It has been almost a week since the assassination of the US far-right political commentator and Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk, and the political fallout is intensifying rather than abating. The possible motives of the chief suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, have become the subject of fevered debate, not just by law enforcement, but online and by politicians and commentators across the spectrum.
The Trump administration has claimed that blame for the murder sits with the “radical left” or “leftist ideology”, as Utah governor Spencer Cox put it. Trump announced plans this week to crack down on liberal organisations. Campaign groups opposing his policies may now find themselves designated as terrorist organisations or prosecuted under anti-racketeering laws.
This dangerously anti-democratic turn is predicated on a narrative for which there is so far little evidence, in which the shooter is framed as a political ideologue.
But the shooting may be better understood as something other than political: an act of performative violence, committed primarily to garner attention or for online credibility. US media reported that state voter records show Robinson, the suspect, is registered as an unaffiliated voter, while his parents are registered Republicans.
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In the immediate aftermath of the killing, reports started to emerge that slogans had been engraved on to bullet casings recovered from the scene. Initial reporting said these were “left-wing” slogans – a statement that fuelled the already febrile left/right recriminations that crowded newsfeeds and airwaves before a chief suspect had even been identified. The engravings were real, but their content was weirder than any sort of political statement. Instead, they turned out to be a set of memes, in-jokes from deep in the “very online” parts of the web, where the suspect apparently spent a lot of time. Some of them are from fringe right-wing subcultures; but they are mostly just snippets of in-group speak, morphed into a kind of internet language only really notable for its devotion to irony, humiliation, nihilism and crudeness.
Those of us familiar with the argot would have winced during the press conference about the assassination, when the official in charge had to read out these lines, which included a sexual joke about a “bulge”, the acronym “LMAO” and a series of arrow emojis (instructions, it turns out, for a move in a video game).
Perhaps that jarring juxtaposition was the point. It wasn’t so much what they said, but the fact that the jokes were read out on the evening news – that in itself was the statement. Rather than containing subtle clues about some coded political ideology, these scrawls are just as likely to have been a juvenile attempt to gain the kind of internet clout that comes with ironic meme creation and sharing. There’s probably no Unabomber manifesto to be discovered here; this is more equivalent to making the teacher read aloud the dirty joke on a dropped note.
Looking at the endless stream of graphic videos that confronted anyone searching for information about the shooting in its immediate aftermath, it’s striking how the assassination seems to have been stage-managed for maximum virality. The set-up of a college campus debate meant that it was filmed from every angle and immediately disseminated. This made it hard for social media and video platforms to do the usual whack-a-mole removal of violent images as they appear.
[ What is Discord? The gamer hangout where Charlie Kirk suspect joked about murderOpens in new window ]
This aspect of the killing prompted some to compare the shooting to the 2019 attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which left 51 people dead and was livestreamed on Facebook. Social media and video-sharing sites mobilised teams and went to extraordinary lengths to take down that video, including copies that were re-made in online world-building apps, frame by frame. In our now post-content moderation world, where many of these teams have been dismantled, it was a safe bet that at least some of the platforms would not be able to replicate that effort.
We also know the alleged perpetrator tracked the aftermath of his act with apparent glee. He watched and played along as political speculation took over the world’s timeline. According to the New York Times, he sent a stream of mostly joking messages to friends in a Discord group chat as the manhunt to identify him intensified – before any of them realised he was the suspect. As one friend said in the Discord chat once they realised that the accused had been arrested, “I truly cannot distinguish if this is for real.”
But, so far anyway, there is no manifesto, and no real ideology. There is only a kind of performative violence that risks – a risk that intensifies the more sustained the focus on the suspect – becoming a hallmark of the attention economy. We saw it in the livestreaming of January 6th, and in the filming of attacks on candidates here in Ireland. In these moments, politics is less the context for the violence than its stage.
This does not seem to be slowing the political instrumentalisation of the murder. Democratic senator Chris Murphy warned of the danger, writing on X: “The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.”
Liz Carolan writes about technology and democracy at TheBriefing.ie
