Angry Planet - Assassinations Are Shitposts Now

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comPolitical assassins often have incoherent politics and Tyler Robinson is no different. The young man who killed Charlie Kirk inscribed the shell casings of his bullets with obscure memes that say less about what he believed and more about where he spent time online. Robinson isn’t alone. Earlier this year the Annunciation Church shooter showed off a rifle inscribed with similar memes pulled from the internet. The Christchurch shooter in 2019 livestreamed their killing and left behind a meme laden manifesto.So what the hell is going on? On this episode of Angry Planet, Michael Senters—a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech—has some unsatisfying answers. Senters painstakingly walks us through each message on Robinson’s bullets and explains the online spaces from whence they came.If you don’t know a gropyer from a Helldiver or have never heard “OwO” said aloud, this episode is for you.It will not make you feel better.4,000 hours in seven gamesA painfully specific explanation of every shell casing meme“It can’t be Helldivers”“This kid has probably fried his brain online.”Hearts of Iron IV’s place in online fascist discourseSon, what’s a groyper?There’s no compelling evidence Robinson was a GroyperThe terrible embarrassment of explaining memes out loudThe 10 year old meme on the shell that killed KirkConstructing an ideology here is a Sisyphian taskBeing online is about irony and performanceHow a moment in time becomes a memetic hieroglyphAssassination as performanceGamergate as a “critical junction” in the Republican partyHow GG spread the irony-poisoned posting style like a virusFilming a TikTok video at an assassinationRe-evaluating our relationship to the internetA little bit about working in a bookstoreThe charging documents drop at the end of our conversationWhat the shell casings in the assassination of Charlie Kirk do – and don't – tell usYes, It’s the Guns. It’s Also the Phones.Read the Charges Against Tyler RobinsonExclusive: Leaked Messages from Charlie Kirk AssassinThe “Notices Bulge OwO” videoThe “Loss” comicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You'll notice that this one is hitting the main feed, I think two weeks after we recorded it. You know, Angry PlanetPod.com. Go. Yeah. So I know that his steam was sort of like, or what people suspect might be his steam account has sort of been shared around. And he had a lot of time on a bunch of different games. Hell divers, he had like 400 hours, you know, assuming this is actually his account. And he had like 400 hours in hell divers, 2,000 hours in C of these.

I think he had 800 or 900 hours in Deep Rock. So the fact that he's talking about it sort of here in the Discord chats that Ken's posted. I think that maybe adds a little bit of confirmation that maybe that was actually his account. Yeah, to all of us, he seems like a simple guy who liked playing games. Yeah, see if these Deep Clark Baractic, Hell d'Evers, too. So yeah, I'm going to guess that that account that was being shared likely was his, given that those three games that his friend names here. were his like three most played games.

You know I think is so interesting about that selection of games in particular? Well, they're all, they're all multiplayer to begin with. And they're, well, they're not just multiplayer, but they're all highly collaborative. Like, you have to be working as a unit with other people to make any of those games work or be fun. Yeah, exactly. Which is interesting because. a lot of the time we would think, oh, all this time, you know, spent on video games meant he was away from people, right? He wasn't engaging with people, but you're right and saying that those three games in particular are all highly cooperative.

But I think also, right, the fact that, you know, again, if that was the Steam account, I added up so you couldn't see his entire library, right? Because it's locked behind, you know, needing to be friends with him. but he reviewed seven games and when you review a game the reviews public and it tells in the review it basically says how many hours of playtime you had when you wrote the review and you can also see how many hours

of playtime cumulatively the player has since writing the review right and so that's how I got up that's how I figured out those numbers but I did a little thing I added the collective playtime of all of those seven games and it came

up to just over 4,000 hours. And I sort of did like, well, I'm like, I wonder how many hours I have logged on all of my Steam games, cumulatively, right? So I went and did that math, and I only have maybe a couple hundred more hours than he did across all of my games, right, across a 20-year span, a slightly over a 20-year span of being on Steam. And so, you know, for me, even if he's playing these collaborative games in like another game that he clearly played was

TF2 because he had screenshots uh on profile of TF2 but where he didn't review it you couldn't see how long he'd been playing there was no sign of his uh there was no sign of his uh play time there but he clearly played that too so i was just wondering like if he has four over 4,000 hours lobbed from these seven games who knows what else he was playing and how many hours he's logged on those and for me like the fact that he logged 4,000 hours across the seven games just speaks to somebody who spent a lot of time in front of the computer,

right? And even if you're engaging with somebody sort of in a collaborative game, right? Deep Galactic or Hell Divers 2 or Sea of Thieves, it's still mediated through the screen, right? It's still mediated for the game. It's still mediated through the medium, right?

Versus like having to get up and go out into the world and touch grass, as we say, to interact with people, you know, in real life. And I do think if you're in front of a computer for that long and if all of your social interactions are primarily mediated through the screen, I think that does something to your brain, right? And it does something to how you perceive another actual human being in the world, right? Which I think then makes it easier to go and shoot somebody.

And then a couple hours later, you're joking about it on a Discord chat, right, to some of your friends. See, now I'm sweating because I'm, I was, I was looking at my Steam account as we talk. Uh-huh. And there's some ugly numbers in here. Uh, Hunt Showdown, 1,788. It's not good. I'm going to read an intro now.

Yeah. Well, it's funny because, like, you know, I was looking at my cumulative hours, but like, I all openly admit that, like, I primarily do most of my gaming on like a PlayStation and switch. right? So I'm like, sure, I have a lot of cumulative hours across the board. It's just they're, they just don't happen to be lobbed on steam, right? So, um, hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. I am here with Michael. Is it centers? And I think you already, listeners, you probably already know what we're going to be talking about today. Sir, can you introduce yourself and give us kind of your background?

Sure. So I am currently. a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech in the interdisciplinary aspect program, basically getting a PhD in political science. That's the layman's way of saying it. And specifically my research is on sort of the translation of online culture and really specifically 4chan culture into the sort of modern political sphere, right? So how did we go from a bunch of teenagers and young adults posting on 4chan back in the you know early 2000s to you know multiple government accounts

are now sharing you know essentially 4chan memes right like I could you know I specifically think the one that stands out to me the most is the White House meme that they posted in the jibli art style of like you know yep an idea of carrying away an immigrant right and it's just like that's pure fortune that is fortune distilled so how did that happen

That is a poll post. Absolutely. Like, how did we end up to where that sort of thing is appearing on an official government account, right? So that's my research. So I wanted to have you on the show because you wrote this piece. And one of my editors shared a couple different things that were being written about the Kirk assassination. And there's a lot of like hand-wringing in mainstream media and a lot of like political accusations. flying around. Everyone's kind of trying to discern what Robinson's politics are. And the thing

that's kind of struck me is that they are, I think like a lot of Americans, and quite frankly, like a lot of soul shooters, not really discernible. We want to kind of put these people into boxes. And the truth is that they have conflicting feelings and they believe a lot of different things and some of those things are weird. And this one, especially because it's like, and this is something that we've seen increasingly, like deep fried internet

shit, like deep fried meme stuff. Some of them, some of it like pretty old, weirdly. But like your piece, which kind of walks through some of the memes and then the other piece in the liberal currents that is kind of more about the death of empathy

in our culture and like what the phones are doing to us. are kind of the two things I've read that felt true and kind of helped me navigate what's going on and kind of the things that I'm feeling. But what I would like to do first is let's walk through what's on the shell casings and like, because I know that like you know what you're talking about. And a lot of other people don't.

Like let's, let's break this down. Like where this, what this stuff means and where it comes from. because I've had a couple different friends reach out to me and ask like, what the hell is Hell Divers 2? 60 hours, by the way. I didn't like that one as much as some of the others. So, like, one of the things that's on one of the casings is, hey, fascist catch this.

And then a sequence of inputs that you would use in Hell Divers 2 to, like, throw one of the largest bombs. It's like the 500 kilogram bomb. That's right. Right. So this is a video game meme. Right? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.

