Meme Ideology
The shooter’s political leanings don’t matter. Here’s what does.
A familiar pattern of political violence in America is that once the perpetrator is identified, the media and very online people get to work dissecting that person’s digital footprint and trying to determine their politics and ideology. We do this for a number of reasons: to investigate, inform the public, conduct research, play detective, or satisfy our own morbid curiosity. There’s always a particular interest in determining whether the shooter’s views leaned left or right — as if that would somehow make the crime more or less heinous —so we can decide where to assign some kind of blame.
I hate how much I know about this. How many manifestos and online profiles of shooters I’ve consumed. I hate how well I know the beats of every news cycle because political violence in America is so commonplace. I hate the futility of it all. Most of all, I hate how each one of these crimes inspires others, and how would-be shooters are networked in a sort of depraved fandom online.
So far, the newsletter Garbage Day has come closest to describing the shooter’s potential ideology and how it fits into the broader culture. It’s worth a read if you want the details, but I want to highlight this paragraph in particular:
We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.
We obsess over the shooters to the point where we often know their names rather than the names of the people whose lives they took. But much of the time, they and the crimes they commit aren’t original. They livestream their acts of terror, and even if they don’t, the grisly videos often end up online. Their manifestos and social media function more like press kits, and frequently include the same boilerplate language in the form of copypasta and memes.
It’s a deliberate choice we make, and it doesn’t have to be this way. After the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern refused to say the shooter’s name in public, explaining that "he sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety – that is why you will never hear me mention his name." Media outlets in New Zealand also agreed to minimize spreading his ideology or adding to his notoriety in their coverage.
One thing that does stand out about the Kirk shooter is that law enforcement didn’t catch him. His family figured things out and had him turn himself in. It’s also notable that the FBI is now run by Kash Patel, himself a conspiracy monger who, a year ago, might have been spreading disinformation about the shooting rather than investigating it. That’s how much we’ve been consumed by a culture that continually allows this to happen. We put some of the worst actors responsible for creating that culture in charge.
I want to tread carefully here as I’m skeptical about the accuracy of this information. Over the weekend, a narrative has emerged that the shooter’s roommate, who is apparently cooperating with the authorities, might be a trans person. Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed a claim reported by Fox News. I still don't trust what Cox is saying. Especially since Cox already told us he prayed that the killer wouldn't be from Utah and was an immigrant. So this person's life might be ruined by complete disinformation. We don't know.
But make no mistake, the roommate who is cooperating will have their life ruined as a result. MAGA will come for them with everything they’ve got and use this potentially false narrative to come for the Trans community. Now more than ever, it’s important that we have the Trans community’s back and stand with them in solidarity.
I don’t know where we go from here. Charlie Kirk should be a wake-up call for the MAGA coalition because the violence they continually incite has now come for one of their own. It unfortunately won’t be the last time either. But given how the media are glowingly rewriting Kirk’s life and how they're choosing to ignore his lengthy history of incitement, I can only assume MAGA won’t learn the right lesson.
ICYMI
Project 2026: Trump’s Plan to Rig the Next Election (Mother Jones) This week’s must-read from reporter and voting rights expert, Ari Berman.
The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security (ProPublica) An important read that probably won’t get nearly enough attention given this week’s news.
ICE Spends Millions on Clearview AI Facial Recognition to Find People ‘Assaulting’ Officers (404 Media) "The records are unusual in that they indicate ICE is buying the technology to identify people who might clash with the agency’s officers as they continue the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts."
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Coda
Weeks like this, I always like to remind readers (and myself) how important it is to take care of ourselves and one another. We live in terrifying and unstable times. Showing up for one another and ourselves is always a good starting point when things are this unmoored. Please go gently into next week as best you can.
I’ll be back again next Sunday. Solidarity.
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Thanks Melissa. Great points about the absurdity of how we all dissect these supposed clues to try and put shooters on some long-outdated political spectrum. And of course it’s very scary the degree to which our virtual society is so alienating and alienated.
Having stumbled across this months-old post in my inbox, reading it now and seeing your mention of how MAGA will certainly leverage the murder of Charlie Kirk to attack trans people, regardless of whether the shooter was meaningfully connected to any trans person — I feel called to post an update.
Last month, the late Kirk's organization Turning Point found a new rising grifter: an undergraduate student who wrote a terrible two-page paper (Bible moralizing where what was called for was understanding of empirical data). It got a failing grade from a teaching assistant who is trans. The paper deserved the zero it got; it just wasn't good. (I say this as someone who has gotten a zero on a paper before, even when I tried hard and wasn't insulting my teacher. Zeroes are a thing that can happen.) The student was undoubtedly put up to it by her mother, Kristi Fulnecky, a lawyer for January 6 defendants. Anyway, in response to the media stunt, Chris Elston, aka Billboard Chris, said on X: "Individuals who identify as trans should be automatically disqualified from holding any position as teacher or professor." The elder Fulnecky replied: "Agreed! Proud of my daughter!"
So yeah, that's how Turning Point is attacking trans people now. One trans teacher gave a (deserved) zero to a MAGA student on a tiny writing assignment, and their rallying cry is that no trans adult should be allowed to have any teaching position anywhere, even at a university where they teach other adults by the consent of those adults who have enrolled in their course.
I'm guessing that Turning Point in particular feels that few people will dare argue with them on this, given their narrative through which they tie the mere existence of trans people to the murder of their organization's founder. It's an obviously fallacious argument — Kirk's murderer allegedly was dating a trans person, therefore the murder is the fault of all trans people, therefore all trans people should be automatically disqualified from holding jobs — yet here we are.