The dark memes behind Charlie Kirk’s murder

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0:50Even before a suspect had been found and taken into custody for the murder of Charlie Kirk, Investigators found bullet casings near the gun associated with the killing, and the casings were engraved with messages. Hey fascist catch with an exclamation point. Oh, Bella, ciao, Bella, ciao, Bella, ciao, ciao, ciao. And the bulges, O-W-O, is sexual role-playing slang used by furry fanatics. So who is this guy? Messages that since then, the country has been trying to decipher, looking for clues into the alleged killer's political ideology. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London.

1:38And today on The Global Story, we speak to the BBC's social media investigations correspondent about what these messages mean to the internet, and what, if anything, they actually tell us about Charlie Kirk's murder.

2:01Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We got him. On Friday, the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, gave the public its first glimpse into how the police apprehended the suspect accused of killing Charlie Kirk. On the evening of September 11th, a family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office with information that... Investigators say that Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah, confessed to his father, but told him he'd rather take his own life than turn himself into the police. His dad then reached out to a youth pastor to talk to Tyler, and the pastor ultimately called the cops.

2:43Robinson mentioned Charlie Kirk was coming to UVU. They talked about why they didn't like him and the viewpoints that he had. The family member also stated Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate.

3:00Over the weekend, the governor went on the Sunday talk shows. Governor Cox, welcome back to meet the press. To share what else investigators had learned. We can confirm that, again, according to family and people that we're interviewing, he does come from a conservative family, but his ideology was very different than his family. And we do know that the roommate that we had originally talked about, we can confirm that that roommate is a boyfriend who is transitioning from male to female. So we know that piece. I will say that that person has been very cooperative with authorities. I should point out here, Spencer Cox is a Republican, but he's also made it a mission of his to try to combat political polarization and improve civil debate.

3:48He, in fact, partnered with a Democratic governor on this. And so that's the context in which I'm hearing his words. The why behind this, again, we're all drawing lots of conclusions and how someone like this could be radicalized. And I think that those are those are important questions for us to ask and important questions for us to answer. Cox confirmed that they still don't know why Tyler Robinson might have done this, or what might have radicalized him. But he pointed to some of the only clues officials have released, the inscriptions they found on the bullet casings. You saw that on the casings.

4:24I think, I mean, I didn't have any idea what those inscriptions, many of those inscriptions even meant. But they are, you know, certainly the memification that is happening in our society today.

4:41There are four of these bullet casings, and their inscriptions feel like they are written in code. So to help us decipher them, we are turning to our colleague, Mariana Spring. She's a social media investigations correspondent here at the BBC. Mariana, can you just talk us through, please, these bullet casing engravings one by one and sort of translate them for us? Tell us what they mean.

5:04Marianna Spring:Yeah, so even I, and I spend a lot of time online, was thinking, oh, hang on, I sort of recognise this or I kind of know where this might be from. So if we take them one by one, it genuinely is like speaking another language. The first casing that was read out had this phrase, notices, bulges, oh, oh, what's that? And this seems to be a reference to a meme that is connected to the furry subculture. What are furries? It's basically a kind of online community. I'd almost think of it as a bit more like a fandom. And it's based around animals and sort of like cartoonish, anthropomorphic animal characters.

5:47Cutesiness, basically.

5:48Marianna Spring:Kind of cutesiness, but with a sort of edge to it, maybe would be the right way of thinking about it. It's also sometimes like quite sexualised. It's very niche, I would say. And it's the kind of, you know, the furry community is one that exists on the fringes of social media. You're very unlikely to encounter this kind of language on your traditional, usual, mainstream social media platform. Instead, it's much more likely to be a forum. And within the furry community, this oh, whoa phrase is like the emoticon of a cute face. It's an emoji. Yeah, it's kind of like eyes and a mouth. Yeah. Okay.

6:28Marianna Spring:And it's sort of a way of flirting if you are in the community, but it's also used to troll or mock the furry community if you are perhaps following along with them, but not as fussed about them. I don't really understand that the furry community, when you describe the furries as a community, I don't really understand that. It's just a group of people online who have what sorts of interest? Kind of, yeah. So I think of it as like the Swifties, for example, people who love Taylor Swift. When it comes to the furries, the way they present online is very much on forums and messaging back and forth, sharing kind of like cute animal pictures and hybrid animals that are sort of like human beings, but kind of not.

7:15Marianna Spring:And then in terms of how that manifests in the real world, like they'll dress up as animals, like they'll attend conventions, like a little bit like something like Comic-Con, you know, like people who dress up as their favourite superheroes or characters, but they will dress up. And then there's a facet of this which is very sexualised and it is kind of about like people sort of fancying and liking people who dress up as animals. But it's a very unusual community. This is not like liking a football team or liking a pop star. It's like a strange place to be hanging out on the internet. Do furries in general have a problem with Charlie Kirk?