So I know, so to sort of explain this one, right, and I'll explain sort of like how I reacted to it when I first listened to this sort of Utah governor's press release. And, you know, I didn't know sort of in my article, I said, I didn't know what to really expect, given all the misinformation that was floating around, you know, prior to the release, you know, the Wall Street Journal ran with an article that said, oh, there's trans ideology. anti-pashist ideology on these shells, right? And the only thing that I saw from that day that could serve as a source was something from Loudor with Prouder, right? It's just like, yeah, you could definitely sort of take anything with a Louder with Prouder watermark with not just a grain of salt, but a whole spoonful. It seemed like an ATF agent that didn't understand like Shell casing manufacturers' imprints,

got a little excited and contacted Stephen Crowder. that that's what some people speculating yeah but like after the utah governor sort of announced what was on the shelves i think it's even more obvious that he just didn't understand what these memes meant and made wild assumptions based on you know pre-conceptions he had so yeah to start with the hell diverging uh meme that we started with so when i was listening and he said you know hey fascist catch this and then he read out the arrows i sat there for a moment. I'm like, those arrows. I know those arrows. I know what those are. I've typed those in before. It didn't click immediately, but I'm like, it's really recognizable. And then I was like, I was like, it can't be hell divers. Like that, like after a couple of seconds, that came to mine and I was like, I quickly just typed into hell divers and then those arrows. And sure enough, the 500 kilogram bomb popped up. And I literally just let out a groan, right?

Because at that point, it was like, oh, yep, this kid is probably. probably Friday's brain on the line, right? And so, you know, people want to point out the hey, fascist catch part, right, to say, well, that speaks to a political ideology. And the governor himself even said, oh, yeah, you know, hey, fascist, catch, that speaks for itself, right? But, like, the fact he didn't feel the need to elaborate on what the arrows meant, you know, no, this shell does not really speak for itself. And, you know, one of the things with Hell divers too that I tell people is because it's a much more sort of

like known pop cultural reference, especially for people who are older. It's essentially just a video game version of Starship Troopers. That's the way to look at it. Like the, you know, the people, the Hell diversers are playing as are exactly like the

Rico's roughnecks. Yeah, the rough necks. You know, they're very dung-ho, but also, right, the sort of satire of an authoritarian regime masking itself under the language of liberal democratic principles, right? And, you know, in Starship Troopers, you have service guarantee citizenship, right? And in Hell Divers 2, you're fighting for something called managed democracy, right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, we're a democratic society. When you go vote, the computer tells you who to vote for, but it's only

telling you that because it knows your best interest, right? It thinks for you. So it's all very satirical, right? You fight for freedom, you fight for liberty, you fight for democracy, but it's all authoritarian and it's all fascist, right? And so, one of the things with Helldivers, too, and with Starship Troopers, right, is when people joke about it, meme about it, talk about it, you sort of have to figure out if they understand it's satire or not first, right? Because a lot of people

just, they do service guarantee citizenship from Starship Troopers, and they say that full-chested, right? You know, not satirical at all. And one of the things I sort of mentioned in my MSNBC article is online culture specifically. And specifically, if you're in gaming circles, in sort of any subculture that has ties or roots to 4chan in any way, has this sort of embracing of irony, right? of like you you embrace things ironically, you say things ironically, everything is filtered through a lens of irony. So, what Caldivers 2, you know, you might, you know, yeah, you might realize that everything's going on is satirical, but you embrace the whole like, oh, yeah, we're fighting for liberty and democracy, right?

You do that ironically. And by doing that, you know, it allows you to sort of enjoy this attire while also like, you know. And enjoy the aesthetics. Yeah, and enjoy the aesthetics and enjoy the experience, right? But it can reach a point where you do that so much, the irony gets lost, right? And it becomes sincere. And, you know, that can happen a lot. And that's something that we always need to sort of look at and think about when we're talking about any sort of memes that are posted or sent out there by shooters.

who we think they're writing these things because they want to send a clear message, right? Because if you're going to go out and shoot a prominent figure, surely you must have a sincere belief that would, like, commit you to doing that, right? You can't, a lot of people think that you can't just go out and do something like this, commit such a hand-and-sat-the-violence simply to create content, right? simply to troll people, right? But I would argue that until we have more evidence one way or another, that's just as possible of an interpretation as anything on the ideological spectrum, the fact that this guy Robinson did this to create content and to create discourse. And for the laws, like they would say.

Yeah, for the laws. Yeah, to sort of put it bluntly. And if that was his goal, he's a. accomplished it, right? Because we, like, collectively, we cannot stop talking about this. And so if that was his goal, he's been very successful at it. But again, until we get more evidence and we should hopefully get more evidence as charging documents are filed and this moves into trial and into the, you know, into court, more evidence will have to sort of be made to the public. But, you know, with that means specifically, people want to point to the hey, fascist part, but that sort

misses the overall general, oh, there's a hell diver's meme at the end of this. Like, there's the fact that there's a meme at the end of it, right, means that you need to interpret anything else on it, not just on it, but all the other sort of shells in the sense of he might be doing this ironically, right? Yeah. He might have done all of this ironically. None of this is probably sincere. Yeah, he's saying it with a grin, shooting it with a grin.

Yeah. All right, let's talk about, one of the reasons I knew that you would be a good person to talk to is that when you mentioned the Bella Chow, which is in Farquist 6, you also mentioned Hearts of Iron 4. And I was like, this guy knows what's going on.

What's the deal with the Bella Chow? Yeah, so, you know, Bella Chow, that's sort of the other thing that pundits have been pointing to to be like this guy had a political motivation, you know, originally a song written and dedicated to Italian anti-fascist partisans, you know, written and produced in the 50s, but dedicated to those partisans in the, you know, in the 30s and 40s during World War II. But that, like what sort of all things online, you have something that exists in an original context, in the whole point of like memes, right? is they sort of take things and rip them from their original context, and they reiterate on them, they make new versions of them, they're remit, they're reused, they're regurgitated, and eventually they can become extremely disconnected from the original context, right?

So you specifically mentioned Farquire 6, you know, it was a very popular song in that. Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy game where you sort of re-fight World War II, right? and you can do that as any country that existed at the time. And it's very, it's very, very popular,

but also, like, there's a sort of subcurrent within parts of iron four and within any sort of, like, historical grand strategy game where, oh, yeah, there are people who play this, who,

they play it because they can play as the Nazis or play as the faction and win World War II, right? You can, you can do a run where you convert, uh, the U.S. to a fascist party and then win World War II with

them. Yeah, and then with World War II with them, you can do that with Britain with Oswald Mosley, you know, you can do it with the OG and just play as Hitler, right? And, you know, that's appealing to some people, but also but also parts of Iron 4

is well, well known for its modding scene. So for anyone who doesn't know what mods are, that's like user-generated content that, you know, adds to the original game in some way, sometimes It's very minor things. Sometimes it's very big things, total conversion. So there are many mods where it's like,

what if Germany won World War I? What if the Axis one World War II, right? There's one mod that I talk about on my, on my, it's the pen post on my blue sky, where it's what if there's a second American Civil War, right? And the whole idea is that COVID ended up being a lot worse than it was. And January 6th eventually leads to like, the United States fracturing and it's a bunch of factions all fighting each other.

And like, you can play as the Patriot Front in that mod. You can play as the Adam Wopin Division in that mod, which are two very, very far-right, you know, political groups that have embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and have called for race wars and things like that, right? So the fact that you can play as those people, right? And even if the mod developers say, oh, well, we're only doing it ironically, right? like really you're exposing people to this content it doesn't matter if you're doing that ironically or not the fact that you're opening up these you know that you're showing people who potentially don't know what patriot front is or don't know what adam often is and you're showing that to people in a context that sets them up to be the heroes right because whenever you play as a specific faction it's always through the lens of they're the ones who are in the right right if you play as like joe biden right then it's like, yeah, liberalism all the way.

