When Memes Become Manifestos: The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Nihilistic Turn of Online Radicalization
Sitting at my desk this morning, scrolling through the news about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I found myself staring at my screen in a kind of bewildered horror. The 22-year-old shooter had engraved bullets with internet memes. Not political manifestos. Not ideological screeds. Memes. One of them literally read “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?” - a furry roleplay joke that’s been floating around the darker corners of the internet for over a decade.
There’s something deeply unsettling about this that goes beyond the obvious tragedy of a man losing his life. We’re witnessing the complete erosion of even the pretense of meaning behind acts of political violence. When the Unabomber wrote his manifesto, you could at least follow his twisted logic. When religious extremists carry out attacks, there’s usually some coherent (if horrifying) worldview driving them. But this? This feels like violence as performance art, stripped of everything except the desire to be “extremely online” even in the act of murder.
The other messages on the bullets tell a similar story: references to Helldivers 2 (the stratagem code for a 500kg bomb), “Bella Ciao” (the Italian anti-fascist song), and the classic “if you read this you are gay lmao” taunt that would have been at home on a 2008 message board. It’s like someone took the entire toxic stew of internet culture and distilled it into four bullet casings.
What’s particularly frustrating is watching older commentators try to make sense of this through their familiar frameworks. I saw one UK radio station confidently declare that the arrow symbols were “anti-fascist logos.” They were grasping for something recognizable, something that fit into their understanding of political violence. But that’s missing the point entirely. This isn’t about fascism or anti-fascism. It’s about the complete breakdown of coherent political thought in favor of nihilistic online performance.
The discussion threads I’ve been reading are revealing in their own way. You can see the generational divide playing out in real time. Older users are bewildered, asking how they’re supposed to explain this to their parents. Younger users are making jokes, because of course they are - this is their language, their cultural reference points being used as instruments of death. There’s something deeply sick about that familiarity.
What really gets to me is how this reflects on us as a society. We’ve somehow managed to raise a generation of young men who are so disconnected from meaning, so marinated in ironic detachment and nihilistic meme culture, that even their acts of ultimate violence are just elaborate shitposts. The shooter didn’t even seem to have a clear political motive - apparently he was a far-right “Groyper” who thought Charlie Kirk wasn’t extreme enough, but his bullets read like a greatest hits collection of internet edgelord culture.
This isn’t just about Gen Z, though that’s the easy target. This is about what we’ve all allowed the internet to become. The algorithms that drive engagement through outrage. The platforms that profit from keeping people angry and isolated. The complete commodification of human attention that’s turned political discourse into entertainment and entertainment into radicalization.
I keep thinking about something one user wrote in the discussions: “We’ve put them in a world where the only point of existing is to suffer and be ignored. This feels like an act of defiance against the hell they’ve been born into.” That cuts deep, because there’s truth in it. When you can’t afford a house, when the climate is collapsing, when political institutions seem completely captured by special interests, when your entire social life exists in digital spaces designed to make you miserable - what’s left except nihilistic performance?
The really scary part is that this might just be the beginning. If this is how political violence manifests when it’s filtered through terminal online brain poisoning, what’s next? Violence motivated entirely by going viral? Shootings planned around trending hashtags?
I don’t have answers, but I know we can’t keep pretending this is normal. We can’t keep acting like it’s acceptable for young people to be so alienated from meaning that they turn mass violence into memes. Something fundamental has broken down in how we’re raising kids, how we’re building communities, how we’re structuring society itself.
Maybe the first step is admitting that our current approach to technology and social media isn’t working. That algorithms optimized for engagement are literally driving people insane. That we need to start thinking seriously about how to rebuild genuine human connection in an increasingly digital world.
Because if we don’t, I suspect we’re going to see a lot more bullets engraved with furry memes. And that’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to write.