoming more “pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” He had also begun to date his roommate, who, in his mother’s description, was male at birth and was transitioning. Text-message exchanges quoted in the documents show Robinson telling his roommate that he had killed Kirk because he’d “had enough of his hatred.” Still, it is unclear how Robinson made the leap from disliking Kirk’s views to deciding to murder him—he wrote, chillingly, that he’d been planning the shooting for only “a bit over a week”—and the messages that Robinson left behind remain a muddle. The phrase “Bella Ciao,” engraved on one bullet, is both the title of a famous antifascist anthem and a phrase that crops up in video games. Some have pointed out that the song also appeared on a Spotify playlist associated with Groypers, a group of far-right, white-nationalist, meme-steeped internet denizens led by Nick Fuentes, who frequently attacked Kirk for not being extreme enough. In isolation, the references are vague enough to be interpreted every which way.

According to an interview that Robinson’s grandmother gave to the Daily Mail, he grew up in a conservative family that staunchly supported Trump. He attended just one semester of college before dropping out. He was registered to vote in Utah but was unaffiliated with a party and did not vote in the 2024 Presidential election. Instead, he seems to have spent time in the corners of the internet where young men can become radicalized toward violence. Like Payton Gendron, who committed a mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, Robinson left a trail of self-implicating messages on the chat-room app Discord. In one chat, he reportedly played dumb about Kirk’s murder, joking about how the suspect was his “doppelganger.” In another chat, though, he confessed to shooting Kirk, saying, “It was me,” just before going with his family to turn himself in to the police.

Whatever radicalization Robinson may have undergone online, people in his offline life seem to have failed to fully understand what was happening to him. Only he knew what ideas he was steeping himself in, and the stubborn opacity of his motivations adds to our collective despair in this moment: if, as one TikTok commentator put it, Kirk’s assassination was in some sense a “shitpost”—a nihilistic in-joke translated horribly into real-world action—then an already senseless act becomes an utterly meaningless one. Memes are incoherent by nature; it’s useless to try to make them mean more than they do. That police are now talking about furries in public is Robinson’s gruesome joke, carried out for the benefit of the online audience that he was, on some level, performing for. (In the text exchange quoted in the court documents, he writes, “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”) Robinson is not alone in this self-referentiality and crackpot mythologizing; the alleged perpetrator of a shooting at a Colorado high school posted TikToks in which he’d copied the poses of previous shooters and showed off a T-shirt that referenced the Columbine mass shooting, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Shootings have effectively become their own memes, with their own viral tropes and signifiers. No matter what political ideas Robinson may have harbored, he might ultimately be best understood as a participant in that warped online culture.

On the surface, Charlie Kirk had a very different, more traditional path to online notoriety. He made his first appearance on a Fox channel when he was seventeen years old. He rose to fame through conservative media and built his youth organization, Turning Point USA, into a thriving tool of political influence with its own PAC. Kirk had the ear of the Trump Administration and by all accounts helped to staff its ranks. Ezra Klein made the case, in a recent column, that Kirk was practicing politics the “right way,” by staging debates in which he proselytized his brand of conservatism, particularly on tours of universities. Yet Kirk leveraged a version of the same toxic online dynamics and algorithmic-attention sinkholes that can ensnare people like Robinson. He launched a regular digital broadcast, the Charlie Kirk Show, in 2019, and in 2022 created a TikTok account that gained millions of followers, stocked with clips from his show and smartphone-recorded riffs. He created a universe of content that his adherents could live within, complete with its own ideological memes. The kind of free speech and lively discourse that Kirk espoused involved spreading hateful conspiracy theories and misinformation. He shared (and later deleted) inflated human-trafficking arrest numbers plucked from 8chan, supported Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, told Taylor Swift to “submit to your husband,” and targeted prominent Black women while stoking “great replacement” fears. Kirk was not simply practicing democratic politics; he was a slick and professionalized counterpart to the online troll, someone who understood that reckless lies promulgated through viral sound bites and incendiary podcast monologues repeated ad nauseum can shape today’s public opinion, whether on college campuses or in the halls of the White House.

Now, Kirk’s assassination—caught on video, ubiquitous in our online feeds—has turbocharged the impact of his content machine. On Monday, Vice-President J. D. Vance filled in as a guest host of Kirk’s online show, broadcasting from the White House. Vance used the platform to claim, without evidence, that “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.” The Trump Administration has promised to crack down on leftist “terrorist networks,” using Kirk’s death as further justification for the unchecked targeting and silencing of its perceived enemies. A growing number of people, including a Washington Post opinion columnist and professors at Clemson University, have already been fired for publicly criticizing Kirk. Meanwhile, Kirk’s social-media accounts have posthumously gained millions of followers. On X, Senator Ted Cruz posted the kind of imagery that has aptly been labelled “slopaganda”: A.I.-generated images of Jesus embracing Kirk and of Kirk with the late Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska, who was recently stabbed to death on a train in North Carolina. The horror of Kirk’s murder will serve the demands of the content mill, stoking more outraged engagement among his preëxisting fan base. As with the epidemic of gun violence, the self-perpetuating cycle of online radicalization continues unbroken, with harrowing consequences for all sides of the political spectrum. ♦