Why was Charlie Kirk killed? According to a charging document filed on Tuesday by prosecutors in Utah, the mother of the man suspected of the shooting said that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the past year, suddenly moving to the political left. And the shooter reportedly texted an explanation to his romantic partner — a male who identifies as a woman — for why he killed Mr. Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred.”
In the days and weeks to come, we will doubtless learn more about the suspect in Mr. Kirk’s killing. But the charging document suggests a relatively straightforward political profile and motive, especially when compared with the cryptic messages the shooter engraved on his shell casings, which were frantically mined for meaning in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Those inscriptions, the shooter told his lover after the killing, “were mostly a big meme.” He said that if he saw one of his scatological jokes mentioned on Fox News, “I might have a stroke.”
Perhaps it’s true that the opaque messages were a joke, from which his true intentions can be clearly distinguished. But when it comes to a person like this — that is to say, a young man who reportedly spent a great deal of time holed up in his apartment playing video games and using niche social media programs — I confess I have my doubts. I wonder if a legible political motive can neatly emerge from the fragmented, self-parodying, endlessly reflexive world of perpetually online discourse.
It is easy enough to imagine that this young man was radicalized. But it is also possible to see his radicalization, if that is the right word, as something post-political, a simulacrum of motive in a fantasy world.
Consider the inscriptions on the shell casings. “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” is a joke about the so-called furry subculture, whose members are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals. “Bella ciao” is the title of an Italian antifascist folk song that the shooter is more likely to have encountered in the video game “Far Cry 6” than at an Italian trade union conference in the 1950s. A series of directional arrows is said to correspond to a sequence of button maneuvers from another video game, “Helldivers 2,” followed by the slogan “hey fascist! CATCH.” “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao” is an ambiguous provocation that simultaneously engages with and mocks traditional expressions of homophobia while reclaiming something of their crude power.
These inscriptions are the quintessential stuff of online gamer-style discourse: fragments without context, seemingly private jokes, missives designed not to persuade or even to be broadly intelligible but simply to circulate. In insular internet worlds, this style of communication is the point. And it produces an epistemic fog that can obscure the meaning of even the most intentional of gestures.
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The post Why Do We Think We Know Kirk’s Shooter’s Motive? appeared first on New York Times.
