Murder by Meme

Charlie Kirk’s killer imitating a pose from a “Pepe the Frog” meme. It is…suggestive.

In yesterday morning’s e-mail, I managed to mess up the link for pre-orders of the e-book version of Dictator From Day One. Here is the correct link. But remember this is only the e-book. The print edition becomes available on Wednesday.

I also linked you to my article on Donald Trump’s exploitation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I mentioned that we didn’t even know who shot him and that we might never know.

Within an hour of that, however, the shooter was in custody. It was not through any spectacular police work by the FBI. It turns out his own family suspected him, and he confessed to his dad, who helped turn him in seemingly in part to prevent him from committing suicide. It’s a sad story.

Yet the shooter’s motive still remains murky, as it often does in these cases.

So far it seems clear that Trump’s assumption that the killer was influenced by “left-wing” incitement is not supported by the facts. He certainly wasn’t doing it because he read one too many articles in The Bulwark. Not that this will stop Trump or his supporters. The one thing the right has learned from their leader is that if you repeat a lie loudly enough, over and over, you can get weak-minded people and the political media—but I repeat myself—to treat it as if it is the truth. So they’re still busy hammering away at this claim.

The most concise summary I’ve heard of what we know so far is that “Charlie Kirk Was Killed by a Meme.” The killer was immersed in a deeply weird and nihilistic online subculture, a hall of mirrors composed of internet memes with obscure and ambivalent meanings.

We still don’t have a clear motive, but we do have a slightly clearer picture of what inspired the attack. As we wrote yesterday, the shooting was obviously staged to maximize impact on social media. And according to the FBI, the attacker’s bullet casings had meme references inscribed on them.

The use of memes in political mass violence started in earnest in 2019, when a man filmed himself attacking a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Just before he started, he told viewers, “Subscribe to PewDiePie.” Months later, in Halle, Germany, an attacker livestreamed the shooting of a synagogue on Twitch. In 2022, an 18-year-old white nationalist livestreamed a shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Investigators later discovered that he was planning it openly on 4chan and Discord, calling it a “real life effort shitpost.” And in the last year, Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson with bullets that read, “deny”, “defend”, “depose.” Days later, a 15-year-old posed for a photo flashing the right-wing “ok” hand symbol before allegedly carrying out a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. And just last month, Robin Westman allegedly carried out a shooting in Minneapolis with bullets that had a range of messages from all around the political spectrum, including “I’m the woker baby why so queerious”, “skibidi” and the simplified line version of the Loss.JPG meme.

According to law enforcement, the messages on the bullet casings believed to have belonged to Robinson were equally politically confusing.

After exploring the idea that “many extremism researchers this morning are wondering if Robinson is a self-identified [right-wing] ‘groyper’”—a possibility I raised yesterday—this discussion offers an even darker conclusion.