Notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this?
Hey, fascist! Catch ↑ → ↓↓↓
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
If you read this, you are gay lmao
Inscriptions from the bullets that killed Charlie Kirk
On 10 September 2025, Charlie Kirk, a prominent right-wing influencer and MAGA activist, was shot dead at a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University. The assassination dominated front pages around the world, not merely for its lethality, but for its symbolic weight. Another campus shooting on the same day faded into the background, but the Kirk killing stood apart, becoming a stark reminder that US political polarisation can have fatal consequences.
Yet while the political violence itself was unambiguous – direct, irreversible, and fatal – the motivation for the attack was anything but clear. The assassin, Tyler Robinson, did not leave behind a manifesto, nor did he attempt to articulate a coherent political message before or during the shooting. The closest thing to any statement of intent consisted of four phrases engraved onto four bullet casings found at the scene.
These inscriptions appeared to puzzle mainstream media outlets following the case in real time. Reports tended to mention them only in passing, resorting to vague descriptors such as ‘trolling culture in online communities’, ‘video game references’, or ‘fascist satire’. From the MAGA camp, there came furious denunciations of ‘leftist’ and ‘woke’ influences, with commentators alleging that Robinson’s experience of attending university had ‘poisoned’ a white Christian boy from a traditional Utah family. In widespread right-wing accounts, this narrative was further sensationalised by disclosure from local government officials that Robinson had an intimate relationship with a transgender roommate.
Various left-leaning commentators, meanwhile, speculated that Robinson may have been affiliated with the ‘Groypers’, a loosely organised alt-right network active since 2019, led by the far-right influencer Nick Fuentes. Unlike Turning Point USA, the Groypers are openly antisemitic. From this angle, the assassination was interpreted as a possible reaction against Kirk’s pro-Israel stance in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In truth, even for someone like me – a chronically online Gen-Z researcher of online hate speech – Robinson’s bullet inscriptions were far from self-explanatory. ‘Notices, bulges’ is commonly read as a piece of mockery drawn from online ‘furry’ role-play communities, referring to the supposed inability to conceal male genitalia – though some have suggested it targets transgender people. ‘Hey fascist! Catch’ reads more straightforwardly as an insult in the sense of ‘you fascist, take this bullet!’ Yet the sequence of arrows that follows turns out to be a bombing input command from the video game Helldivers 2. ‘Oh bella ciao’ would appear to invoke an anti-fascist tradition, borrowing from an Italian partisan song dedicated to resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War. ‘If you read this, you are gay lmao’ is, more plainly, a homophobic joke.
Taken together, these chatroom–style inscriptions offer little by the way of a coherent ideological map of Robinson’s beliefs. The anti-fascist references in particular occupy a deeply ambiguous space. In a political environment where both left and right routinely accuse each other of ‘being fascist,’ invoking Bella Ciao no longer reliably signals opposition to fascism in its literal sense. It may just as plausibly reflect a contemporary right-wing trope: that it is today’s social justice warriors, rather than the authoritarian right, who are the true fascists.
The only conclusion that can reasonably be described as ‘obvious’ is that Tyler Robinson was deeply shaped by fringe online communities. In these still poorly understood dark corners of the internet – such as 4chan, 8chan, private Discord servers, Telegram channels, Terrorgram, 764 network, and true-crime forums – this ironic and esoteric political style is not marginal but mainstream. These spaces are saturated with memes that are largely ambiguous to ordinary users: sometimes playful lines of text, sometimes deliberately grotesque images.
Even within channels and forums explicitly devoted to far-right ideology, overtly political content has become less common, while the referential density of memes has steadily increased. Shitposting, in this context, serves multiple functions at once. It signals a cynical, world-weary attitude – a cultivated coolness of having ‘seen through everything’. It also operates as a form of mutual recognition: a kind of cyber bar-room fist bump, determining who belongs and who does not.
In Robinson’s case, the logic of fringe online communities is taken to an extreme. The attack itself might be seen as a form of ‘shitposting’ rendered in lead and blood, with the bullet case inscriptions drawing on the aesthetics and logic of meme culture rather than the conventions of political messaging. For those attempting to interpret such material – whether qualitative researchers, journalists, or quantitative analysts working on natural-language-processing models – such confrontations with what Whitney Philipps and Ryan M. Milner described in their 2017 book as the ‘ambivalent Internet’ is likely to cause headaches. These texts and symbols project the unmistakable trappings of communication, signalling presence and intent. Yet, very palpably, there is no actual exchange of meaning taking place.
What Robinson’s messages reveal, alongside such cases as the widespread mimicking of the 2019 Christchurch shooting on Roblox, is what I call memeified extremism. Memeified extremism rarely conveys a coherent ideology, extended argumentation, or anything resembling deliberative back-and-forth discourse. Instead, it is fragmented and strikingly patchy – what the researcher Ana Meier has called ‘salad bar extremism’. Within extremist groups hosted on underregulated online spaces, belief systems are assembled from a heterogeneous mix of ideas: white supremacy, racism, misogyny, hostility to LGBTQIA+ people, anti-capitalism, anti-globalisation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Satanism, anarchism, and, at times, anti-fascism. These elements are frequently layered with aesthetic references – Gothic fashion, heavy metal music, Japanese anime, self-harm photography, Nazi iconography – producing an ideological collage that resists neat classification.
