I think we’ve tipped into Princess Diana territory now. That is, the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is now at the level of hysteria, egged on by, among others, the widow Kirk, who first delivered a statement with a whiff of Rwanda c. 1994, and then posted one of the cringiest videos I’ve seen in some time, featuring herself mourning over the body of her husband in his casket, whispering I love you while the camera got in close enough to see every detail and capture every sound.
It was awful, the sort of spectacle that makes you think, girl, do you not have one friend or close associate who could tell you what a terrible idea this is? And then you realize, no she doesn’t, and in fact, they were probably all egging her on. Because content. And branding. And reach. And engagement. Rick Perlstein, a historian for whom I have a great deal of respect, wrote on Facebook that it’s of a piece with Jackie Kennedy refusing to take off her bloodstained pink suit after her own husband was shot. I wouldn’t go that far, but if there’s even a shred of truth to it, I don’t feel the least bit terrible about my cold cinder of a heart. Empathy is the most human emotion there is, but there are still ways to kill it.
In the confusion of recent days and of the confusion still to come, here’s something smart I read Saturday. It’s by Cary Gabriel Costello, a sociology professor at UW-Milwaukee. It’s long, and I feel bad about pasting it in its entirety, but it was posted on Costello’s Facebook page, and I don’t know of any other way to share the whole thing, since many of you have left that platform, and good for you. Here’s a link to it, anyway. One thing I try to remember as a mantra when big news breaks is: More will be revealed. Also, and this is increasingly true, not everything you see, even in a legit news source, is true, or even factual. As I look at the case of Tyler Robinson from the perspective of Sunday afternoon, I see a motivation that could be comprised of political philosophy, dead-endism and a large smattering of legit mental illness, as Robinson is smack in the middle of that fraught age range when those afflictions present themselves.
But I think it has more to do with what Costello writes, and I’ll stop blathering and let you guys read it. Happy week ahead and let’s reach the end of it with our sanity intact:
Hi. I took a month off social media, but I’m back upon request to talk about the person who shot Charlie Kirk this week.
Here’s what we know: shooter Tyler Robinson comes from a family of Republicans and loved hunting with them. He was obviously very proficient with guns. He was a gamer and very online. He etched his bullet casings with trolling phrases that reflect this online cultural milieu. And while his politics may have once been mainstream conservative ones, he had become disillusioned with the Republican party—because, as he told a friend, he had come to see them as little different from the Democrats, too content with the system that he wanted to see smashed.
You will see him referred to as a “groyper.” That’s a term for the followers of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who hated Charlie Kirk for not being racist enough.
Groypers harassed Kirk at his public events for years—the so-called “Groyper Wars.” Now consider the collage of images I’ve attached to this post. In the first image, you see the classic meme pose of the groyper: wearing a tracksuit and doing the “Slavic squat.” In the middle we see alt-right meme icon Pepe the frog in the groyper costume and pose. At the right, we see shooter Tyler Robinson in the same pose and costume.
Does a photo of Tyler Robinson in his 2018 Halloween costume dressed up as a groyper meme mean that Robinson considered himself a groyper in 2025? Not necessarily. What it does show was that he was familiar with the group and portrayed himself as one of them at that time. But there is a possible clue in what he etched on one of his unspent bullet casings: the chorus to the song Bella Ciao. This song was an Italian antifacist folk song that was treated as an ironic anthem by the groypers.
I want to point out that all across the major mainstream news outlets as I write, the fact that Bella Ciao was etched by Robinson on his ammo is being presented as evidence that he was an antifascist. I’m sure that was part of the fun for Robinson. As the other messages he etched show, he loved to troll. That’s central to the whole business of the channish online inchoate masculinist clan: mock your enemies, and show proficiency with in-jokes to impress your chortling tribe while leaving the other team befuddled and confused.
