What the Messages on the Bullets of Charlie Kirk's Assassin Mean

At a press conference this morning, Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox announced that the suspected assassin of Charlie Kirk had engraved messages on several bullet casings recovered at the scene of the murder, including the bullet that killed Kirk.

The messages are a mix of what appear to be anti-fascist sentiments and irony-poisoned internet memes, in the style of what Reason‘s Jesse Walker identified in 2019 as “The Shitpost Terrorist“—a “rhetorical mixture of sincerity and sarcasm.”

Cox said the bullet that killed Kirk was engraved with the phrase:

Notices bulge OwO what’s this?

The phrase is an old copypasta meme, originally parodying furry subculture. (If you don’t know what furries are, this story is really going to be an educational moment.) OwO is an emoticon depicting a surprised face.

According to the press conference, the other etchings on the unfired bullets read:

Hey fascist! Catch! Uparrow, right arrow, three downarrow

The last sentence is a video game code from Helldivers 2, a popular cooperative shooter. Performing the combination calls down a large bomb on a target.

O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao

“Bella Ciao” is an Italian folk song that became widely adopted as an anti-fascist anthem in the decades after World War II. Younger generations are probably more aware of it because it’s frequently used on the show Money Heist.

If you read this you are gay lmao

This is a puerile joke.

The Wall Street Journal originally reported that the bullet casings were engraved with “transgender…ideology,” but that is not readily apparent.

What the messages do show is an internet-specific brand of trollish nihilism adopted by many recent shooters. For example, the 23-year-old shooter who killed two children and injured 19 others at a Minneapolis Catholic school on August 27 left a monologue on their YouTube channel that referenced Waco and Ruby Ridge, but also “Loss,” an infamous 2008 web comic that’s become one of the longest-running insider jokes on the internet.

The copycat style that has emerged is both deadly serious and a put-on, and part of the “joke” is that it’s largely inscrutable for those who haven’t marinated their brains in online culture. But it’s not original or particularly meaningful. As Walker wrote, “Reciting [memes] before you shoot people is the internet-age equivalent of murdering someone while you repeat a Saturday Night Live catchphrase.”

The post What the Messages on the Bullets of Charlie Kirk’s Assassin Mean appeared first on Reason.com.