Within days of the Charlie Kirk shooting, a pernicious lie was circulated that the shooter was either MAGA or a gropyer because he was familiar with internet memes. Jimmy Kimmel spread this on the Tonight Show. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, said that he ‘spoke the language of the far-right’. This ridiculous article, astonishingly, was written by somebody who graduated in 2020, putting him right at the cusp of the Zoomer generation.
This nonsense has been put to rest by transcripts which show the killer murdered Kirk because of his ‘hatred’. Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile to provide a practical guide for digitally illiterate individuals to understand online Zoomer culture, so they can avoid repeating this embarrassing mistake.
Zoomer culture for Dummies
After the first election of Donald J. Trump, Youtube implemented a policy of harsh censorship and demonetization onto its platform. Whereas before the time of the “adpocalypse” many voices ranging from the tepid “liberalist” Sargon of Akkad style anti-sjws to full-blooded white nationalists were allowed at least some presence on the site, in the post-Trump world only the most normie of normiecons (Say Ben Shapiro) were allowed to maintain even the most desultory fraction of their previous audience.
One of the strange things coming in lock-step with the explicit censorship of right-wing “influencers” (though we had not this term yet) was the artificial promotion of a left-wing counter movement to the alt-right. A group of YouTube channels referred, to-apparently colloquially (but in reality in a manner constructed in a USAID board room) — as Breadtube, were unrelentingly pushed into the YouTube home page of any user who had previously clicked on one of the endless “SJWs destroyed compilations” uploaded to the site, the powers that be buying their own story that FAR-RIGHT RADICALIZATION could be attributed almost solely to the suggestive power of the irrational, almost demonic, sway of the ALGO.
A few of these “breadtubers” such as Contrapoints or “philosophy tube” were able to amass millions of views on their videos lambasting the far-right but, the little number below the Youtube video doing little to convince anybody that the aforementioned video has an audience among real human beings, it was thought advisable to induce a few ex alt-right front-men to publish testimonies of their conversion. This was a difficult task for our dark masters, nobody who had previously been involved with or interested in the new American right had actually reneged on their opinions concerning political issues. If one were to search the Youtube archives right now for “How I escaped the alt-right pipeline” (the title under which the Breadtube conversion narratives were published) one would be greeted with a number of classics of the genre, all consisting of some 20 somethings American man looking morosely into his webcam recounting in a very sentimental and circumlocutory fashion how playing on “Anarchy Minecraft servers” made him an unironic neo-nazi when he was 13. But even in this I overspeak. Many of these escapees of the white nationalist water works seemed to have really only got stuck in the campus conservative rain gutter for a brief period until eventually sliding down into the innocuous leftist driveway.
One of the chief proponents of the breadtube gospel was a man going by the username “Faraday Speaks”. A few appearances from him in semi-mainstream left-wing podcasts (Sam Seder, the Young Turks) remain online as testimony to his capacity as evangelist but his main alt-right pipeline video, as well as his entire Youtube channel, are now totally deleted. This video stands stark in my memory for the veritably unalt-right character of the alleged alt-right media environment that he was immersed in. After recounting how Stephan Molyneux (his own channel being throttled by Youtube around this time), the only named right-wing figure who held sway over Faraday Speaks, made him say a few mildly anti-feminist statements in front of his mother; Farady Speaks spend about half the video worriedly reiterating that he in fact did NOT go much further down the alt-right pipeline and never had any deeply held dissident opinions on race (that all important topic) until finally he reaches the narrative climax. Faraday Speaks, with literal tears dripping down his face, informs us of how the transgender youtuber Contrapoints with a single video swooped into the underworld of hate to rescue him from its infernal clutches like Eurydice sans the volte-face.
