Media can’t understand alleged Charlie Kirk killer

Orbiting the investigation into 22-year-old American Tyler Robinson — who could face the death penalty after being charged with fatally shooting far-right YouTuber Charlie Kirk in Utah — is a mad scramble for meaning, motive and a digestible understanding of his worldview.

The only certainty we have right now is that things are uncertain — everything, that is, except for the Pynchonian nature of these times. Indeed, the more news that comes out regarding Robinson, the clearer it becomes that whatever his political leanings are, they may not run deep. There is no manifesto, no years-long paper trail, no deep-seated motivations beyond a handful of text messages.

What does appear to run deep, however, is the irony-laden, memeified, terminally online world in which the likes of both Robinson and Kirk circulated. The question is: do you notice the bulge 0w0?

Groyperfication nation

The right is attempting to paint Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin as a leftist trans-chaser, with Robinson reportedly in a relationship with his transgender housemate, and his Mormon mother telling investigators he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” in recent years. Conservative media outlets have latched on to this, blaming “transgender ideology” for Kirk’s assassination.

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Several mainstream US media outlets have rejected the framing of Robinson as a Groyper. But even if he isn’t a card-carrying member, his alleged violence and message are consistent with a mind boiled over by the borderline unfathomable rewiring of the soul via the hyper-reality of the modern internet. Indeed, the Groypers offer insight into an ironic detachment that goes unremarked upon by modern media outlets.

This “group” — keep in mind how amorphous and fluid these guys are — exists largely in response to Charlie Kirk specifically (a conflict comically known as “The Groyper Wars”, of which there are technically two), as well as to the more mainstream MAGA CHUDS like him (and Don Jr. and Ben Shapiro). The Groypers have pejoratively labelled these figures “Conservative Inc”.

The argument that Robinson is a Groyper was based mainly on the memes engraved on bullet casings — “notices bulge OwO what’s this”; “if you read this you are gay LMAO” — and what is best described as his “vibe”. This group is the avant-garde of the new fascism, but also its angry mob. Their public intellectuals and idols are not the likes of Kirk but memetic signifiers and in-jokes, their creators and thinkers forgotten, the core tenet of their preachings then baked over, burnished and brandished.

Groypers speak in codes and symbols that require a level of nerddom to interpret, a skill born from an asocial, lonely life. These are minds cooked in ways we’re yet to really grapple with, rewritten by an unchecked cannibalistic internet that incentivises attention-grabbing above all else. These methods of getting attention have passed beyond vile jokes and incomprehensible cartoons, through snuff videos and revenge porn, paedophilic hentai and marathon goon sessions, onto that joke whose punchline remains untopped: death.

‘As far as we knew he was opened up’

We live within a new psychosis, and when it pops off in “seemingly random” acts of violence, those who aren’t lip deep in it — or haven’t realised that they are — can only respond in shock and confusion. To those attuned to it, Robinson’s alleged act was as natural as sharing a GIF in a group chat.

Our media, doddering, dusty and dutifully “sensible” to the point of paralysis, are almost incapable of meeting this current moment. The instinct to separate this incident along clear lines of “left” and “right” is borne of naivety and confusion, and/or obvious cynicism and manipulation from the conservative media.

For anyone over 40 — particularly the ossified minds that make up Australian media — it is almost impossible to comprehend the circumstances in which a young adult could commit an act of senseless violence without a clearly delineated ideology underpinning it. They are being asked to parse shape-shifting hieroglyphs at a breakneck pace, and they are not equipped for it. I barely am, and I am a child of the internet.

One of the most telling insights so far into what kind of person Tyler Robinson is has been an investigation by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, formerly of The Intercept. Klippenstein talks with Robinson’s friends and asks whether he ever opened up; one friend responds, “As far as we knew he was opened up.” Elsewhere, his friends paint a picture of a fairly typical 22-year-old gamer, one who had friends, liked the outdoors, and was generally pretty normal, if quiet.

This paints a murkier picture of the nature of the killing, and the memetic response to it, and raises questions as to where and how it fits into certain trends on both the young right and left. The internet, and the overwhelmingly bleak times it both summons and promotes, has left people rabid, feral, uncompromising, and incurably poisoned — black pilled, to use alt-right parlance.

The endgame

This is the natural evolution of a virus that Charlie Kirk himself was a 10th-generation mutation of.

The YouTuber was a white nationalist, a fascist and a grifter. Some classic Kirkrrhoea includes “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people“; “the answer is yes, the baby would be delivered” (when asked whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter to pregnancy if she conceived because of rape); and, recently, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”.