The New Yorker:

The right-wing activist and his alleged assassin were both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement at all costs.

By Kyle Chayka

Assassins and would-be assassins have become a sickeningly common feature of our polarized political landscape, and so have our rituals in the aftermath of the assailants’ heinous acts. First come the shock and the bipartisan expressions of regret. Then, almost as instantly, come the debates: Whose side was he on? Just as often as not, the clues come from fragments of the shooter’s life on the internet. Deciphering social-media messages, private chat-room records, and Google-search histories, we hunt for ideological bread crumbs.

Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of the right-wing activist and maga ally Charlie Kirk, used bullets that he had engraved with phrases that revealed less about his political affiliations than his fluency in deep internet culture. One bullet said “Hey fascist! Catch!,” then included a code for dropping a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2. Another said “If you Read / This, You Are / GAY / lmao,” and a third contained an emoticon-laced message drawn from furry subculture. (The symbol is not perverse because of its origins; it’s perverse because of how gleefully and literally it was weaponized, not unlike when Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them” on Israeli artillery destined for Gaza.) Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, has said that Robinson subscribed to a “Leftist ideology.” According to court documents released on Tuesday, Robinson’s mother told investigators that he had moved to the left politically in the past year, becoming more “pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” He had also begun to date his roommate, who, in his mother’s description, was male at birth and was transitioning. Text-message exchanges quoted in the documents show Robinson telling his roommate that he had killed Kirk because he’d “had enough of his hatred.” Still, it is unclear how Robinson made the leap from disliking Kirk’s views to deciding to murder him—he wrote, chillingly, that he’d been planning the shooting for only “a bit over a week”—and the messages that Robinson left behind remain a muddle. The phrase “Bella Ciao,” engraved on one bullet, is both the title of a famous antifascist anthem and a phrase that crops up in video games. Some have pointed out that the song also appeared on a Spotify playlist associated with Groypers, a group of far-right, white-nationalist, meme-steeped internet denizens led by Nick Fuentes, who frequently attacked Kirk for not being extreme enough. In isolation, the references are vague enough to be interpreted every which way.

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