Murder is mimetic. The Zodiac Killer — who murdered at least five people in Northern California in the 1960s and sent cryptic messages to the news media — inspired copycats and established a dark cultural archetype: the serial killer who leaves taunting clues for his pursuers to try to decipher. School shooters, often emerging from irony-poisoned, meme-addled online subcultures, tend to perform for one another. The same day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a 16-year-old apparent white supremacist opened fire at his Colorado high school; one of his TikToks included a picture of Natalie Rupnow, who killed two people at her Christian school in December.
Over the last 10 months or so, a frightening new pattern has emerged. First, in December, Luigi Mangione became an internet icon after allegedly assassinating the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in New York City. Messages left on the bullet casings seemingly alluded to the way insurance companies refuse coverage. The sniper who murdered Kirk left messages on his bullet casings as well, though in his case they appear to have been a macabre sort of trolling. Joshua Jahn, the 29-year-old who staged a sniper attack on an ICE field office in Dallas this week — killing a migrant detainee and injuring two others — reportedly wrote “Anti ICE” on his bullet casing. F.B.I. Director Kash Patel claims that Jahn repeatedly searched online for information about Kirk’s killing.
It is not surprising that the Trump administration would use these hideous acts as a pretext to crack down on its political enemies. Particularly since Kirk’s killing, the mood in this country has sometimes reminded me of what it felt like after Sept. 11, a combination of genuine fear and mourning, hysterical sanctimony and vicious opportunism. The Justice Department, The Times reported, has now instructed more than a half-dozen attorneys to draft plans to investigate George Soros’s Open Society Foundations for possible crimes including material support of terrorism. A frighteningly expansive new White House memorandum describes left-wing political violence as “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns” and directs federal agencies to target progressive political networks. Donald Trump was going to use the power of the presidency for vengeance no matter what, but left-wing violence has given him momentum.
As a new wave of repression sweeps over this country, it’s become difficult to have a rational discussion about the killings being used to justify it. Violence that at least looks left-wing really does appear to be on the rise. In The Atlantic, Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe wrote that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.” Yet the men committing the highest-profile left-coded killings have little discernible connection to progressive politics, on or offline. Neither Mangione, Tyler Robinson, nor Jahn were registered Democrats or, so far as we know, involved in activism of any kind. They’re less men of the left than men of the internet.
Since I’m a liberal, I imagine that this might seem like a rationalization. But no less a Republican partisan than Chris Rufo, a man who rarely misses an opportunity to demonize progressives, appears to see something similar. This week he wrote an essay called “Radical Normie Terrorism,” about both Robinson and Robin Westman, who killed two children at a Minneapolis Catholic school in August. Looking at the online spaces they inhabited, Rufo described not hubs of political radicalism, but of “memes, attitudes, copycatting, in-jokes and irony.” Jahn seems to have dwelled in a similar milieu. The journalist Ken Klippenstein, who interviewed several of Jahn’s friends, wrote, “He preferred edgy humor, video games and the message board 4chan, all of which he became increasingly steeped in as he withdrew from social life.”
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