7:48Marianna Spring:Not in particular. I mean, there's quite a lot of overlap, I would say, in the kind of subculture world online. So I think what it does tell you is that the people who are engaged in these kinds of worlds online are more likely perhaps to have encountered other fringe ideas that all sit sort of simultaneously on and in these forums. And the way that these forums work is they're like threads often. So people will be debating back and forth and you almost kind of show your stripes. You show how much you are part of this world by knowing all these references. Like it is like that kind of in crowd thing.

8:24Marianna Spring:Like if you know the right phrases to use, if you know like the language, it shows that you really, really get it. It's sort of that power of like, I know something you don't know because I understand all these words and these references. which again is not to say that that's the case with the shooter in this incident. We don't actually know necessarily what he does or doesn't believe but in some ways it's almost like lots of these people who exist in these forums kind of don't believe in anything. Like their purpose and tribe is being over-internetted. Okay, so on balance I say that the first one is inconclusive.

8:57We don't know what it means.

8:58Marianna Spring:We know that it's connected to the furries and we know that it suggests he spends a lot of time online But we don't know whether it means that he does or doesn't support them because it kind of could mean either. Okay.

9:14Okay, so what's the second bullet-kissing engraving?

9:18Marianna Spring:So the second engraving says, Hey, fascist! with an exclamation mark, catch. And then it has a series of arrows. So an upwards arrow, a sideways arrow, and three down arrows. and it's really interesting because when the Utah governor Spencer Cox was asked about this he said well I think this speaks for itself this is self-explanatory and to some extent that does speak for itself hey fascist it suggests that and some people have come to this conclusion that in this case the shooter didn't like Charlie Kirk's views and perceived him to be a fascist which is some of the language that's been used particularly by the left in regards to to Charlie Kirk.

9:59Marianna Spring:However, gamers are very quick to point out that those arrows are no accident. So the arrows themselves connect to this game called Hell Divers 2. And the arrow sequences is a code that's used to summon a bomb in the game from 2024. I'm not familiar with this game. What's this game? Hell Divers 2 is like a third person shooter game, essentially. So think of it as a kind of war type game. And this arrow command is essentially one that you'd use to drop a bomb. But the game itself is often branded as a kind of satire of fascism. So it's kind of taking the mick out of fascism, which is again why this hey fascist and the arrows is not quite so straightforward perhaps as the governor was suggesting, that it means he doesn't like Charlie Kirk.

10:45Marianna Spring:It actually again could be that it's kind of like this troll thing. Can you explain what taking the mick means? Oh, sorry, to joke about, to satirise, to be making a bit of a joke. and there will be more information that comes out about why this happened and the way it happened and what the motive was. Or maybe we'll never know. But all of these clues start to point you towards someone who almost believes in nothing rather than believing in anything, which is very problematic. Is a nihilist, essentially. Basically like being a nihilist. And a lot of these people online who function in these troll communities kind of are.

11:17Like they don't have necessarily neat ideological ties.

11:24Marianna Spring:They are more complex. And this is a good example of that. Like you could interpret it, And you imagine that if you were the person who was thinking about this shooting and deciding to engrave these cases and everything else, that you would know that there will be people who will interpret Catch Fascist as I think Charlie Kirk was a fascist. That's certainly what you're hearing from some within the conservative movement here is that it's very clear what he believed in. Yeah, exactly. Whereas actually, if you then understand the depths of the references, and that's kind of the art of this trolling, is that these things aren't what they necessarily seem at face value.

12:04Marianna Spring:That's kind of how it works. The nature of this kind of troll world in these kinds of forums is it's not as straightforward as everybody would like it to be, which is everyone would like to be able to say, this is what this person believed and this is why they did it. And if we're honest, there are also people who it is useful or not useful to their own political agendas to be able to say, well, the reason this happened is because this person doesn't like this for this. And actually what's happening here is, again, this kind of further fragmentation online and in the real world with political activists of different stripes taking what they want from the messages and saying, well, this is actually what happened and this is what it means when it's steeped in meme law.

12:47Yes. Okay, so it's a sort of deliberate hall of mirrors situation.

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13:34Can we move on to engraving three, please, which to me seems like a more straightforward one to explain, but I'm prepared for the possibility you're going to tell me it's not.

13:44Marianna Spring:so this third one said oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao and it is a reference to this classic italian song bella ciao which became a very popular anti-fascist anthem when mussolini was uh the dictator in italy in the second world war in the second world war and it's become popular again recently it's one that has been used on sites like tiktok it's had loads and loads of listens on some of the really popular music streaming sites just because people have been using it to share different takes on stuff. In a leftist way? In a mixture of different ways, really. So yeah, sometimes in a leftist way, sometimes people don't really realise the political context of it for a whole range of different reasons.