The whole thing had a very “ex-alcoholic meets Jesus Christ” cadence to it but, as somebody who had not yet followed Faraday Speaks out of the Alt-Right Pipeline it really stretched my limits of credulity. I simply could not believe such a trivial and soppy imbecile could have been seriously committed to any ideology except for the one that he holds now. Even if I did buy that he sincerely thought himself as one point to be “alt-right”; it was accompanied with the further acknowledgement that this was an inevitably transitory state affairs, with it being certain that Farady Speaks would one day transform into the card carrying socdem (or is it demsoc. I am told there’s a difference) that he now is. The inherent nature of the person that Faraday Speaks was could not have been any other way.
All this is to say that, as a zoomer who has spent my whole life in the online media ecosystem, there are certain things I take for granted about the taxonomy of internet subcultures and physical constitution of the people who inhabit that allows me to intuit, in a way some older people perhaps couldn’t, the way a leftist broadly, rightist broadly, Groyper, “wignat”, neopagan, “Tankie”, libertarian, “ancom”, or transgender would specifically interface with an idea or meme. Not only this, but how these identities interact with possibly intersecting identities that inhabit not explicitly political cyberspace. This skill allows me to easily spot the errors and deceptions being spewed in the latest “online radicalization” moral panic about “Ironic Extremist Gamer Culture”.
Since David Foster Wallace “irony” has been a declared enemy of the American liberal intelligentsia. In the wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the revelation that the casings of the bullets used by his shooter featured such messages as “Hey Fascist, Catch!” and “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao” a campaign has been launched, whether from motives of blatant deception or to merely repeat received ideas on the problems of the age, to blame the shooting on “irony-poisoning”, “Discord Groomers”, and “Hyper online gamer spaces”. If these may be blamed, or so the left and it’s unwitting stooges think, then we can sociologize away the irl and freely declared political associations of the shooter and instead focus on acquiring an exorcist (mass surveillance on all young people) to purge this social demon.
Now it does not take a Champollion to decode the political messaging inherent in the choice of phrasing chosen by the Kirk shooter, however various ingenious excuses have been thought up to avoid the natural inference that the shooter chose two anti-fascist phrases as to show his sincere ideological commitment to anti-fascism. Two of these, I think, are able to be entertained only through the tacit acknowledgement of major errors and would thus be particularly instructive to debunk. Both involve a tentative attempt to explain why anybody except an anti-fascist would engrave the anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao” onto the bullets he used to assassinate a prominent political figure. One attempts to do this by totally inverting the natural assumption, whereas the other attempts to totally minimize any political association at all. Both of them are totally spurious, and I will attempt to give some of our older readers a lesson in cultural literacy that will allow them to perhaps better see through similar deceptions in the future.
The above image, illustrated by widely derided transgender cartoonist “Sophie Labelle”(whose webcomic “assigned male” has probably been seen mocked in memes by our younger readers), has recently acquired a little bit of currency on what is best described as “middle aged liberal Twitter” and it contains what appears to the untrained mind to be an argument that is of some merit. Because on Spotify there is a user created “official Groyper War playlist” that features a “Bella Ciao remix” (this is phrased in a much more misleading manner in the comic itself) this means that the use of an anti-fascist song on the bullet casings actually serves as evidence FOR the shooter being a far-right fascist. This, along with a similar claim that a picture of the shooter in an Adidas tracksuit posing in the “slav squat” internet meme position, posted alongside a drawing of a “groyper” illustrated in this same pose, evidences the shooter’s affiliation with Nick Fuentes’ Groyper movement, has been put forth to place the blame for shooting on the far-right against Charlie Kirk’s moderate right.
Various obvious objections have been raised to these various claims but they really disguise the underlying error. For example it was noted by many that the picture of the “groyper” was actually a “pepe” with the Groyper being a more explicitly political subtype of the old Pepe the Frog meme. Likewise, it was pointed out that the squatting slav tracksuit meme had quite a bit of popularity on the left, with the hosts of the prominent “dirtbag left” podcast Chapo Trap House podcast even hosting a public show draped out in the meme attire. In addition, it may be pointed out that this “official Groyper War playlist” was official in no sense, only being the creation of some random anonymous Groyper. However all that being said, this will still leave the uninformed reader wondering why this anonymous user ever would add an explicitly left-wing song to his spotify playlist if he was avowedly a member of a far-right movement.