It's great. It's good. But if you play as the Patriot Front or you play as Adam Woffin, then everything, you view it through their lens, right? The writing views it through their lens. And so you expose people to that stuff. And then they think, oh, yeah, I think this stuff's kind of neat, right? And then it doesn't matter if you did it ironically or not. And so with Bella Chow and Hoy 4, you know,

we don't know if you played Hoy 4 or not. But there was a lot of speculation that. like, oh, well, maybe this is a sign that he did because there was a DLC that came out that focused on Italy. And one of the things that came with it was, oh, yeah, you can get a version of Bella Chow if you pre-order this DLC. And so maybe that's how he was exposed to Bella Chow. Maybe he was exposed to it through Far Cry 6. Maybe, and this is again speculation, you know, people pointed out that, oh, there's a Brewerper playlist out there, right? and for those who might not know,

Breiper is just a term for the fans of Nick Fuentes, big far-right sort of political pundit, very sort of like in the milieu of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. That's sort of his vibe. And he and Charlie Kirk, their sort of fan bases have had beef with each other for a very long time, right?

Kirk's fan base was considered not conservative enough by Fuentes' fans' base, right? So just, if you've listened to anything, Charlie Kirk said, take that and then think about that from the mindset who thinks Kirk isn't conservative enough, right? He's a moderating force. That's what Groyper's are, really. And there's a Groyper playlist out there, apparently, I've seen it, that has a Bella Chow remix on it. And there have been a number of videos within Groyper, like, uh, telegram channels that have like Bella Chow remits videos, right? And so maybe he was exposed to it that way. But the thing

is we don't know. We don't know how he was exposed to Bella Chow. It could have been through Far Cry 6th. It could have been through the Groyford playlist. It could have been through Hoy. He could have stumbled on it on YouTube randomly somehow. Right. And, you know, the fact that he thought it was a cool song and decided to action on a shell doesn't speak to a political ideology, right? People will want to point to it and say, well, it was on a shell in a political shooting. Therefore, it must be evidence of motive, right? Of a political ideological motive. But again, looking at the Helldivers meme, right, and some of the other memes will be talking about, you have to view it through the lens of irony, right? So,

you can't assume it was sincere. And I think that's the thing a lot of people want to do. They want to assume everything on these shells has to be sincere because of the severity of the action. The destruction of context is like a big part of memes, as you said. And it feels like this shooting in a way is like taking an attempt to take that destruction of context into the real world. I have not

been compelled. I know that there's people that want to say that he's a groyper. I have not seen compelling evidence that he is. What say you? Yeah, so I'm in a similar boat. I have not seen any compelling evidence that

he was a groyper. There's this tendency among people sort of like left of center, right? If someone does a violent act, if they do something that is terminally online, like write names on shells, right?

Then there's an automatic sort of assumption that, oh, well, they have to be a gorgber then, because sort of in the colloquial, we've just sort of linked being a gorgiper to being terminally online, right? Like, for a lot of people, they're one and the same. And the way I sort of try and differentiate it is I go back to like very elementary sort of logic. And it's,

it's a conditional, right? So what I say is it is a necessary condition to be terminally online in order to be a groiper. It is not a sufficient condition, right? So if you're going to be a Groyper, you have to be terminally online, but not all terminally online people are Groypers. And like, some people just can't seem to wrap their heads around that. And not every Pepe is a Groyper. Exactly. Not every Pepe is a Groyper, because, again, memes get ripped out of context. And, like, just because the Groypers like to use that meme a lot, doesn't mean it's the only people who use that meme.

Like, I'm in Discord chats with people from who I know in high school, and we still sort of use the Pepe laughing meme on occasion. None of us are Groypers, right? So, and so, yeah, it's, there's been no real definitive evidence that these are Groyper. The, like, the thing that would say that is if he had any sort of writing either on a Discord server, on a manifesto, which has not come up, or, like, or one of his friends could speak to the fact that, like, oh, yeah, he was really anti-Semitic. He talked a lot about how he didn't like Jews, right? Like, that would be evidence towards being R. Groyper because they are extremely anti-Semitic, right? That is sort of their main ideal. through line is the Jews run everything,

the Jews are corrupting everything. And so there hasn't been any evidence of that. The only evidence that he's a Groyper is the, oh, there are Bella Chow's on like a very unpopular Gwiper playlist that has like 10 followers. And, you know, he dressed as a Gopnik one year for Halloween, right? Which again, like, very, it's a stretch. Yeah, that meme exists in more than just the Groyper. space. And so saying, yeah, these two

memes are like definitive proof he's like Royper. That's more than just a distraction, my opinion. And like, real quick, just for people that don't know, A, Pepe's a green frog that is pretty popular in a lot

of different circles online and had become synonymous with far right around 2016, but is not always in that context. There's a fat version of Pepe. that is associated with Groybers. If you've seen the picture of Tyler Robinson in a track suit doing a Slav squat,

that's the Gopnik that you're talking about, which is kind of more of like a Russian meme, sometimes an anti-Russian meme, sometimes just a Russian meme. And then there's a Pepe version of that where there's a frog version. And like, so all this stuff, it's really, it's so strange because, like, I can, I see a lot of these pictures in, like, in Discord, that I'm in and I instantly understand exactly what it is.

And like it flashes into my brain. I follow it. It's either funny or it's not, but I understand it. When you have to explain it out loud, it's so, it's hard. It's so bizarre. And you sound so, you sound exactly like what you are, which is like brain fried by internet bullshit, right? Right.

And to sort of like put a bow on the Eastier-Groyper thing, you know, I follow and I sometimes chat with Amanda Moore, who's an independent journalist, and she's, like, the go-to journalist to cover Groyper's Influentes. Like, she sort of infiltrated that group for a couple months or a year and sort of, like, wrote the best sort of analysis of that group that's out there. And she doesn't have any evidence that they're Groyper's, right? And so, like, if the expert sort of on the field says we don't have, she's not ruling it out, right? She's just saying with the evidence that's out there currently, it doesn't seem like

he's a groiper. Obviously, if new evidence emerges, you know, after charges are filed and we move to trial, then, you know, things change because the facts that are present, you know, that we know change, but with what we have currently, no one I know who has studied Groyper's in any meaningful way thinks, like, they're not willing to say, yes, definitively he was. There's the, there's, it's, it's, there's no evidence suggesting he was, basically. All right, we got two more casings to go through, right? There's only two more. Yep.

If you are reading this, you are gay LMAO. Yep. So that one. Which I feel almost was written because he knew someone was going to have to say it in a press conference. Exactly. And there's, you know, to put some levity on this whole situation, some of the best sort of memes I've seen of, this whole incident have been, you know,

people joking about FBI agents or Cash Patel or Dan Bungee, you know, picking up the shells, reading it, you know, the, if you read this, you're Gary L.O., and then dropping it a gas, right? Thinking, oh, no, I've been made gay because I've read this shell, right? Like, you know, to have a moment of levity and all this badness, like, that's a pretty funny joke. But I do sort of agree with you in saying that, like, it does feel like he might have wrote that and the last meme we'll talk about

simply because someone would either have to see it in a press release or actual officials like, you know, FBI officials, FBI agents would have to talk about it, right? Would have to have to have a PowerPoint about it, which, you know, creates content and creates, you know, for this person, probably funny in content. But this whole style of if you read this, you're gay, right? Or literally, it's a sort of gotcha meme, right, in terms of like if you read this, then you're ex, right? And that sort of follow-up can be anything depending on, like, you know, what groups you run in. And gay is a very popular one because if there's one thing people on 4chan love to do, it's to call other people gay as an insult. Right?

Like, that's the running theme on 4chan and not just on 4chan, but on sort of, like, boards like it for a very, very long time. You call someone gay or you call someone the F-sler if, you know, you don't like a thing they're doing. even if it has nothing to do with sexuality, right? It's just an insult. But, I mean, that sort of like gotcha mentality is just very popular and an irony-poisoned, you know, a landscape and a language that is sort of like dominated by gotcha culture and, you know, never embracing anything sincerely, right?

