But days after the shooting, authorities have yet to determine a coherent motive for the killing of Kirk—the founder of Turning Point USA and a popular figure on the American right—and experts on extremism are similarly baffled by the possible motivations.
In the aftermath of the killing, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said that investigators found inscriptions engraved on the bullet casings found with the gun found at the scene of the crime, and on a spent casing from the bullet that was fired. All of the inscriptions referenced obscure memes and language common to online gamer culture.
Even the engravings with ostensibly political meanings may not be so clear-cut. On one of the bullets were the words: “Hey fascist! CATCH! (up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols),” Cox said.
“I think that speaks for itself,” Cox said.
Those words, though, are likely a reference to a sequence of moves on a controller that unleashes a powerful bomb and accompanying phrase in a third-person shooter video game called Helldivers 2. The phrase has morphed into a meme that is commonly used on message boards to signal an end to a conversation.
Another message, inscribed on a separate bullet, “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” is often used as an insult in online role-playing communities. Another read: “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao”—humor that is also common to online male-dominated communities.
While they gave no clear indication of a political affiliation, all of the messages revealed that Robinson was a person who spent a lot of time online. They would have been indecipherable to anyone who was not immersed in the same circles.
Professor Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism at Boston University and an expert in extremism who has written a book about meme culture, said Robinson appeared to have “relied heavily on memes to express his own personality.”
“There is nothing expressively conclusive about his participation in specific online groups as of now. His social media and posting histories are not available. But these memes tend to be posted on more politically incorrect anonymous message boards and gamer chat apps,” she told TIME.
The ambiguity is the point, she added.
"What memes say about people can be complicated, but they can illustrate what someone finds to be funny or signal their affiliation with certain online subcultures," Professor Donovan said.
"In the set of engravings, he referenced some more ambiguous symbols and a clearly homophobic joke. The ambiguity is a crucial element of memes because not everyone is in on the reference or knows its origins," she added.
Another inscription featured the words to the Italian antifascist anthem “Bella Ciao”. But the song has since been used in the popular Netflix show “Money Heist,” and in the first-person shooter game Far Cry 6.
Activists and lawmakers have pored over these messages in search of meaning and motive.
The antifascist connotations of Bella Ciao led some to believe Robinson may have been a leftist, but members of Robinson’s family have said the entire family is MAGA supporters, and the link to the gaming community suggests it may not be that simple.
Some have attempted to draw a link between Robinson and the far-right Groyper movement, a decentralized group of white nationalists who follow Nick Fuentes and coalesce online around obscure and extremist meme culture. The movement had been at odds with Kirk’s brand of conservatism for some time. Some noted that a Halloween costume worn by Robinson closely resembled a Groyer mascot, and that the Bella Ciao song appeared on a recent public Groyper playlist. But experts on the group have downplayed the evidence released so far.
Fuentes, the unofficial figurehead of the Groypers, has publicly condemned the shooting of Kirk, writing on X that “my followers and I are currently being framed” for Kirk’s killing “based on literally zero evidence.”