In order to explain why a groyper WOULD add Bella Ciao to his Spotify music streaming playlist but WOULD NOT engrave it onto the bullets he would use to assassinate one of his political rivals, it is necessary to explicate the role of common symbols in online “discourse.” There are two concepts I would like to explain to you one of them I call “Natural sign message loss” and the other I call “Explicit counter-sign creation”. I will explain both of these through a familiar example and connect them back to “Bella Ciao”.
Here is a collage of early Soyjak memes. Soyjak is a right-wing meme, a portmanteau of “soy”and “wojak” intended to mock effeminate men (soy has a negative effect on testosterone. Hence Soyboys). As can be seen above with the I’m With Her pin and the Che Guevara picture, the soyjak is perceived as being left-leaning and is mocked in his capacity as a left-winger. But you probably knew this and have seen this character posted by THE RIGHT before. Now the reason I bring Soyjak up is because he is in fact no longer an exclusively right-wing meme.
Here is a meme uploaded to “r/gamingcirclejerk”(a left-wing gaming themed meme forum) using the soyjak meme to make fun of people who were mad at the video game “Starfield” having gender pronoun selection options for the player’s “create a character”. The reader may object that this is not an example of the soyjak losing its meaning as a right-wing signifier and is in fact an explicit “reversal” of the right’s on rhetoric, but there is more.
This post is very revealing. First of all the official Kentucky Fried Chicken Spanish language Twitter account is posting the Soyjak meme in a brand friendly politically neutral context. Secondly a large reddit forum has shared this exchange with a caption implying it has misunderstood the meme, not because it is a far-right meme that it would be inappropriate for a major company to use, but because KFC has not understood that the Soyjak is a sign representing a contemptible person. Soyjak has gone through “natural sign message loss” that is, because he has been used so often that he has lost the inherent association with the right he originally had and is now used as a common piece of visual vocabulary. A right-winger may still use Soyjak and his soyjak meme will be recognized by the informed person as coming from the tradition of right-wing soyjak memes (with all the concomitant associations) but not all soyjaks are assumed to be right-wing or even political unless there is evidence explicitly indicating such. A fashion style worn by many coastal liberals need not be worn by coastal liberals, but you keep your guard up a little if you see certain wardrobe choices.
Related to this more natural process is “explicit counter-sign creation”. Whereas the enemies of who created a meme originally may end up using it by sheer accident through natural sign message loss, explicit counter-sign creation occurs when there is a concerted effort to mock a meme by consciously reversing the ideological content of it. It comes either in the form of an “antimeme” which has the opposite connotations as the original meme or in the ironic usage of a meme opposed to the usual meaning.
The perfect example of the antimeme is the “chudjak”. Created on the left-wing internet forum /leftypol/ the chudjak was the “anti-soyjak”. Instead of portraying an embarrassing effeminate liberal it portrayed an embarrassing ugly right-winger. This is basically the perfect example of a meme explicitly created to counter another meme. However the chudjak itself was co-opted in a distinct manner.
The “nothing ever happens” meme is a meme that essentially originated as an ironic right-wing meme. The mocking Chudjak character was used by right-wingers to mock themselves and their own cynicism/make relatable humor about their own pathetic position. In this particular example we see that the Chud was right in his cynical prediction that nothing would happen. If one searches for Chudjak on Twitter now, he is likely to find more right-wingers posting it than left-wingers. The natural baseline ideological assumption ingrained in the chudjak sign has reversed but a left-wing user of the chud as it was originally intended to be used may still be recognized. In decoding memes that appear to be either left or right a certain level of direct analysis is needed and we should always use external evidence to determine what is meant by them. For example if I say “Hey Fascist, Catch!” and “Bella Ciao” on my bullets that I... well, I think you know where that is going.