Yet incoherence does not imply ineffectiveness in today’s online communication. As Zizi Papacharissi observed in her analysis of Twitter during the social movements of the early 2010s, we increasingly inhabit what she titled her book: ‘Affective Publics’. Here, the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ has faded. Communities are no longer held together primarily by deliberated consensus generated from the negotiation between various social groups, but by shared atmospheres, channelled through the confirmation of each other’s emotions. This does not mean that communication without a fully-fledged ideology or carefully structured reasoning is somehow deficient. Rather, it suggests that affect itself has become a mode of connection.
This is what Sarah Ahmed describes as the ‘stickiness’ of emotion in The Cultural Politics of Emotion. In Ahmed’s telling, emotions do not reside within individuals but circulate between them, sticking to certain signs and bodies through constant repetition. In the digital gutter of 4chan or Telegram, a ‘sticky’ meme – be it a furry role-play reference or a distorted folk song – acts as an affective magnet. It doesn’t need to be understood to be felt; it only needs to circulate. As these signs travel, they accumulate emotional value and ‘stick’ to particular objects, figures, and groups. Fear, disgust, and hatred become attached through repetition, so that certain names, images, or symbols come pre-loaded with affect. This creates an affective economy where the currency is not truth, but the intensity of shared resentment.
In this sense, memes function less as arguments than as vehicles for emotional adhesion. They do not persuade so much as they bind. Each repetition reinforces the association: migrants with threat, feminists with ridicule, queerness with contamination, enemies with mockery. Over time, these emotional attachments harden into a common sense that feels immediate and self-evident, precisely because it is felt rather than reasoned. Ahmed’s insight helps explain why memeified extremism remains effective despite its ideological incoherence. What holds these communities together is not a consistency of beliefs, but the circulation of shared emotional orientations – who to fear, who to despise, and who belongs.
Multimodal social platforms provide fertile ground for a shift to such communities. Text-based communication, however informal, remains constrained by linguistic rules: grammar, syntax, and the need for at least minimal coherence. Even Donald Trump’s famously impulsive social posts rely on a degree of contextual continuity to be intelligible. Images, music and looping animations, by contrast, operate differently. Exaggerated visuals, hypnotic soundtracks, or ironic GIFs bypass deliberation altogether. Their force is immediate, visceral, and difficult to contest through argument.
It would be tempting to think of such communication as altogether new. Yet much of what we observe can be better understood as a reconfiguration of older dynamics – a point which, in my view, is essential to making sense of contemporary digital culture. Language may have become ritualised in these online spaces, but language has always been ritualised. From Judith Butler’s account of performativity, through Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, to Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the oath, scholars have long emphasised that speech does not merely transmit meaning; it performs social functions. To utter something in a particular form often matters more than the content of what is said.
Ritualisation, in this sense, reduces uncertainty within a specific group, even as it generates ambiguity for everyone else. Legal and medical professionals rely on dense technical vocabularies to fix meaning and spare interlocutors the effort of repeatedly explaining foundational assumptions. Viewed this way, memeified communication operates on a similar logic, albeit to an opposite end. While professional jargon seeks precision, the codification of memes thrives on strategic ambiguity. It resembles the use of codes in wartime: a rational strategy designed to signal alignment and establish trust within a bounded group.
Platform architecture further amplifies the incentives to communicate in this manner. Vibing – the act of sustaining a shared emotional atmosphere rather than exchanging substantial information – is not merely a cultural preference; it is a rational response to a platform-dominated communication environment. Trolling provokes reactions, reactions generate engagement, engagement yields visibility – and visibility is precisely what platforms monetise. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen bluntly testified in 2021 before the US Senate, anger is key to the platform’s growth.
If Michel Foucault’s metaphor of modern politics as a prison or Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’ suggest a world of calculated, omnipresent order, today’s political landscape might be better captured by a different image: the nightclub. In this space of spontaneous chaos, departing from any calculated order or careful arrangement of personal life, people gather and move together, immersed in a shared rhythm. The music is so loud that sustained conversation becomes impossible. Communication is reduced to shouted fragments, gestures, and fleeting signals of recognition.
The tragic implication of the nightclub metaphor lies in its ephemerality. Every party eventually ends. At some point, willingly or not, everyone must leave the dance floor. It is only then that the illusion of togetherness dissipates. Those with whom one raves or vibes are no longer bound by a shared atmosphere, because no durable connection has ever been forged through a substantial exchange of meaning. The danger is not that nothing was shared, but that what was shared cannot survive outside the noise. What remains is not solidarity, but an existential silence – not an absence of sound, but an absence of meaning.
It is perhaps in this silence that a darker possibility emerges. In the middle of the dancefloor, some may experience a moment of terrible clarity: that this form of visibility and belonging is easily revoked and destined to be forgotten. In the search for an exit from nihilism, the fantasy of the irreversible – the bullet, the blood, the engraved casing – can begin to appear as a means of forcing permanence onto an age of infinite refresh.
Ziyu Deng is a DPhil student in Information, Communication, and Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute. Sitting at the intersection between sociology and communications, her doctoral research studies the communication of online misogyny on the Chinese Internet. Her research interests also include gendered digital participation, online contentious politics, digital intimacy and AI companions, as well as digital youth culture.