And so, you know, I think of it, you know, I went looking to see if there was an origin for it and there was a sort of like spike in popularity for that sort of thing when back in 2015 or 2016 when Drake released an album that was called If you read this It's Too Late

or if you're reading this It's Too Late People memed on that People memed on that album cover And you know Did very similar things Like if you read this You're gay

Or if you read this You know If you read this Check out my SoundCloud Right But you know There was one that I saw That just it made me

And this might be getting Two in the weeds And this might be to into my own age group sort of culture. But there's one that just says, if you read this, you've lost the game. Yeah. And so, yeah, and so like that sort of thing, right, where to sort of explain what the game is, it's just this metaphorical game that, like, a lot of people in nerdy sort of subculture

started collectively playing in like the mid-2000s, where if you think about it, if someone makes you think about it, you lose it, right? And the whole point is supposed to be you go on not losing it for as long as possible by not thinking about it. And so, like, that's like, I did that with friends in high school, right? I did that at anime conventions with people. People would, like, host whole panels just so they could get people to lose the game at the end of it, right? And so, like, that sort of gotcha, you know, style of posting, style of, like, getting people, right, has existed sort of within nerdy fandums and nerdy subcultures for a very, very long time.

And, you know, it's clear that with how terminally, not just with how termining online he was, but it's clear he was involved in nerdy fan cultures, right? The fact that, like, the memes he are referencing, the hell diver's means specifically, is from a video game. It's from a nerdy fan culture. And so, you know, he might not have known the game. That's very much something from, like, people my age. I don't know if the kids know that anymore.

But, you know, that whole sort of gotcha mentality has, has, that continues to be a thing. that online culture embraces. All right, let's talk about the last one then. This is the one that killed him, right? This is the one that killed him, I believe. There's a, again, that's just, there's just something about it that's insane to think about that. This is the shell that killed him.

So notice, you're going to make me read it. Notices, bulges, O-W-O, what's this question mark? It's a 10-year-old. It's like 10 years old, right? It's like this is an old, as far as all these memes go, this one's one of the more ancient ones. Yeah. So, so this one popularized on sort of Tumblr and 4chan back in 2014, 2015, so it is 10 years old. But it's specifically a way to make fun or poke fun at furries.

And the fact that I've had to explain what furries are to a handful of reporters this week is just something I never thought I would have to do. but furries are people who sort of like draw and write as and role play as anthropomorphize like animals right so think of like you know think of like a werewolf but instead of being like down on all fours it's like you know it's standing up tall it's still what it's bugs bunny yeah it's it's it's buds bunny it's just you know they sometimes look a little more human sometimes look a little more beastly depending on the preference of the individual right and there are conventions that furries go to, some furies have what's known as like fur suits where they like, they really embody their persona, you know, their avatar

basically. But again, I never thought I'd have to talk about this. But this whole notices bulge and it's, for me, it's never notices bulge O-W-O, right? For me, I hear it in the automata pet

it. So it's noticed U-woo, what's this? I struggled with trying to decide if I was going to say U-W or not. I'll do it. I'll say it full chest. But so, yeah, it's when you hear it online, right, and there's, you know, there's this really popular video that uses TF2. So a very popular game on Steam where Scout, one of the characters encounters are furry, right? And they say, at the very end, they say, notice is bulge.

what's this, right? And it's, that's become such a cliche, right? That is people do that as a way to sort of say like, oh, again, it was originally made to poke fun at how Furby's roleplay online, like, because they all try to be cute, they all try and be, you know, even if they're grown men, they all try to act sort of cute and sort of youngish. That's just sort of like the perception of how a furry writes, even if that's not true. And, you know, that sort of established what a, furry was all the way back in 2014, 2015, right? In sort of like popular internet culture. And that's just sort of persisted and carried forward, right? Like, there's a lot of that sort of stuff

that goes on in VR chat, right? Anyone who owns like an Oculus headset, it's a way to do chatting in a VR space where you can inhabit a virtual avatar and a lot of people lark or role play as furries in that space.

and so, you know, that sort of like memeified language, right? No one actually talks like that in real life, right? But you get on VR chat and you'll hear people joking around about that. And like, so for me, I'm pretty sure what happened. And this is speculation, but in terms of the, you know, person looking at these shells and thinking, oh, trans ideology, right? That's the one they point to you, right? Because, like, if you don't know where that sort of meme emerges from, if you don't know sort of, like, how it was originally made to poke fun at furries and how it's sort of evolved to just become very common internet parlance for a lot of people within nerdy subpulchers, then, like, I'm trying to inhabit the shoes of, like, a 40, 45-year-old, 50-year-old detective in Utah. You sees this and goes, what does this mean?

right bulge like the bulge down here right and like i can sort of see how if you're like a conservative right you have predispositions about what things could or could not mean then like it's very easy to read either maliciously or not maliciously trans ideology into that right but again there's no indication that robinson was a furry right like if he was it almost certainly would have come out by now yeah that is not a thing you can hide on your online profile there would have been a deviant art account and it would have surfaced Yeah, there would have been a DVR account. It would have popped up in some of the discord conversations that have leaked out at this point.

It just feels like, you know, if he was a furry, that would have been exposed by now, or it's supposed it would have come up by now. So, you know, again, there's this using of a mean, right? The using of the notices bulgey, what's this, where that's sort of originally meant to poke front at furries and furries sort of ironically or, rather they ironically embrace it, right? But there's no indication that he was in the furry community, right? So he wouldn't have known it from there. It's, again, one of those memes that's just become popular sort of across different fandoms in the broad sort of internet culture, that he could have pulled that from anywhere, right?

He could have watched that video on YouTube that has over 11 million views, right? And so, you know, he played TF2. if the Steam account that people are talking about is actually his there's evidence he played TF2 so he might have watched that video and then oh, notice his baldry, what's that?

That's funny. But that's still used it's used in VR chat. People still sometimes occasionally use that as a meme online to put fun at somebody. So again, there's no indication of where he originally encountered that, right?

And so trying to pin any sort of ideology on it is again, that's a Sisyphian task, right? Because it's not ideological in any inherent sense. Like, that meme has been ripped out of its context in such a complete sense that it doesn't really mean anything anymore, right? It's just a joke. Yep. It's just a complete shibboleth for being online. Exactly. All it means when you see it and you understand it is that you've been online too much. Yeah, you've been online. I've been online. I too much or you've been online for many years.

For many years. Yeah. Or you're an ancient internet dweller. So this kind of like deep fried meme bullshit has become a feature of a lot of shootings. Robinson is not

the first and not the only one. The one a couple months before this, there was a loss meme on a magazine. I talked about that. Mm-hmm. you know, Christchurch shooter streamed and his manifesto was full of memes.

There's been multiple of these. What is going on? Right. So in terms of the sort of culture that surrounds shootings, right? Especially shooters who use memes as a part of their shooting, right? There is an aspect of it. And there's a really good article. The Atlantic that talks about this.

It came out a couple of weeks ago before this shooting that talks about sort of the performance of online culture, right, as a way of signaling to an in-group that, like, I am of you, I am a part of you, and to a certain extent, like, I'm trying to elevate myself to a level of hero or a level of saint, right? And so, you know, the fact like, you know, in the Annunciation School shooting that happened a few months ago,

or like a month ago in Minnesota, right? There have been just so many shootings. year alone that it all sort of like time dilates but like yeah that's the one that had the lost meme so for those who don't know that it's a popular comic um that gets made fun of all the time where and it's not just the original lost meme right it's the it's the minimalist lost mean where instead of like the actual images it's just sticks that represent it it's become so symbolic that you can recognize it from just those right And you know what's funny is I've got a friend that, like, I would say like 50% of our output is just him tricking me into seeing a loss meme, which in a way is an evolution of the game.