This is all related to “the question of why a groyper would put an anti-fascist song on his spotify playlist” in the following way: In the aforementioned “2016 Youtube” there were many viral videos (or, at least, videos with hundreds of thousands to millions of views) consisting of historical songs; many of these were from the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, or Francoist Spain but there were also many explicitly left-wing. The anthem of the Soviet Union, and of course Bella Ciao became memes. These songs were youtube rallying points both for avowed members of the left and right but were also listened to by neutral parties who were amused by their enjoyment of the song despite the extreme lyrical content/historical associations. The creator of our “Groyper war playlist” is a strange second order case of this where somebody who is explicitly far-right has come to enjoy a far-left song because of its presence in general internet culture. This explains why he added the song while also not contradicting the observable fact (see the comments on any Youtube upload of Bella Ciao) that the majority of people who ascribe meaning to Bella Ciao itself are outspoken anti-fascists.
The peddlers of disinformation want to sell the oddity of digital culture (viz. that some explicitly ideological things may, in certain cases, be taken as not intending to convey the ideological messages they contain) as if it is something with voluminous meaning to it, but that is not the case. The reason our shooter carved Bella Ciao into his bullets was to explicitly state that he identifies with Bella Ciao, a song that only an anti-fascist would ever identify with as a specific cultural object. Do you really believe that it is a coincidence that the shooter called Kirk a fascist and quoted an anti-fascist song before shooting Kirk? Personally, I have a hard time believe that you do.
The second disinformation strategy recognizes the apparent contradictory nature of the usage of memes and memelike signs but still attempts to obscure and hand-wave away the explicit ideological alignment of the shooter by proposing that there is a general, nihilistic, non-ideological, internet, pro-violence culture to which the shooter was a part (because there is a pic of him on a laptop when he was in elementary school). Under this framework one can be an anti-fascist, transgender-loving, homophobe, National Socialist and not feel any sort of tension between these things because all of your beliefs are ironic, or a nihilistic facade. While many people with no strongly held convictions do say ironic things to amuse themselves, would that sort of person really shoot a prominent political figure? Let’s hear some exponents of this position try to give an account of how these hyperonline spaces operate.
“For these terminally online violent freaks asking if they're liberal or conservative is a bit like asking if Robespierre was a Huguenot or a Papist. It's just not part of the way they engage with the world anymore, it's all irony, all weird memesedgelordism, and engagement bait”
Says “Maia” from Twitter to the applause of 1 thousand people. And she has said it very succinctly. To a GAMER left and right are just antiquated, they are not even in the calculus.
‘Ok I'm going to put on Guy Who Knows Too Much About The Internet hat and do a bit of serious commentary: "Bella Ciao" is a multi-layered reference. It's first and foremost an Italian antifascist song. But it's also a Hearts of Iron 4 meme/reference and it's often included on Groyper playlists. It's impossible to determine an ideology from the use of Bella Ciao because we don't know in what context and with how many layers of irony it's being used. The only thing I'm sure of is that it indicates (along with other engraved messages) that the shooter is *hyper* online.’
Jeremiah Johnson tells us that Bella Ciao is a “Hearts of Iron 4” meme from which we can divine no ideological content. Having explained why the “Bella Ciao is a Groyper meme” claim is a crock of irrelevant nonsense I will now explain the role of “non-political subcultures ABOUT politics” and why the concept of a terrorist with no beliefs is ridiculous.
The stock conservative response so far to the “gamer nihilist” claim has been to point out that users on liberal leaning sites like Reddit or Bluesky regularly advocate for and condone violence against conservatives and right-wingers. Therefore, they say, it is not the mere communication platform Discord to blame but rather the violent culture of left-wing online spaces. This goes a little way towards the truth but in my view it is not enough. Yes explicitly left-wing ideologues who are not ironic in any way shape or form and those who post under their own face and name are not afraid of condoning violence; obviously this will go a long way to justify violence in the minds of their ideological confreres. However, the claim about radical “hyper-online gamers” with no explicit political orientation except nihilistic online extremism for extremism’s sake needs to be addressed and I will do so to both its truth and its falsehood.