14:24Marianna Spring:It's also quite popular within the gaming community. Again, there are multiple ways you can interpret this. You could interpret this as this is the alleged shooter saying, I don't like fascism and this is an anti-fascist song and I'm going to write that on the casing and then people will know that I don't like fascism. You could also interpret it as a kind of trolling move again, which is sort of saying, well, people will think I've done this because I don't like fascism, so I'm going to pick this song which has become really popular and I'll let people interpret it how they will. Perhaps of all of them, maybe it's the most straightforward and even then it's not necessarily a slam dunk of, well, this person doesn't like or does like fascism or however you want to describe it.

15:10Marianna Spring:it's actually just another hyper online reference.

15:20So we mentioned earlier that there were four bullet casing engravings. What's the last one?

15:26Marianna Spring:So the last one is, if you read this, you are gay, LMAO, so laughing my arse off, which is a very, very, very troll phrase. And that's been the general interpretation of it, that it's kind of mocking investigators who did find it. But all of these things in the round, all four of them together, if you take from them, this is someone who's spending a lot of time on the fringes of the internet, it then begs the question, well, are they part of a particular subculture? Are they part of a particular world online? And one of the suggestions that has been raised is that they could be adjacent to or part of this group called the Groypers.

16:00The shooter, Tyler Robinson, this guy was a Groyper. All I want to know right now is if Tyler Robinson is a Groyper. Unfamiliar with the term? So is I. But this is the group of people that align with Nick Fuentes. This is his group. Nick Fuentes' followers do not like Charlie Kirk.

16:21Marianna Spring:Now, the Gruypers are an alt-right group connected to Nick Fuentes. He's a very popular commentator, although perceived as being quite on the fringes, but very extreme and is referred to as alt-right. Yeah, far-right. So a lot of people have said all of these things point towards the fact that actually maybe this person was motivated by being a groypert. And that would mean, from an ideological perspective, that they almost are further right than Charlie Kirk, who holds some very right-wing views, further right than Charlie Kirk, and that this is actually kind of infighting within the alt-right of the Republican Party.

17:01Marianna Spring:Like, Charlie Kirk was much more mainstream and much more pro-Donald Trump, and compared to Nick Fuentes, he seems more moderate. And so in some areas of the online world, there's very much the feeling that there is a rivalry between Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk. Yeah, I thought he was like not allowed to go to the Turning Points events that Charlie Kirk was holding or they barred him from that of some sort. Yeah, so they're not perceived as getting on with each other. But that doesn't, again, necessarily mean that Nick Fuentes would want Charlie Kirk to not be alive anymore. I should read what he said on Twitter, which was on the 30th of September said, my followers and I are currently being framed for the murder of Charlie Kirk by the mainstream media based on literary zero evidence.

17:38Marianna Spring:After the left gunned him down, they celebrated and justified it. They said I was next. Now they're blaming me. These people are pure evil. Again, it is perfectly possible that someone who is inspired by this kind of Groyper ideology could carry out a shooting like this. And it wouldn't be that Nick Fuentes had suggested that happen or should happen. It could just be that's what a follower decided to do. But I do just think that it's, I mean, And what is so difficult as we unpick all of this now is everybody, and you heard it there in what Nick Fuentes said, everybody is picking out the bits of this that suit whatever defense or narrative that they want to push and saying, well, it shows us this.

18:15Marianna Spring:Well, it shows us that. And these engravings have given us so many clues that can be used to support different arguments. and perhaps the most difficult thing is that people can't just sit with the fact and this is the problem of the algorithmic social media online world they can't just sit with the fact that actually maybe there's not a clear ideological motive and in the kind of age of social media and the internet there are people who can be party to a whole range of quite extreme sort of subcultures and ideologies and views and not really necessarily subscribe to any of them and in some ways it would have been easier I think for a lot of people trying to process this if they'd been able to very neatly say this this is why they did it this is what they believe yeah and instead you've got sleuths picking over it who are just drawing out the bits that they want can you just explain to me please Marianne a very specific image that's being shared on the internet it's of Tyler Robinson and he's basically squatting wearing a tracksuit and for some reason i don't quite understand this is supposed to mean something about his political leanings yeah so um the engravings are not the only clues that people have been pouring over people have also been looking at pictures from what seems to be tyler robinson's mum's facebook page so there's a picture of a halloween costume that seems to show tyler robinson in a tracksuit like like an Adidas black tracksuit with a cap on.

19:44Marianna Spring:And there are people who've been suggesting, oh, hang on a second, this looks like Pepe the Frog, which is an alt-right. People might have seen it, this kind of green. But wearing an Adidas tracksuit. Yeah, I mean, I can't. These things are like weird online. No, because my kid wears that like on a weekly basis. I'm just confused. It's just like this weird online world where like none of it makes any sense. Let me just work out the best way of explaining. I don't know if you ever did this at school. You know those games you can play where you write something and then you fold over the piece of paper and then the next person writes something and you fold over the piece of paper?