It is. It really, really is where it's like, and there was this one moment that happened recently, a friend did this to me too. He sent me, and it combined two memes, right? It was, it was a Rickmorel meme. but with the way his hands were positioned on each frame, it redid the lost name, and he posted it without context. And I tried to figure out what it meant. I looked at it for a moment.

And I looked at it, and when I realized what it was, I actually gelled at my screen, and I immediately texted him. I was like, you do not understand how much I hate you right now for doing this. But it's an evolution of the gotcha culture, right? Like, that's part of it, right? And when I saw that, right, when I was like, okay, this person had the minimalist lost meme on, it wasn't even on their magazine. It was on the rifle, I believe, if I remember.

Yeah, I think you're right. And just, okay, real, real quick. So, like, early 2000s, four panel comic for four panel comic. And it was this web comic that was primarily about video games. And one day this guy released. these four panels that is this very personal story about a miscarriage. And you have to understand that for years this guy had been doing like really childish humor about video games and then suddenly this.

And then for whatever, like, it just made everybody on the internet in gaming culture just thought that this was bizarre and it became a joke. And over the years, those four panels have been rendered down. and down and down until it is almost like you've, it's been turned into a hieroglyph. Or if you see a certain number of sticks in just, like literally sticks, in just the right order,

you recognize it as the comic. But again, you have to have been on the internet for too long. And so that comic from the early 2000s ends up reduced down into a hieroglyph and put on the magazine, or put on the rifle of a shooter. Yep.

And, you know, at that point, you know, there were other references and other memes on the rifles and on the magazines. But when I saw that, immediately, I was like, you cannot trust anything this person is saying or writing. You have to view it through the runs of pure irony poison performance. And that's what it was, like, because that shooter in particular, the way they released their manifesto, right?

They wrote it, and again, this is the Annunciation School shooting in Minnesota. The way they released their manifesto, because every shooter has to have a manifesto, right? And Robinson joked about that in his Discord channel, or in his Discord chat, about, oh, I better go burn my manifesto before they find me, ha-ha. You know, they released it. It was written in faux Cyrillic, right? So Cyrillic is the strip that Russian speakers and Russian writers used, but it was in English, right? So it was actually in English, but it was written to look like Cyrillic, and they just, they would page through it slowly, page by page, page by page for about 20 minutes, right?

And like, they understood that somebody, in fact, more than one somebody, right? A lot of somebody's were going to look in that video and analyze it, frame by frame, page by page, right? and that like the act of doing that, the act of putting that out there is part of the performance, right? It's almost like I'm making you waste your time, right? Because, yeah, I might be saying some things that reveal, you know, how I ended up in this mind space in my journal. But the fact that I'm making you do they sit here and watch a 20 minute video frame by frame and have you semi-decode my journal. That's pure performance, right? And so that's one of the things that I think a lot of people who don't study this, right, or who don't know it as well, when they hear researchers or others say this act was performative, right?

This shooting was performative. They're sort of aghast because they go, how can something so violent? How can something seemingly so intentional be performative, right? And, you know, and I think that's just simply a lack of understanding of what we research is being when we say performative, right? It's not like performing a school play or performing a show for, you know, your parents at high, you know, in high school, right? It's you're performing for your in-group, right? You're performing for your perceived cultural group online. And that's actually a very common practice, right?

in like, you know, back in the day, and, you know, within church who still, people still do that through the performance of rituals, right? So, like, going to church every, like going to church and every Sunday and taking communion, that's a ritual. It's a nonviolent ritual, right, because it's replaced the act of violence with consuming bread and wine. But that's still a ritual that does a performative act, right? And these acts of violence are performative acts in that regard. They're signaling to an in-group. I am one of you, right? And it just so happens to be that this in-group, right?

This sort of culture that surrounds sort of like admiring and semi-worshipping mass shooters is one that violence is the sort of like thing that binds the community together. Not like love, not, you know, friendship or anything like that. It's the act of violence, right, through going out and committing, you know, what has mostly been. mass shootings and school shootings, but it just so happens in this case. This is, you know, a very targeted act at a singular political figure, but I've been talking about this with a couple of other people, and, you know, we can't, we obviously can't say anything definitively, but I'm slightly worried, and I won't speak for anyone else, I'll just speak for me. I'm slightly worried that what this might signal, especially if the whole purpose of doing, of doing like a mass shooting, right,

where you do all these memes is to be performative and to like generate discourse, right? Is that these people in these communities are going to look at this act and go, oh, we should target politically prominent figures now rather than going out and doing school shootings or mass shootings, simply because that generates more discourse, right? this conversation about Kirk and what this all means has stayed in the zeitgeist longer than the school shooting that happened literally the same day, right, in Colorado. That school shooting has already been basically memory old by society writ large. And so if people in these communities are sort of thinking, what's the best way to generate discourse so I can leave my mark, then there's this idea that maybe we're, start seeing more targeted political acts of violence right list, potentially across the spectrum.

Now, obviously, there are logistical issues to that. Politically important people tend to have more security than schools, but, you know, it's a worry that I have, and obviously we won't see if that pans out or not, and I really hope it doesn't pan out, right? And this isn't me saying, I hope they just keep shooting up schools, right? Like, I don't want acts of violence. to be happening at all. But we don't want this sort of evolution to occur where you have people who now think shooting up a school isn't good enough, right? It doesn't generate enough buzz.

I've got to go and try and assassinate a politician or a political pundit, right? Because that just creates more actual for acts of violence, right? Which I think is really bad. I think you're right. We don't blink anymore when there's a school shooting. It doesn't, it doesn't. it doesn't hit like it used to. But this current thing,

it has made, it has dominated the news cycle since it happened. And I, if your goal is attention and performance, like, I can't imagine that people on, you know, the pole board is not lit up in other places,

darker places, are not lit up with everyone saying, like, look how crazy this is making. everyone. You know, like that just, I think you're right. I had not had that fear until this moment, but I think you're absolutely correct. Well, I'm sorry to inflict that fear on.

It's, you know, it's a fearful time. What are you going to do? Okay, so you and I are brain poisoned. We play lots of video games. What's why, like, what do you think happens to a person that makes them go and do this? Like, we're, we've got that. of hours and things, and we're not, and we understand the memes and we're not doing this.

Yep, yep. So, like, and one of the things that I try and do is I want to make sure that we don't all become, you know, Jack Thompson's about this, right? The fact that, oh, yeah, it's the video games themselves that are causing this, right? The content within these video games are driving young people to go out and get acts of violence, right? That's been pretty definitively proven. and study after study, the actual content in video games don't actually compel people to go out and commit that acts of violence. For me, it's one, and we sort of talked about this before, we got on air, was, you know, there's this account that's allegedly the shooter's Steam account in which a Steam account is just the sort of distribution platform for games on computers these days. and, you know, it's semi-private.

You can see games that this account reviewed, and if this is his account, then there were seven games that he reviewed that collectively between them had a little over 4,000 hours of playtime, right? I think it was 4,100, 400, 4,200 hours. And, like, that is a lot of playtime for just seven games, right? He almost certainly had more than those games,

and he probably dumped hundreds of hours in those as well. And I think there's something to where if you are in front of a screen for that many hours a day, because for context, like, cumulatively, all of my Steam games combined over like a 20-year period of playing games on Steam only amounts to being a couple of hundred hours ahead of the guy, like five or six hundred hours more maybe, which, like, that sounds like a lot.

but when I have over 10 more years of experience across hundreds of more games, when that's just seven of his, like it's clear that he spent a lot of time in front of the computer rights, even from the sort of leaked Discord chats that we have now, he seems to have been on Discord often,

primarily engaging with people through Discord. And I think something happens to the way you perceive the world, to the way you perceive other people, to the way you just sort of think about things. if your reality is primarily mediated through the screen, right, through digital interactions, right? I think that lessens what you think of other people, right? I think that lessens and cheapens sort of how you view other people, view their lives,

you don't view them perhaps as real other people with, you know, other real human connections, worries, loves, thoughts, fears. but, you know, not to use, you know, the parlance that the far right likes to use, but to a certain extent, I think you start to think of other people as NPCs, right, as non-player characters in a video game, right? Like, I'm the real human. Everyone out there, everyone else out there on these digital spaces, except for, like, the other members in my party, right?