The community of the “Hearts of Iron 4” World War 2 grandstrategy simulation game is I think the perfect example of a non-political community that is in some away ABOUT politics and it is no coincidence it came to the mind of Jeremiah Johnson. If one is to peruse one of the many public Discord servers dedicated to individual “mods” or custom built game modifications to give “the old once over” to the list of users: the trained eye would be able to spot many accounts indicating varied political stripes. Certainly many transgender flags would be in the bios but also certainly there would be a few chud presenting individuals with a picture of a German soldier smoking a cigarette or something. The reason for this is that the “mods” for “Hoi4” often feature alternate history scenarios where the player is able to play as his particular niche belief system like “syndicalism” or “catholic fascism”. Despite this, one would probably not find much actual political discussion in the channels of these Discord servers or at least not much of any intensity.
The reason for this is that any real dispute between extremists would necessarily contain content that would get a public Discord server banned (there are rules). So the only way that somebody could be radicalized in this environment is if they were added to some separate private chat by a friend they made in one of these public chatrooms. And if we go back far enough we realize the people in these private chatrooms could only have been radicalized by what is part of the public political discourse. Do not mistake me, there is a confused political bias in what is present in Discord but this confused, ill-defined, bias is precisely identical to what is allowed by the online censorship guidelines by which Discord abides. It is therefore a vaguely left-wing bias but the left-wing positions it creates or abets do not perfectly resemble the kind of leftist things you see touted in public. This might seem like I am just describing the prejudices people in my age cohort have for this particular online subculture but what I want to communicate to you, if you do not have enough knowledge of it to share my prejudices, is that it is really a kind of cringeworthy innocuous thing and that your ignorance of it is being exploited to create hysteria.
The fact of the matter is that hidden discussion groups are only made by people who associate because of traits they identified in each other that were expressed in publicly viewable spaces. Anarchists meet in coffee houses but the coffee house did not create the Anarchists. When we have thousands of people openly celebrating a political assassination in public is it really so strange to believe that the shooter himself was informed by the same beliefs as his celebrants? You have to believe in something to do something hard. If you go to the gym everyday it’s because you believe it will make you healthy, if you study all night for an exam you believe getting good grades will grant you a better future and if you blow up Tsar Alexander II’s carriage it’s because you ‘believe in nothing’, Bazarov. Nobody throws away his life unless he has a true conviction in his own moral correctness, Saint Bartholomew was not flayed for excess of acedia. Even if destroying your own life is in fact what you want there are easier ways to commit suicide, or so I have heard.
Of course, everyone knows this and it is only ignorance of youth culture that allows people to be deceived that some strange fiction is actually a strange reality. Dwelling in online spaces does not itself produce the psychological inclination to commit extremist violence without the extremist beliefs just as much as rubbing up against 100 arabs’ skin everyday without ever speaking to them does not grant you the ability to speak Arabic.
These cynically deployed rhetorical tricks exploit those confused at, scared by, and ignorant of the current digital culture in order to agitate for pointless and intrusive censorship measures, while also deflecting blame from their own ideological brethren. You should not be so quick to believe that people have done drastic action for subconscious reasons when a conscious explanation is immediately obvious. If it seemed unbelievable to you that somebody would carve onto a bullet “Hey Fascist, Catch!”, without the idea that they would be shooting a fascist, then that is because it is unbelievable. Culture illiteracy allows you be transferred into a world of farfadets and phantasms, where subrational demoniacs perch themselves on rooftops and fire away wildly on account of grievances they do not even believe themselves to have.
But that is not the world we live in. Young men are aggrieved and angry, but they are angry under well known banners. When the red spectre comes to haunt do not think it a product of hallucination or blind madness but recognize the words that emit from it and hear their echoes coming from those that still yet live. Be they white, black, young, old, heterosexual, a “tranny chaser”, the common denominator is the beliefs which have inspired them and not some vector of socialization like the newspaper or telegraph.
Piercing article. Also worth noting re Bella Ciao on the 'groyper playlist' is the song’s popularisation through the 2017 Netflix series ‘money heist’. The show was semi-viral at the time and used bella ciao extensively, but in a generic anti-establishment and 'epic moment' sort of way