The set of narratives expected about motivations by news sources and politicians are very much disconnected with the messages sent by lots of young shooters seeking fame today. Etched on one of Robinson’s bullet casings is “hey fascist—CATCH!” Almost all of the news sources I have just checked are presenting this as proof that Robinson was antifa. They are not headlining the markings on other bullet casings—most local news stories are not even mentioning the others. And that’s because they don’t fit this narrative. The one that housed the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk read, “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this?” That’s a phrase used to taunt opponents in game chats and social media, mockingly pretending that the speaker is a furry expressing sexual interest in the person being mocked. It’s very much like the phrase etched on another casing: “if you read this you are gay lmao.” The point of these etched messages was to taunt Kirk. To own him. To show dominance and prowess. This was like a video game in real life, where everyone would see how good a shot Robinson is, and those in the know would admire his memery.
But the media (Fox no less than the NY Times), and politicians, and influencers, and vast swathes of Americans unfamiliar with this online, game-flavored masculinist form of communication can’t parse any of that. They want to answer a simple question: was the shooter leftwing or rightwing? Or, since most presumed he MUST be an infuriated leftie, which flavor of “woke” were they? The immediate speculation was that Robinson must be trans. Social media are clogged with thousands of posts asserting this. The Wall Street Journal initially reported that there was evidence that was the case. And they got that “information” from federal investigators, who claimed two pieces of “evidence”. The first was that the base of the bullet casings all contained a series of stamped letters including “TRN””, which was interpreted to stand for Trans. Those were just the manufacturer’s mark; the company was Turan Ammo.
The second piece of “evidence” was an etching read “↑ → ↓ ↓ ↓”. Why that was interpreted as “pro-transgender,” I have no idea. Either FBI investigators drafting internal communications were beyond incompetent in somehow interpreting this as trans messaging, or the statement that pro-trans messages were found on the bullets was always disinformation that someone leaked to the press in order to put fuel on the fire of the hate-narrative that trans people are violently unhinged. In any case, it’s nonsensical.
In fact, that series of arrows are just representations of the controller moves used when playing the game Helldivers 2 in order to drop a giant bomb. Robinson was showing a little love to fellow gamers while signaling he was the overpowered dispenser of destruction.
Robinson’s “manifesto” here is essentially that it is Game Over for the famous Charlie Kirk, conquered by Robinson. To the extent that he has politics legible to the familiar Democrats-vs-Republicans mainstream narrative we are all way too familiar with, it is most likely that he was at least sympathetic to the far right. His Ciao Bella was a likely nod to the groypers. But it was also an attempt, along with his “hey fascist—CATCH,” to stir hatred on the more mainstream right against the left. Robinson is above all else an accelerationist. He and his ilk want a war. They want America as it stands to burn. What they believe will rise from the ashes varies, and some are black-pilled enough to hope nothing does. But they all want to blow things up.
Robinson wanted people to pore over his etched messages, so he’d be inside our heads, taking up space, getting attention. He also wanted his messages to be confusing and seem contradictory so that people would fight about what they meant. Hopefully we’d tear one another to pieces over conflicting interpretations.
The correct thing to do under the circumstances is not to feed the troll and give him what he wants: attention, social conflict, rising violence. Unfortunately, our president is not the sort of person to bring Americans together. He has declared that the left is to blame for the shooting, and anyone who critiques Kirk now that he is a martyr is fomenting terrorism. He’s not about to walk that back. And MAGA will follow his lead. If you looked around various social media in the 24 hours after the shooting, you saw thousands of people calling for actions from the banning of all leftist organizations to the extermination of Democrats to locking up all trans people in institutions.
Of course, there were also calmer heads on the right, and Republican politicians who at least acknowledged that Democratic politicians have recently been assassinated or had their houses burnt down. But the problem is that MAGA politics are not about compromise and standing up for the rights of those with differing political positions and identities. Everything happening in our national politics right now makes that clear.
Yet national reporting also shows that if there is one thing that Americans agree on right now, it is that they don’t feel safe and that something is seriously wrong with the nation. And while that’s certainly a very negative feeling, I think a lot about how we might capitalize on that and turn things around—before accelerationist, triggerhappy gloryhounds like Tyler Robinson take us all down.
I hope you are thinking about how to turn things around as well.
