Editor’s note: This issue of Regulator was sent to subscribers prior to the release of the indictment against Tyler Robinson. Though we have more hints about Robinson’s motives, what follows is still accurate about the videogame-referencing memes being a red herring.
Hello and welcome to Regulator.
For a moment, the fatal shooting of conservative activist and influencer Charlie Kirk last week pushed an already divided nation to its brink. Members of Congress screamed at each other on the House floor: Democrats blamed Republicans for fostering gun culture and mass shootings, while Republicans blamed Democrats for branding them “Nazis” and “fascists.” MAGA influencers posted calls to rain retribution and vengeance on the left, citing dubious reports that the bullets had been carved with “pro-trans” messages. White supremacist Nick Fuentes, bracing himself for the possibility that a member of his “groyper army” had killed the pro-Israel Kirk, broadcast a video pleading with his followers to not resort to political violence.
But the moment that Utah Gov. Spencer Cox recited the memes engraved on the bullets used by Kirk’s alleged killer — including “If you read this, you are gay LMAO” — the straightforward partisan narrative that everyone craved got derailed. Though certain details about his roommate and ideology are still fuzzy as of noon on Tuesday, Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with killing Kirk, was a white cisgender man raised by Republican Mormon parents, a college dropout, and just too internet-poisoned to be politically categorized.
This week, I chatted with Ash Parrish, our video games reporter, about a phenomenon that the political world and mainstream media has never taken seriously until now: the philosophy of the “deeply online” — a young, poorly socialized generation who live their entire lives in internet communities, building deep relationships with people whose faces they may never see, and who treat the real world as a meaningless simulation.
“These are esoteric communities, especially the alt-right ones. It’s layers upon layers upon layers of this deep nihilistic irony,” Ash told me. (She goes into this later, but there is, indeed, a very deep irony about calling someone a “fascist” while referring to Helldivers 2.) Worse, they’re almost completely divorced from real-world societal norms — if only because the community has completely forgotten what “real-world society” is — and that makes it even harder to ascertain Robinson’s motives. “You can’t just go into a community and watch for a day and then think you have an idea of what’s being said. You have to spend time with it. You have to know the lingo, as it were, to understand what is being said and how these people feel.”
But before we go into that, I want to frame the brainrot in contrast to the MAGA narrative building up around Robinson’s political agenda — or, in the absence of any explanation from Robinson directly, making one up for him entirely.
After Robinson’s arrest was announced on Friday, the internet immediately combed through his digital footprint, trying to figure out whether he was “of the left” or not. There were no fast and easy answers — at what point could “Bella ciao” also be a brainrot meme? — leading MAGA journalist Andy Ngo wrote to warn his followers on X about leftist “misdirection” related to the meaning of Robinson’s alleged messages: “that the arrow markings on a cartridge were just a video game reference, or that he didn’t make a trans reference but rather a furry one.”
Liz Lopatto wrote last Friday about the mainstream media’s failures in covering the hunt for Kirk’s killer. For days, outlets like The Wall Street Journal reported that the bullets were engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology.” Without any reporters who deeply covered digital media and gaming, they not only missed the cultural context, they also misreported the news completely. “[G]iven the history of false accusations against trans people and leftists, the Journal’s decision to go live with shaky information was staggeringly, shockingly irresponsible,” she wrote. “Trans people have been under attack from the right for the better part of a decade.”
In the absence of any reporters who could accurately explain gaming culture, brainrot culture, and online culture in general, the mainstream media is in a poor position to accurately cover Tyler Robinson. (Although, if this newsletter has been forwarded to you: may I point you to our monthlong subscription sale right now?) And the right-wing media, which has a vested interest in portraying Kirk as a victim of leftist violence, is filling that information hole.
Just this morning, The New York Post published a headline suggesting that Lance Twiggs, Robinson’s roommate and romantic partner, “proclaimed support for Biden on social media,” citing a Reddit post that stated, “We are riding with Biden on this glorious subreddit.” The Post cited The Daily Mail’s reporting, but it seemingly ignored a crucial piece of context: according to the Mail, the comment was made on r/Love for Landlords, “where users share trolling posts pretending to show support for landlords.”
I’ll assume the best of intentions and that the Post does not have a reporter who knows internet culture. But I will certainly not assume that the Republicans calling for the suppression of liberals right now care about the context of internet culture.
This week at The Verge
“Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer scratched bullets with a Helldivers combo and a furry sex meme”, Tina Nguyen and Mia Sato: The suspected shooter left a hodgepodge of extremely online taunts.
“After Charlie Kirk’s killing, MAGA influencers call for violence”, Tina Nguyen: MAGA world is grieving a personal ally the only way they know how: by calling for ‘retribution’ against the left.
“Even killings are content”, Mia Sato: Charlie Kirk’s college campus tour was meant to get attention and spawn an endless stream of social media content. This time, it happened in the most disturbing way.