So, like, people in your Discord servers can talk too often. They're not really real, right? Or they're not as real as, like, me, my family and my friends that I talk to you, right? I do think that, like, I think something like that happens if your social reality is primarily dictated through digital interactions, right? It cheapens human life. Yeah, my, I guess my, I don't think you're wrong, but my problem with that is, but it's me. Like, I spend so much time on Discord.

And I have, I have friends. who is primarily a digital relationship, that I have maybe, maybe met like twice in real life. And I don't, like, I don't think of people that way. I hope. Yeah.

And I think part of it is what subcultures you immerse yourself into if you're sort of really deep into like 4chan, right? And the sort of cultures that have emerged from 4chan where everything's viewed through a lens of irony. Everything's viewed through a lens of irony. of sort of anti-social, I need to be edgy, I need to be sort of like, you know, I can never be sincere, being sincere is cringe, right? That, I think, plays a role in it, right? If you're sort of in that sort of milieu, right? If everything you're doing is being sort of embraced through a lens of irony, I do think that that influences things to a certain extent. But I also think, you know,

I don't know how old you are, but I'm 30, shoot, 33 now, yeah. No, 32, excuse me, I'm losing track in my own age. But, you know, I'm 32, so I sort of got socialized, right? And I mean that, like the sociological understand how to interact with other human beings way in the real world, right? Like I went to elementary school, went to sort of middle school before being on the internet became very common. And so I sort of understood, you know, I was socialized in a much more sort of like traditional in-person way, right? I think the younger generation are perhaps more predisposed towards a lessening, like a lessening of viewing other humans as actual other human beings because they are primarily.

socialized through the digital space, right? Especially post-COVID, right? Where a lot of kids, like, you know, they started either elementary school or middle school, you know, in, you know, lot down and having to go through classes in Zoom. And then, like, it's been playing catch-up ever since, like, trying to not only get them socialized, but also to get them educated. And so, you know, I think that plays a part of it. And, you know, one of the pictures that sort of has stood out to me,

you know, a lot of people have really gone through his mother's Facebook page because it was public. I don't know if she's locked it at this point, but there are a lot of pictures of them with guns, going to military bases. They were clearly, you know, a conservative family, and there's

nothing inherently wrong with that, obviously. But people want to sort of point out that, oh, they were around guns a lot, therefore he was gun nut, right? But for me, the most interesting picture was a picture the mom took when he was 10 or 11 and it's him on the computer saying, oh, he spent so much time now that he has the accessories for his computer,

he doesn't even need to interact with us, right? It was posted in 2013. And for me, it's like, well, okay, he's 10, 11, right? You're not really properly socialized at that age, right? You're still going through elementary school, maybe entering middle school. You're not really properly socialized. it's clear the mom is sort of saying he is already on the computer a lot if he's not even interacting with the family.

And he's entering the online space, right? Because the picture was posted in like Christmas 2013. He's entering online culture and online spaces right before Janergate kicks off. And, you know, that's sort of something we haven't talked about here yet. But like, Gainergate really sort of like changes online. online spaces in a very critical way, I think. And he's sort of entering, you know, online spaces right before that happens, right? Gamergate hits off in like April 2014 earnestly.

And so like, he can really, the caption is he can totally avoid us now that he got all the computer accessories he's been wanting. Yeah. And it's like December 25th or 26th, 2013, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, so that speaks to someone who was online a lot at a very young age who started to become immersed in online culture, why it as GamerGate was coming around, right?

And so I think none of those in isolation gives you an answer, but I think all of those together combined give you at least a relatively good argument about how he ended up the way he did, right? Not properly socialized, spending a lot of time on, you know, being online, potentially in spaces that become extremely toxic and antisocial after Gamergate. And then he exists within those spaces for over a decade, right? He grows up in them.

He's socialized in them. And then that's how you get someone who etches on a shell, notices bulgey, what's this? It goes and shoots a prominent political pundit, you know, with that piece of ammo. Well, I think it's, we either call it there or you stick around for another 20 minutes and we explained to Normie's what Gamergate is and why it's important. Well, I mean, I can explain Gamergate. My whole dissertation's on Gamergate, but I also don't want to. Well, it's, I sort of argue that Gamergate acts as what's known as a critical junction.

So in political science, there's this idea that societies often reach moments where internal pressures and external pressures sort of force them to go down a certain path, right? And for me, Gamergate acts as a critical junction, both for sort of 4chan culture and for the sort of Republican Party, like the American Republican Party, right? Because within Gamergate, you know, or rather within 4chan, right, at that time, they have, they've sort of just come off of winning a flame war with Tumblr. they're sort of in an ascendancy of like, we're okay, we're the primary dominant internet subculture now. But like, they've also lost

a lot of sort of like what made 4chan what it was originally because an ominous sort of found its home in 4chan first before they moved off board. And so there's this rift that sort of forms in like the cultural milieu of 4chan and the sort of far right steps into it.

Right? They step into it primarily through radicalizing younger gamers through gamer game, right? But at the same time, you're having a Republican Party that, you know, is gearing up for, you know, the 2016 election, and they're cast adrift, right? Mitt Romney lost in 2012, and he lost pretty badly. And, you know, a lot of people sort of forget about this now, but, you know, a lot of the Republicans sort of banked their hopes on, like, this sort of, like, Romney being the new face of the Republican Party, this more polite, more polished, more intellectual face, right?

And that clearly fail, right? And it failed for various reasons, the main one being like Barack Obama is just a charismatic machine, right? And like, it would be hard for any politician to beat him. But they don't know sort of where to go. And, you know, all of a sudden, people like Steve Bannon come in, he recruits Trump.

And Bannon sort of play, like, he had a whole operation about farming gold and World Warcraft, right? He knew these sort of internet subcultures. And he saw the Gamergate happen. And he said, there's some potential right there. There's some people we can bring into the case. Let's let's let's let's let's, we're doing it now. You've started.

We're doing it. If you've got the time, we're doing it. Because I do. I have them time. Okay. All right. So this is, let me try, let me attempt to succinctly explain what this is to the audience. And it's your dissertation.

I'm very curious for you to grade me on, or not that this is an accurate reading. It's 2014. Without getting into the weeds, there is an argument over a video game review that becomes the fuel for a targeted harassment campaign against primarily women,

but also video game journalists and critics. And the methods that that harassment campaign takes, are then have been replicated over and over again and the political organization that that harassment campaign used

has been replicated over and over again over the next decade and as a and like there is an overlap between like the political operators that were involved in GamerGate

and the Republican Party that comes afterwards. Is that fair? It's all the day. Okay. That's a pretty good summary. Yeah, so sort of, you know, what I was saying with the Critical Junction is essentially these two groups find useful allies in each other, right? Fortune users sort of see a way to enter the mainstream for the Republican Party and the Republican Party, primarily through like Steve Bannon and Milolynopoulos, see a way to tap into a previously politically apathetic base or a politically apathetic demographic, right, to make them part of a base.

and, you know, that's the start of that political alliance. And there's a really good book called Nemours that sort of covers that period of 4chan's history of the Gamergate happening, sort of the stuff that happens a little bit prior, Gamergate happening, and how that gets tied into the 2016 election. That's a really good book that I'd highly recommend if you want a good rundown of, you know, the specifics there. But, like, for me, like, going back to Robinson, right, and going back to that picture, and specifically the date of that picture, you know, the fact that he might have been online before that, right? The sort of picture and the comment on it from his mom implies that he was, you know, maybe on the computer, but not as often as he was now that he's got the stuff that he got for Christmas, right? You know, so the implication is he's on the computer a lot now, so much so that the mom jokes about,

oh, that he doesn't even need to come talk to us anymore. That, you know, he's entering these, he's entering an on a culture. I don't want to call it culture. He's entering sort of the online sphere, right? Right before it explodes with Gamergate, right? Because, yes, Gamerich gate starts in 4chan, but it rapidly goes to other sites, right? It gets picked up on Reddit. People start making YouTube videos about it.

