When Charlie Kirk was shot dead during an event in Utah last week, the immediate reaction was outrage. But straight away came two big searches: for the killer, and also for an explanation.
The days since have been filled with speculation and accusations, as people from across politics have looked to blame their enemies. But even days on, and with a suspect in custody, the world is nowhere near finding a motive or explanation for the killing.
Many have been suggested, and the few pieces of information released from both the shooting and the killer’s history have proven fruitful to those looking to propose their own theories. Some have suggested, though with little evidence, that the killer was a leftist, while others have pointed to indications that he might have considered himself a Groyper, a fandom arranged around Nick Fuentes, a far-right influencer who has claimed that Kirk was too moderate and whose fans have publicly clashed with him in the past.
In the wake of the shooting and with the shock and outrage still raw, many are still asking why it happened. And the answer became urgent, as people looked to blame their opponents for the violence.
Donald Trump, for instance, suggested in a video posted soon after Kirk’s death that the problem was “radical left political violence”. He pointed to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last year, despite the fact that no clear motive has been found, and the now-dead shooter’s political outlook is both unclear and seemingly contradictory.
But that pattern – of vague, contradictory political positions cloaked in an ironic posturing that means even specific statements must be distrusted – has been a growing part of a recent run of mass shootings. And it reflects a substantial strand in internet culture more broadly, among young people in an online discourse marked by posturing, competition and an aversion to saying anything specific or sincere.
Through the bloody history of the US, the public has been accustomed to mass shooters and terrorists leaving behind some often elaborate explanation of why they did it. That process has become so commonplace that the acts themselves have often been seen as partly a way of bringing attention to their perpetrators’ views; for decades, media organisations have been troubled by how to report so-called manifestos that might explain the cause of a killing without promoting their views.
Perhaps the most famous of those is Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, a 35,000-word treatise that takes issue with modern technology and the culture that has grown up around it. Kaczynski’s use of his killings to promote his views was direct: the manifesto was published in 1995, when he wrote to the Washington Post indicating that he would suspend his mail bomb campaign if it were made public.
But the years since have seen a rapid increase in the publication of those documents. Detailed and lengthy, but often confused and uncomplying, the writing left behind by killers has remained an important part of how the public comes to understand mass killings and acts of terror.
But, in recent years, those killers have left behind less clear explanations, and so the shootings themselves have become less legible. Perhaps the first clear indication of a shift was in the Christchurch shootings in 2019, where a far-right Australian man killed 51 people in a series of attacks on mosques.
The killer had livestreamed one of his shootings. But that began not with a political or other extremist statement, but rather with a shout of “subscribe to PewDiePie”, the YouTuber.
That was ostensibly ironic and nonsensical. But it was also a reference to the vlogger’s ongoing rivalry with Indian music video channel T-Series, and so had become something of a rallying cry for the far-right.
Some of the same mix of meaninglessness, irony and extreme political views appears to be present in the scant information about Tyler Robinson, the suspect in the Kirk killing. Messages on the bullets contained references to internet memes that can be read as coming from across the political spectrum, for instance.
That mirrors a more mainstream process that has seen some parts of internet culture and online societies move into an increasingly arcane way of interacting with each other. Memes are shared precisely as a way of both confirming an in-group and freezing out an out-group, with social bonds being formed from the mutual understanding that they imply/
At the same time, those Internet users often talk with intense and layered irony, allowing them to disavow any statement that might be taken seriously or literally, and laugh at the people who might be looking to hold them responsible for things they have said. That has given rise to a whole state known as “irony poisoning”, wherein people themselves might no longer be able to understand where their sincere political views begin and end.
Such ironic posturing is widespread on social media, where context clues are blurry and the easiest way to popularity can be to show that one is smarter than other people, especially if that can be done in an apparently carefree way. But the same process is particularly useful to those who hold extremist views, since they can be communicated and disavowed all at the same time.
It is in that context that a killers’ internet history, social media posts and online interests should be seen: they are the result of a shifting, unclear and intentionally confusing culture that prizes irony and being in on the joke above much else. We may never truly understand a killer who participated in and was perhaps radicalised by such a culture, since truly understanding is often the thing that must be avoided at all costs.
