Opinion From the Left
In the days since officials detained suspect Tyler Robinson for allegedly assassinating political influencer Charlie Kirk, polarizing discourse has appeared online as political groups try to pin the tragedy on each other:
“The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk posted.
“I can’t name, including probably like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement,” Donald Trump Jr. said on The Megyn Kelly Show on September 11.
On the other side, Jimmy Kimmel’s show was indefinitely removed from the air after he suggested Kirk’s killer was on the right: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," Kimmel said.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC after stating that the shooter may have been one of Kirk’s supporters “shooting the gun off in celebration.”
Narratives have emerged as officials investigate and release some, but not all, details exploring Robinson’s potential motives. Notably, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox revealed that Robinson’s live-in romantic partner is transfeminine, sparking commentary proposing that he may have been polarized by leftist ideologies and killed Kirk in reaction to some of Kirk’s critical beliefs around queer and trans issues. On the other hand, engravings on the bullets have led others to speculate that Robinson is a “groyper,” the name for a member of a largely online white nationalist and Christian nationalist group that follows Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has denied affiliation with the suspect and wrote on X, “My followers and I are currently being framed for the murder of Charlie Kirk by the mainstream media based on literally zero evidence.”
We may learn more about the motives behind Robinson’s actions, but until then, the rush to assign blame based on political alignment underscores the polarization rampant in the media and in our political landscape.
Whether Robinson was motivated by leftist ideologies, the beliefs of a fringe alt-right white supremacy group, or something else, what is clear is that dark, widely unexamined subcultures from the internet left a clear and unmistakable mark on his crime and several other violent acts in recent history, begging the question: What is going on online, and what happens when we can’t decipher it?
According to the FBI, the bullet engravings read:
- “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Ciao, ciao!” seeming to reference an Italian anti-fascist song
- “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” referencing an online meme that parodies furry culture
- “Hey Fascists, Catch!” – next to an up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols, referencing how to complete a bomb strike in the video game Helldivers 2; and
- “If you read this, you are gay lmao.”
Vanity Fair (Lean Left) published the article “Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean?” examining the meanings of the bullet engravings and claiming that these memes are “used by the benign and malignant alike,” making them difficult to decipher motive. For instance, though the “Bella ciao” song has connections to anti-fascist beliefs in a pre-World War II Italy, it also was recently popularized in the mainstream by the Netflix series Money Heist and the video game Helldivers 2.
The Telegraph UK (Lean Right) tied several of these engravings to alt-right ideologies, claiming that the Italian song has appeared on a Groyper playlist and that the Furry meme has been co-opted by the “extreme Right.” It also highlighted pictures of Robinson posed in mimicry of a Pepe the Frog meme, which has been used to represent alt-right groups as far back as 2016, according to BBC (Center), though the “slav squat” pose also exists as a widely-participated-in meme.
Meanwhile, some online speculators, including Fuentes and many in the comment section of an AllSides Instagram post, have used the fact that Robinson’s partner is trans to allege that Robinson must have been motivated by leftist extremism.
While society often associates Democrats and those on the left as aligned with the trans community, it isn’t quite so simple to assume that only left-wingers are associated with transgender people.
Within a variety of online subcultures, including Incels (short for involuntary celibate) and alt-right groups such as Groypers, a seemingly conflicting stance on queerness and gender by way of Femboys and Chasers has emerged. Explaining this kind of gender play is complex, nuanced, and sometimes impossible. In short, there are allegedly cisgender men in some of these communities whose fear or hatred of women has gone so far as to feminize other men in their circles in order to experience “heterosexual” relations without actually interacting with women. As obscure and absurd as it sounds, Nick Fuentes himself has joked that having sex with women is gay.
Both Vanity Fair and Foreign Policy (Center), however, reached a conclusion outside the left-right political binary, with Vanity Fair writing: “None of the phrases Robinson allegedly wrote are known code words for anything nefarious.” Vanity Fair also wrote that the engravings “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.”
Similarly, Foreign Policy wrote: “If anything can be gleaned from the memes at all, it’s the sense that the shooter could have been motivated by something far more nebulous than politics: a strain of chaotic nihilism that permeates many online subcultures.” When it comes to the allegedly racist Pepe memes, FP wrote: “So why isn’t that compelling enough evidence of a far-right motive? Because Pepe got reappropriated and he’s often still used as nothing more than a fun meme.”
Foreign Policy goes on to connect details of Robinson’s crime with those of other recent extremist violence, including the shooter who killed 49 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Like Robinson, the perpetrator of that mass shooting laced his manifesto with “references to memes and video games,” according to Vox (Left). That shooter wrote, “time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort.” The shooter at Annunciation Catholic School just a few weeks prior to Kirk’s shooting also referenced memes, such as “skibidi,” and wrote “there is no message.”
As the investigation is ongoing, information may come out suggesting Robinson was radicalized by ideologies on the far left or far right. He may also, as Vanity Fair, Foreign Policy, and others have suggested, have been influenced by nothing beyond the extremism and nihilism of internet subcultures that believe in perpetrating violence simply for the sake of chaos.
Regardless, what this assassination, and many other recent acts of violence and extremism, shows us is that the internet is a far darker, more expansive place than many of us are aware of or capable of excavating. What is particularly nefarious about the language of these groups is what Foreign Policy calls “context collapse”: these symbols, memes, and phrases float seamlessly between lighthearted, unproblematic spaces and dark, extremist groups, often unbeknownst to the general public, allowing these dog whistles to fly by unnoticed and us to be left pointing fingers at each other in the relatively moderate middle.
Vanity Fair’s article concludes, “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.” As we continue to examine bias from both officials and media in the investigation of Tyler Robinson, one thing has been made clear: we are at a loss if we continue to pretend that these internet subcultures do not have real-world implications. More and more, we are seeing chronically online beliefs take hold in offline acts of violence, and it is in our best interest to start learning the language of extremism that exists on both sides and outside the political spectrum the mainstream is familiar with.
Emily Allen is a News Editor and Bias Analyst at AllSides. She has a Left bias.
This piece was reviewed by Julie Mastrine, Director of Media Bias Ratings and Marketing at AllSides (Lean Right bias) and Henry A. Brechter, Editor-in-chief (Center bias).
