Brainrot, Not Ideology

Editor’s note: Tyler Robinson has been arrested and charged in connection with the killing of Charlie Kirk. He has not entered a plea and has not been convicted. Facts remain preliminary.

It took 33 hours between the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the announcement that a suspect had been detained by the FBI and Utah state law enforcement. In that time, theories multiplied online: was the gunman a far-left activist, a far-right extremist, even a foreign agent? Speculation spread as rapidly as the shock at the assassination itself. At one point, the Wall Street Journal even ran with an internal law-enforcement bulletin claiming that bullets had been engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology.” The paper later corrected the story after Justice Department officials urged caution. The inscriptions—phrases like “Bella Ciao,” “hey fascist, catch,” “If you read this, you are gay LMAO”—appear to be more likely lifted from gamer culture and meme forums than from any coherent political doctrine. For those immersed in that world, the references to video games are obvious. However, for newsrooms hungry for a tidy ideological narrative, they can be deeply misleading. At the time of writing, one suspect is in custody and the investigation is ongoing.

According to officials, the perpetrator is not believed to be a foreign agent. Tyler Robinson (arrested on suspicion; not convicted) has been described as “becoming political” and perhaps leaning left, but no evidence has emerged yet to indicate that he belonged to any organised group. Others believe he may have been a “groyper,” i.e., a follower of online far-right communities. Journalist Mike Rothschild, who covers groups such as QAnon, commented on X that “The online brainrot world is full of things that don’t make sense, actively contradict each other, or are hopelessly insular inside jokes. You can make references that groypers make and not be one. You can post both fascist and antifascist memes, and adhere to neither ideology.”

A lot is yet to emerge about the suspect and his alleged motivations. What we do know, per public statements and reporting, is that he is a 22-year-old from Utah, who had once held a university scholarship but dropped out after a single semester to study as an electrical apprentice at a technical college. A former classmate has described him as a quintessential “Reddit kid.” For those unfamiliar, Reddit is a sprawling hybrid social media discussion forum with a generally progressive slant (certain news forums, for example, ban links to outlets like Quillette). The arrest affidavit states that the alleged shooter corresponded with his roommate and made a joke on Discord in reference to the Kirk assassination.

Discord, like Reddit, is a chat and voice platform that is popular with gamers and has been associated with extremist communities. For example, the 2017 Charlottesville rally was organised on the platform, as leaked planning chats later showed; and the 764 accelerationist network has similarly run subgroups on both Discord and Telegram to recruit and abuse victims. Beyond the far-right’s use of Discord, there are many antifascist servers as well—public listings include several “antifascist” tags and dedicated hubs.

Whether Robinson’s online milieu tilted left may end up being beside the point. What matters is the profile: a socially adrift 22-year-old dropout searching for meaning online. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the task is not to pin a tidy ideology on the act, but to confront the scourge of online brainrot.