“The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation”, Elizabeth Lopatto: The Wall Street Journal’s fuckup while covering Charlie Kirk’s killing needs more than an editor’s note.
“Internet detectives are misusing AI to find Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter”, Jay Peters: The FBI shared photos of a ‘person of interest,’ but people online are upscaling them using AI.
“Republicans pledge censorship crackdown to avenge Charlie Kirk’s death”, Lauren Feiner: One lawmaker called for posters who ‘belittled’ Kirk’s assassination to be banned for life.
“How platforms are responding to the Charlie Kirk shooting”, Jay Peters: Here’s how the big social media sites are officially choosing to moderate posts about — and of — the violent shooting.“The Helldiverscommunity is coping with a spotlight it doesn’t want”, Terence O’Brien: Helldivers is a satire of fascism — now, it’s being dragged into real-world politics.
Is being “online” political, or just nihilism?
Tina: “Being online” is a phrase that keeps getting thrown around in the media coverage of this shooting. There are people who know what that means, but many don’t. So, in this scenario, what is “being online”?
Ash: “Being online” doesn’t mean you frequent a couple of websites. “Being online” in this parlance means that you’re online so much that it’s almost like it’s your job. You are in these communities, these forums, these social media sites, these Telegram chats. It’s running in the background while you go about your day. You are plugged in almost 24 / 7 / 365. And what happens when you are “terminally online,” to use the phrase, is that when you interact in the real world, it seeps into your speech patterns. You say these completely nonsensical things that make sense to you but don’t make sense to anybody hearing it. And it assumes a space in your brain or it takes up space in your personality wherever you are.
It’s not necessarily specific to the alt-right online. It’s everywhere. It’s any time you have somebody who’s deeply unable to disconnect or has spent so much time that they can traverse these spaces seamlessly and can’t code-switch. They have this other culture that has its own rules and morals and patterns of speech that they learn over time as they become deeply invested in whatever it is.
That’s a really good way of explaining it. There’s a second deeper layer here, where “being online” also implies not being in the real world. How does the digital aspect play into it?
In this context, when you are deeply online, you forget what the real world feels like. You forget the way the real world behaves, and it’s almost like the real world becomes this digital one. For us, we spend our time in the real world doing our jobs and hanging out with our families and whatever, and then we spend a period of time online. For people who are “deeply online” — especially people who are, to use the term, brain poisoned or internet poisoned — online is their life.
They log into the real world where they get these little bits and snippets of “touching grass” or interacting with real people. That’s the simulation to them, almost. But online, everybody’s talking with their account handles. You don’t know anybody’s real name. You’ve never spoken with someone like and looked at them in the face, except through voice chats or Discord calls. That is their real world. And you forget that in the real world, not everybody knows as much as you do and the kinds of information that they have is different. Sometimes depending on the kinds of circles — but in this specific case, these alt-right, online, even gamer circles — they don’t realize that these things that seem like these big, huge, prolific things are only known in the real world to a very small number of people.
The correct way to think about that is, I need to remember that online is real life, but it’s also not. It’s a grounding thing, being able to understand that this may seem like a big thing in this community where you’re all talking about the same thing, is not the same as real life. But when you say that to “deeply online” people, they get confused or they get upset or they start to think, No, you don’t know, you’re stupid, you’re ignorant and I’m not going to pay attention to you, and they further retreat into these online spaces. That’s where you get the calcification in people’s social skills and their social behaviors, that can lead to developing this kind of sense of Oh, I need to go out and shoot somebody in the neck.
Oh, God.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get graphic.
No, no, no. I mean, one, that’s exactly what happened. And two, it does point to the lack of thinking there could be some major consequence for casually deciding to shoot someone.
I mean, I think these people understand that there’s a consequence for it, but they want the consequence. I’m someone who spent a lot of her young adult life being a black woman on 4chan. That’s where I hung out for a lot of my early 20s. They used to talk about going “high score.” That used to be shorthand for mass shooters.
On 4chan and other places where 4chan ideology has permeated, going “high score” has become a badge of honor. It has become something to aspire to. You want your friends on r/pol, the politically incorrect board, or /B, the random board, or the /R9K board to be like, oh yeah, this is one of ours! He did it! He showed those, you know, insert various slur here.
When Helldivers 2 became entangled in the evidence against Robinson, I was like, “Wait, is he reenacting something from Helldivers?” Or is this part of what you’re talking about with being deeply online? Actually, let’s just step back and explain what Helldivers is.
Are you familiar with the movie Starship Troopers? Helldivers is Starship Troopers. You are a soldier for this fascist government, where there’s no conscious emphasis on the fascism of it, but you can see the elements of it when you look at the world that Paul Verhoeven created with this movie. In Helldivers 2, your job is to go out and fight the enemies of “democracy.” So you fight bugs, you fight robots, you fight aliens. That’s what it is.
