In a strange turn, the young man suspected of fatally shooting conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah this week may have inscribed the bullet casings with language ripped straight out of video games and internet culture.
Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox read off those engravings during a press conference yesterday. One of the inscriptions read “Hey fascist! Catch!” and included an up arrow, a right arrow and three down arrows. The reference to fascism might be why the Wall Street Journal initially published a report saying that an internal law enforcement bulletin found “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” on the suspected shooter’s ammunition.
While there may be some reason to assume this was the origin of the phrase, there is also another possible explanation. The arrows given are the same used to call in an air strike in the video game Helldivers 2, which also happens to be a satire of fascism.
Another casing read: “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao.” Some immediately interpreted this as an old anti-fascist song from Italy, but it too has links to modern-day gamer and internet culture. It was prominently used in the title Hearts of Iron IV, a historical strategy game, and Far Cry 6, a first-person shooter set in Cuba. A third inscription was perhaps even more clearly borrowed from internet: “If you read this, you are gay LMAO.”
And finally, the last inscription we know of was “notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this?” This is probably the most obscure reference of them all, but the popular website KnowYourMeme can help decipher it. The phrase is used to mock furry culture — that is, people who like to dress up in animal costumes.
So what does all this mean? It’s possible that the suspect in this case — Tyler Robinson, who is now in custody — had a political motive. It may be that he didn’t like Kirk’s ideas and speech, and decided to silence him with a lethal weapon. But the proliferation of gaming and internet culture memes on the equipment used points to a new kind of killer who is increasingly stalking American life.
We are now several decades into widespread internet access in American homes, and the suspect in this case, as a Zoomer, was raised deep in the bowels of online culture. While the FBI agents tasked with understanding this case are probably well into the ages where they would never understand what a furry is, let alone a furry meme, this young man may have felt like everyone he interacted with online or in person would naturally understand references to popular video games such as Helldivers 2. He was allegedly living a double life, one among his reportedly deeply traditionalist and religious family and another one on his computer and smartphone.
I once interviewed a former gang member in Chicago who today works to help de-radicalise extremists, and he told me that even in lone-wolf attacks the person often sees themselves as part of a large community, such as one they’ve built online. It’s possible that this suspect, by killing Kirk, believed that he was contributing to the amusement of online denizens who frequented the same spaces as him.
If you’ve spent any time within internet gamer culture, you know that it thrives on dark humour and layers of irony. But as online darkness seeps out into the real world, none of us will like what we see.