And, like, it becomes, it's, it becomes a thing. it becomes a thing that even mainstream journalists report about, which is something that generally doesn't happen with Clorchan. The last time that had happened with Fulchan was to sort of talk about how anonymous started these sort of on Fiorchan boards, right?

The hacker group that did some stuff during the 2008 financial crisis. And so, you know, that was the last time Fortune got any really big prominent mainstream coverage. And the fact that the harassment campaign was so toxic, so bad,

and so potent, right? The fact that it just kept going. Like the thing with a lot of stuff on 4chan, especially back then, was like you might have a thing that happens for a day or two. But because the whole thing with 4chan is that like it's constantly generating new things, people move on, right? The fact that it was so sustained was a relatively new thing. Well, it also moved off board, right?

It did. Yeah, rapidly. So yeah, Reddit became a very popular place for it. again, people made YouTube careers off of talking about GamerGate and sort of embracing the, you know, the tagline that the movement adopted. So it wouldn't appear to be just pure misogyny was it was about ethics and game journalism, right? And that's a line that, again, was so overused. It's become a meme in and of itself, right? The fact that if you joke about wanting ethics and game journalism, you're actually just a bigot.

Right. Like that's sort of the implication of slinging that at someone these days. But, you know, the fact it moved off board and the fact that it got mainstream coverage, right, two very important things. And not only that, but it was political, right? And it shouldn't, you know, that shouldn't be lost over. This was a political thing. It was talking about how, you know, there was too much female representation in video games, right, tying it to feminism. And that's inherently political. And so the fact that, you know, a lot of sort of what 4chan prided itself on prior to Gamergate was being, was being like militantly apolitical, right? The sort of joke about poll was, right, yeah, we might have Nazis on here, but we have communists on here too. We have liberals on here.

We have anyone can come to poll and shitpost, right? And so, like, there was some actual pride in the whole war apolitical here a bit on Fortune back then. But after Gamergate, that goes out the door, right? And so that's the other thing is it taps, it takes these young men and it politicizes them, right? Or it makes them where there may have been latent politics before, it turns them on and makes them actively political. And it's this thing where like there's the kind of anti-feminist reactions. And there are group, there are these disparate. groups of content creators.

We didn't call them content creators back then, that were doing other things. There was a lot of guys that were kind of like want to be Christopher Hitchens' and want to be like Richard Dawkins that were doing doing this new atheism stuff on Reddit and on YouTube that

realized there was a big audience for this GamerGate stuff and get really big into that and kind of launch themselves on that. Milo Yanopolis, now kind of forgotten about like really gets his doing GamerGate content. Flies too close to the sun and he is where he is now. But, you know, it does, and it politically activates a lot of young gamers that were not before.

And a lot of this stuff gets rolled over this, this Chan culture, Gamergate stuff gets, these political forces get rolled over into the 2016 election in support of Trump, right? Right. And then the other thing that it sort of does, and I think this is how it sort of impacts Robinson more specifically, is it takes that anti-social irony, poison style of posting, and with Gamergate, it spreads it like a virus, right? Like, because it, like you said, it moves off board. It goes to Reddit. It goes to YouTube. It starts infiltrating various other subcultures and, and, uh, band of boards. Yeah, like suddenly Stephen Baldwin and James Woods. or posting like they've been on, like they're a 13 year old on 4chan, right? Yeah, exactly.

So like that sort of language, right? The sort of style of posting, the means that get used, the sort of humor that's involved, that goes from being niche in subcultural to being just cultural, right? It stops being subcultural and it becomes culture. And it competes with other cultures, right?

It competes with a more sort of liberal culture. It competes with, you know, intellectual culture, right? But it stops being subcultural. it becomes cultural, and I think that's important, right? Because that culture, the 4chan culture, has an edge and has an advantage when competing against other cultures online, right? Because unlike basically every other culture that was created in the real world and was ported online, it was born on the web, right? Fourchan culture was born online, you know, memes as a sort of thing gain their prominence through places like something awful and through 4chan. right, like the whole way we communicate and talk online has its origins in places like

something awful in Fortune. And so the culture that emerges from that has naturally an advantage and competing in a sort of culture war against other cultural forces online, at least. And, you know, the fact that we're now seeing, again, sort of loop back to the beginning, the fact that we're seeing government accounts posts like they're literally on Fortune, right? sort of shows that they're making a transition from being a purely online culture to having real dangerous impacts in the real world as a whole, right? Well, I think the online going offline is kind of one of the big themes for this, for this shooting for me, period. Because it does, and this is something that's in that liberal currents piece, is that for a long time, it's felt like,

Twitter's not real life, you know, that meme. Like there is the separation between reality and online. And that's breaking down. You know, the ways that we interact online really do reflect and inform the ways that we spend time in reality now. They do. They absolutely do. And I mean, there's, there are online friends that I have. have my oots on

on like blue sky and other places where you know I will make an argument about like how online is influenced and politics and they'll sort of say like we let's like come on we know Twitter's not real life we know 4chan's not real life but like that argument is

rapidly in my mind losing kind of what we said rapidly losing any sort of salience because it's becoming very clear that like yes for maybe still a majority of people Twitter is not real life, right? But for enough people, right? For enough people, Twitter is real life. For enough people, 4chan is real life. For enough people, the Q&on conspiracies that they used to see on

Facebook are real life, right? And I think the problem is there's this idea of as long as it's not a majority of people were okay, right? But I think it's becoming rapidly clear that like even, even if just five or ten percent of people sort of think, you know, there is no distinction between online and reality, that's enough to make very potent, you know, very violent changes in real life, right? Because you're taking these things online and moving them into these real world spaces and ways we haven't seen. And so, yeah, this is my roundabout way of saying, I agree with you and saying that that argument of Twitter isn't real life. It's just that's not an argument we can make anymore, right?

Like, you can grasp on to that, right? You can try and cling to it, but I think it's been a mostly disproven belief at this point. You know what really typifies this for me, I think, is the elder TikTok. Do you know what I'm talking about the Mormon guy, the Mormon influencer? Yes, yes, I know who you're talking about. Yes, so the guy who's at the Kirk shooting, who, you know, the shooting happens, and he immediately turns, I don't know if he was shooting before. but he turns on his phone

and he starts going oh my God shot the car's been shot you know the selfie mode he's got the phone up here

but people are running in screaming behind them because of course you are like you just watch someone got watch someone

get shot but he he's making content right he's making content I can't remember if he says like and subscribe he does at the very end

he's like follow elder TikTok you know here here and here there you know he's got to put those out there

but I mean like it's the that like everything is content right the fact that everything's a performance everything's a performance everything's content right so the fact that you know for and obviously for that for all those people who are running right who were who were very scared and terrified and getting out of Dodge right

nothing going on there was a performance to them right to them it was very real to the shooter and to elder TikTok it was performance right both the shooter shooting Kirk potentially and definitely for him the let me record this bit right

because oh my God I'm at an incident I need to record it for the content because what if I don't I think that does speak to the sort of like hyper real moment we live in where so much of our so much of the way we perceive reality is dictated through content

produced online and distributed to us online from all these different platforms so Has this made you re-evaluate or rethink your relationship to the internet? It has. And so, like, this specific incident hasn't, but as I've been researching, as I've been doing this research over the past number of years, it's made me sort of realize, I need to go touch grass more, right? I sort of need more community. I need more, even just digital community.

