The bullet casings authorities recovered during their investigation of Charlie Kirk’s killing make at least one thing clear: The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was speaking the language of memes.

“Hey Fascist! Catch!”, “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao,” and “O Bella ciao…” read some of the engravings on bullets, both used and unused, in the shooting last week. Their meanings are hard to parse — they’re ideologically inconsistent, wrapped in layers of irony and earnestness, and reference various online communities and video games.

In a text exchange with his roommate and partner, reproduced by authorities in charging documents, Robinson references the inscriptions, calling them “mostly a big meme.” “[If] I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new[s] I might have a stroke,” Robinson allegedly said.

It all suggests this act of violence, which seems to have been driven by opposition to “hate” Robinson thought Kirk was spreading as well as some left-leaning ideas, was also wrapped up in a kind of dark, nihilistic, deeply online meme culture that has been spawning, or at least inspiring, acts of violence over the last half-decade. Memes started to make more of an appearance in the killings carried out by mass shooters, beginning most notably in 2019, during attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Memes, and deeply online references, also appeared in Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of a health insurance CEO and in school shootings this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

It’s a complicated world to parse, so we turned to Elle Reeve, someone who has a history of investigating and explaining the shady corners of the internet that have started dealing serious damage in the real world. Reeve is a correspondent for CNN and the author of the book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics — all about the kinds of (mostly) men who get sucked into dark worlds online, and as she’s put it, “talk themselves into doing strange, cruel, or violent things because it all started with just jokes, man.”

Below is an excerpt of Reeve’s conversation with us, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

It’s been almost a week since Charlie Kirk was killed. What do we know at this point about his alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson?

To me, we still don’t know enough. We know that he was a young man, he is referred to as very smart and quiet by a lot of his friends that have talked to the press. He scored well in his ACT, according to a post his mom made, but he dropped out of college after the first semester. He was a big gamer — really into video games. And according to investigators, he was dating his roommate, [who they say is transgender].

The first tranche of information we got about this alleged shooter was when investigators revealed what he allegedly wrote on the bullet casings. Could you help us understand what exactly he wrote?

So the first one is “Notices bulge OWO what’s this?” This is a furry meme. This one has thrown a lot of people for a loop. Luckily, people aren’t trying to attribute a lot of politics to it because it’s so confusing. But it’s a reference to furries. It’s a 10-year-old meme. It comes from an image that’s a drawing of two middle-aged, unattractive men role-playing with each other online, making sexy talk as furries. And if people don’t know, that’s kind of like a sort of sexual thing where you like imagining yourself as an........

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