And the thing about it is that I think it appeals to a large audience. It’s a great game, it’s a fun game, it’s the number one game on PlayStation. It just got released on Xbox. But the whole idea is that you are a fascist in this game. You’re fighting other external threats, you’re the good guys, but you are operating under fascist conditions. And it’s all treated as this big joke, which, as you can imagine, is catnip to the people who think Hitler memes are funny.
When you say I don’t know if he’s reenacting something, or if this is online brainrot, it’s a bit of both. The whole thing that he did, engraving of the arrows on the bullet casing, is that in Helldivers, you have the option to go to a computer console and type in this code to call in an orbital strike. The arrows are the code that you input on the controller pad to call down that orbital strike. So engraving something like that on a bullet is like, “I am calling an orbital strike on you!” So yes, it is part enactment, but it is also part “Ha ha, look at this funny joke, I’m in on it, guys.” Like, that kind of shit. It’s a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
Interesting. So whenever someone who is a normie, for lack of a better term, looks solely at the bullet and says, okay, this speaks for himself, he’s clearly anti-fascist — the brainrot element adds some real logic-breaking confusion.
It’s not logically consistent, because it’s not supposed to be. The “deeply online” people know that, but they think it’s delightful to be so confusing and obtuse because it means that, no matter how much other people pay attention, they won’t get it, and they will always be on the outside.
You said earlier that you are not surprised that this finally happened — that an online, terminally brainrotted person did something this societally consequential.
And you know what? That’s not new. I mean, it feels like a lot of these other shooters have come from the same place. Maybe not necessarily gaming specifically, but I would be hard-pressed to see if the other shooters have — maybe not game hours, but are in these online communities. Maybe it’s gone beyond gaming in the time that I’ve been out of 4chan; that’s not a place I frequent anymore.
Yeah, online fanfiction forums have gotten insane.
I guess what surprised me is that people are finally cluing in on the gaming part of this and thinking they need to pay attention to this kind of stuff, when they should have done it 10 years ago with the first Gamergate. A lot of the moment has been missed by legacy media because they simply do not care about these spaces. They have all the money for it — to pay for the kind of journalism that would make them or make their publications stand out and have the definitive reporting that says, this is what’s going on. But it’s just a completely dropped ball. So when I say I’m sad or I’m surprised it took this long, it’s more that people are starting to wake up and think, oh, shit, we are completely unprepared for how to talk about this. We’re getting it wrong. Who can we talk to? Oh, wait, we fired all those people.
It’s good to see that the mainstream media, in addition to what we’re doing at The Verge, is taking the time to ask the subject matter experts. Maybe now we can have the funding for the kinds of journalism that would help people better understand what’s going on and how they can spot it with the people in their own lives. So it’s not just, my husband or my son are just playing these games for hours and hours and hours. I don’t know what to do. Now it’s like, oh, I need to watch for these patterns of behavior. I know what questions to ask when they say they’re on Discord.
People don’t even know what Discord is. Parents think it’s just a chat app, and they leave it alone, not understanding that where it used to be 4chan, where it used to be Stormfront, where it was Telegram — now, it’s Discord. These are the places where these kids are getting radicalized, where they’re sharing their memes, where they’re getting groomed by people on Roblox — where they can sit in poison and not realize that’s what they’re breathing.
Speaking of, I should probably have this in the column: could you explain to the DC-based Regulator audience what Discord is?
See? There’s no reason that in the year 2025 we have to explain to people what Roblox or what Discord is!
But, anyways, Discord is a platform. It is a chat service where you can create groups to connect with friends. A lot of times, big game studios will have their own Discord server where people can meet up and chat about everything — not necessarily just a game, but it’s a community building space that is built around a chat app feature, essentially. It is not the same as Facebook, but it’s similar in terms of communities and community organization and building community and just chatting with people you know and want to know. It used to be WhatsApp for gamers, but Discord now has evolved to the point where everybody’s in on it. Like, if you and your friends are hanging out and you are not gamers, you are probably hanging out in a Discord.
And now, time for Recess.
Last week was one of the most surreal weeks of my career in journalism, and I’ve had some pretty surreal ones. (Honestly, I never thought anything would beat out January 6th.) I credit my sanity to two things:
First, The Verge staff (especially the gaming desk), which collectively pulled together the Helldivers 2 / furry scoop and beat our media competition within an hour of Robinson’s arrest being announced. (They were also good at reminding me that I should get some sleep.)
Second, the Animal Crossing: New Horizons OST, which is very, very soothing background music during stressful days at work.
And finally, in news that is not related to the events of last week, Hayden Field and I just published a report on Meta’s new AI super PAC in California — and how it’s being used to politically kneecap their competition. (Yes, the tech world isn’t gonna stop doing politics any time soon.)
See you next week.