I think digital community can be good as long as it's, you know, mediated in a way where you're not generating content, right? And so what I mean by that is like, I play D&D through Discord with a bunch of friends from high school and a couple of friends from college every Sunday, right? And I think that's a good thing, right? because, hey, I can keep up with how they're doing. Oh, you know, one of them just got engaged.

One of them just bought a house, right? You know, see how they're doing. Keep in touch. And that's a good way to, you know, have a community that you can be involved in. But, like, another thing I started doing is, like, started going back to church, right? And so, like, that's a good way to get me out the door on Sunday morning. And I go to some church functions on, you know, on the occasion during the week. And, like, that gets me out the day.

gauging less online, but it also gets me talking to people who exist sort of outside my cultural age demographic, right? Like I'm talking to the nice old church ladies, right? Talking to them helps me sort of perceive how someone who's not terminally online views the world, right? So, you know, they read my MSNBC article and they were like, oh yeah, this was, they, right, this is really informative because I know nothing about this, right? And their exposure to Charlie Kirk might have been whatever they saw on the evening news, right? and so that helps me in sort of understanding that like you know yes Twitter isn't real life is an argument that doesn't hold water anymore but there are still a lot of people out there who don't sort of understand all this stuff right who Twitter is definitely not real life to them or they don't realize it's real life yet and so that helps me put things into perspective right which I think is also really really helpful and just like for me me, for the longest time, I was one of those people who thought the internet was this great thing,

this liberatory thing, this thing that, like, yeah, it might have its problems, but, you know, overall, I think it's good for sort of human progress. And I mean, the thing that really sort of got me questioning that was Christchurch, right? Because that's sort of where I enter the scene and start wanting to do research about this, because I see Christchurch, I see some of the memes that get talked about on his guns, some of the things that he said on the stream. And like, I go, I recognize that. I know that meme. Why do I know that meme?

I was like, why do I know a meme that a dude who decided to go shoot up and kill 30 people in a mosque in New Zealand? Why do I know that? Like, for me, I thought those two things should be totally separate things, right? But once I researched that and then, like, researched Breivik in Norway and started researching some of the other sort of shooters. that had sort of links to online culture, I was like, oh, this is a lot more prominent than I thought it was.

How did this all happen? And that sort of kick-started my desire to want to research all this. And so that planted the seed to get me questioning about how much time we need to be spending online and mediating and balancing the good that online brings versus the bad, the fact that it can keep us connected with people that we have very strong cherished bonds with, like friends from high school or family who live very far distances away, or connecting with fellow scholars in a field that I would have never been able to do before prior to the internet versus the sort of dehumanizing effect that some aspects of online culture can have through like irony,

poison and through these performances of sort of like nihilistic things. violence, right? So there's a balance. And right now I think the balance is way out of whack and we're seeing a lot more of the bad stuff than the good stuff. The balance is certainly out of whack. And I think that's a decent place to wrap if that works for you.

Yeah, it works for me. Let me ask you this though. Did you work with a buy counter at half price books ever? I did. So that was primarily where I worked was the buy counter. I mean, I liked work in the by counter more than, like, sorting the business section or something. Yeah, yeah. Where did you work?

If you don't mind when I'm asking, like, what part? I was in, like, where, like, which region or like which? Yeah, which I worked in, I worked in the suburbs of Dallas. So I was like out. I was like, oh, one was where I trained and then, like, working some of the big stores in there. What about you? Oh, yeah. You have the exposure to, like, the really big stores.

Oh, yeah. I worked at one in Lexington, Kentucky, actually. Okay. I only ever heard about 0-1 and how big that store was, and the fact that Texas has a lot of them, right. Well, that's where they started. That is, it is. It absolutely is where they started.

And, like, I always really enjoyed the buy-a-counter simply because you never knew what was going to come in. Like, there were just some days where it's just like, yeah, it's nothing but a bunch of grotto-y-old paperbacks. can't really do much with this. What did you all call stuff that you'd have to trash? Trash.

You just call it trash? What did you guys? What was your secret word? Grish, for John Grisham, because we got a lot of John Grishman that we had to trash. We had a lot of Patterson. Okay, gotcha. So, yeah, for us, it was,

whenever we were talking at the bycounter, it was like, oh, can you take out the Grish? Right. So that way, like, when we were carting off of a bin full of, paperbacks, people wouldn't know that we were going into the bat to throw them away. It would twist people up to see that, but also like, they don't have any concept of just how many, how many, like, James Patterson and John Grisham paperbacks were printed and exists.

They were printed just how many were out there. And then I get it. Sometimes, sometimes it's like, oh, you know, I clear it out, grandma or grandpa's estate. And yeah, you know, they probably had a connection to this. I don't. So it's like, you don't, like, yeah, we don't want to be like, we're throwing away your dead grandma stuff. But again, at the same time, it's like, we can't really do anything with this. So, I think some people got that.

Like, some people sort of understood that, like, nowhere else is taking this. You'll at least give me something. Yeah. And if it's not where. So, but there were some people who were like, they get a little upset sometimes. I'm sure you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. We had people get mad all the time. Like, you know, my, I think one of my favorite ones, it was like every cliche. in the book for a by counter that was going wrong. It was smoke smell. Shania Twain

CDs scratched. Romance paperbacks in a box that was in a garage that a cat had peed on. Yep, yep. Nothing you can do with that. It's just like it's a box of garbage. And then when you, I don't know what like your cursory offer was because you always

offered them something. It was like a dollar or something, right? The woman got very and explained to us that these were the prized possessions of her dead veteran husband. It was just like, it was just like, it was just like every by-counter cliche all wrapped into one. It was very bizarre. Yeah, and that just happens sometimes, you know, the freaking, yeah, for me, I'd be like, well, if they were so, if they were so cherished, how come there's cat pee on them? Yeah, exactly. I think I may have said that, which did not make, did not de-escalate the situation in any way.

Yeah. I was going to say, apparently the charging dock for Robinson is out. Oh, did it just drop? Yeah, it just dropped not too long ago. I'm looking through it. They have like an expanded crime scene investigation. It still looks like it's mostly stuff that we've all known about. the one thing that's here

is the conversation with his roommate on Discord you know the one thing that he says here is like oh I've had enough of his hatred some hate can't be negotiated out if I'm able to grab my rifle

and see you know I've left no evidence but this sounds like he's just bullshitting his roommate now right because because like remember how is in the fucking me. Yeah, he even says here, remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see notices bulge, Uwu, on Fox News, I might have a stroke. Yeah, I mean, that's it right there, right?

Yeah, that is literally it right there. So, I mean, he seems to sort of say that, like, oh, like, there's one line here where he says, I have enough, I've had enough of his hatred. That's why I did it. But, like, again, the fact that he extra those memes in there, right? And the fact that he's like, oh, if I see that on Fox News, I would die, right? Die of laughter probably, but it's like that speaks to, you know, the whole, was he even being sincere with his roommate, right, about that motivation there? And again, it definitely speaks to the fact that the shells, that the shells don't really mean anything, right?

You definitely can't sort of read anything into those, because he does at least sort of admitted in that conversation that they're memes. I will believe him there when he says, you know, these are memes. Yeah. Oh, man. All right. Well, that's grim. I'm going to read a little bit more through this and see if anything else pops up.

But thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on talking. This was very valuable. We've got a lot of Normie Beltway people that listen to the show. I think they will find this a translation of some kind. Yeah, so that is the hope of what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to translate all this to the normie, so hopefully it works. Thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through this.

Thank you for having me and happy to, glad we got to reminisce about a good old HPB days. Oh, I mean, those bonuses would come in and then I would spend it all on books. Exactly. It was just kind of like, they don't even really pay me because it all just goes back into the story. Yep. It's happening sometimes. Yeah, it was good, checking. If you ever need me on again, just let me know, would be happy to chat.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, go to Angry Planetpod.com, sign up, get early access, and commercial free access to all the mainline episodes. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet.

Stay safe. Until then.