Understanding the Bullets: Ironic Aesthetics and the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk’s assassin engraved the following on his bullets: - “Hey fascist! CATCH!” followed by arrows. - “O Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao Ciao ciao!” - “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao.” - “Notices Buldge OwO what’s this?” (spent casing) So let us devote time to understanding these messages. We must, because certain people are already trying to claim they have no meaning at all. Or, they are blaming the right for this assassination:

A Facebook photo in which Robinson appears to reference a Groyper meme has led to early speculation that Kirk’s killing may have been an outgrowth of these intra-far-right skirmishes. But another feature of the modern far-right is an embrace of the post-truth huckster. In these circles, it’s always possible that someone is playing a character—or will claim to be doing so, muddying the waters so no one can accuse them of having a sincere belief beyond the desire to rile up their targets.

So let us actually pause and understand the messages. Imagine these are our data points. A furry meme, two anti-fascist slogans, and a joke. Pin them upon a board. We are being detectives, again, as we always must be now. So how do we piece these together? Let us add one more data point. Not from the killer, from Yarvin, from his book Disturbance, to begin to piece together our case:

It is hard to convince a Republican to become a democrat, or a Democrat to become a Republican. It is easier (not easy) to convince either to become a libertarian, a fascist, or a communist. The greater the political distance, the easier the jump becomes until it is not travel, but teleportation. A true conversion experience. Saul did not incrementally become Paul. Normal politics cannot imagine being pilled through a sudden and total conversion. Ironic politics knows nothing else. So does spiritual evangelism- and whether any discontinuous transition of mind is spiritual or ironic is a distinction without a difference. In a devout age it will be spiritual. In a frivolous age it will be ironic. Possibly both are the same thing anyway -or sides of a coin. The ironic is the loss of faith, the spiritual is its gain. The gain of faith in Christ had to mean the loss of faith in Caesar, a matter the latter could not help but take personally. We are in a frivolous age and faith, if any, must follow the transition. And in a bureaucratic age, we have many a petty Caesar to mock - and much to mock them for. - Curtis Yarvin, Disturbance

Radicalization, or conversion, what Yarvin calls discontinuous political travel, is a two-way teleporter. And what can happen, in the good scenario, someone bad becomes someone good. Saul becomes Paul. What can happen in the bad scenario is that someone good becomes bad, Lucifer the beautiful becomes the Beast. And in the worst scenario, someone bad becomes worse, and a Redditor becomes an assassin. So. Why write such things on bullets? Those statements are memetic coordinates. One enters them into an ironic teleporter to travel rapidly. All teleporters need coordinates. You must know where you are going and coming from. In another metaphor, Saul became Paul at a specific point on the road to Damascus. There are coordinates for conversion. And Saul’s coordinates were memetic: he spent the rest of his life proselytizing, his own testimony being his key. So let us imagine these are the coordinates the killer entered in the teleporter he took to radicalization, from apparently leftism, to violence and antifascism. These slogans are his testimony. Let us break them down. Understand them and the irony therein.

Notices bulges OwO, what’s this?

This meme originated on DeviantArt in 2013 with the user CookiMuffinFaic.

From the beginning, the meme was a commentary on the distance between dehumanized, literally, online sexual fantasy and online sexual roleplay. Though in ironic fashion, the meme transformed into a genuinely sexual fantasy, with many sincere erotic depictions. The irony is in looking at the above and saying “Yes” when you know you should say “no,” after the already ironic fact that the men larping as puppygirls are men. That is how irony works. Political irony escalates. A sincere depiction of irony is below. It is a tongue-in-cheek admission of genuine erotic pleasure.

But as all of this is actually warped and freakish, as irony always does, we are dragged one step further, to the notion that though this is perverse and strange, what’s really perverse is opposing this, and emphasizing a normal human sexuality. Through irony, furry porn becomes political liberation. The ironic path can never simply acknowledge that normal human sexuality is good, and this is bad. Irony, in this fashion, first condemns the roleplay, then embraces it, then rejects its opposition, until there is nothing left: one cannot mock the roleplay, one cannot enjoy the roleplay, and one cannot condemn the roleplay. At the end of OwO, there is no meaning, except that given to OwO by way of scorn from others. There is nothing sincere any longer except the vague idea that the signifier, OwO, is freedom from something. “The heart is a great bazaar, and freedom is all or nothing.”

The sexual coordinate of conversion-teleportation is that of the loss of love and romantic meaning, and that of learning to hate normalcy. OwO can be read as a hatred of all normalcy; of men being men, women being women, marriage, and perhaps an opposition to abortion; and of an insistent, ironic sense that in this nothing there is freedom. Through the ironic path through the teleporter, there is desensitization to bestiality, to pornography, and the path is through an oddly youthful discord culture of influencers, streamers, and softcore. And to note, I am not against pornography. I also actually like Gawr Gura. But we should not deny the desensitizing effects or ironic tone of this type of media. Effects, which could mar someone’s ability to understand love and sex in a healthy way, undermining a person’s access to a basic need of human belonging, warping them. This meme on its own is not that bad to those of us online, and that is the point. If I showed this to my mother, she would likely be disgusted. That this is part of the cultural milieu of the internet is a condemnation of us, that we are already in a bad place. No wonder there are so many Pauls. And so many resentful Sauls. This is actually not normal. And the people who enjoy that know it’s not normal. And they hate normal people for being normal. Because they must believe there is a deeper liberating political meaning to a fetish that no longer exists for them except as a memetic rejection of normal life.

Antifascism

Unlike the ironic use of “Notices bulges, OwO, what’s this?” “Bella Ciao” and “Hey Fascist! Catch” both seem very sincere. As Yarvin says, we are in the land of ironic conversion. Therefore, we should expect irony alongside sincerity, and in a way, sincerity seems to compensate for the irony. Consider the reason why one can defend the culture of ironic softcore, bestiality, and e-girls is the notion that the opposite, normal human sexuality, is really no better, and that defending normal human sexuality is in fact fascist. Or more precisely: taking seriously the notion that the culture of ironic softcore, bestiality, and e-girls is bad and should be actively maligned against is fascist. Why are you so upset she has a tail? People roleplay all the time. Yes, they do, but consider the seriousness with which people roleplay. The wide gap between a sexy nurse on Halloween or wolfman erotica and the political belief that all of normal sexuality is actively malignant and evil. For a certain number of people, the ironic embrace of furry porn and other online sexual fetishes is a liberating act. OwO is a step towards Bella Ciao, just as OnlyFans is a step towards female empowerment. One must believe their opponents to be, not normal people, normally disgusted by the OwO bulgie meme, its aesthetics, and culture, but fascistic monsters set on re-enacting a holocaust. Thus, political sincerity seems to arise as an excuse for ironic fetishism, in anti-fascist form. Update: that the shooter was in a romantic relationship with a transgender person advances the likelihood of sexual antifascism as a motivation. Transgender individuals and furries sometimes understand their sexual behavior to be a revolt, a rebellion against heterosexual Christian norms, which they consider “Fascist.” Yet we should not be tempted to fall into this perspective, we should not see the slogan “OwO bulgie” as ironic, and “Bella Ciao” and Hey fascist! CATCH!” as serious: they are all ironic, we are discussing here an ironic conversion to violent antifascism, which is precisely ironic in that it is a conversion towards political violence against an innocent man, which is what the fascists were known for. There is no sincerity, because there is a straight line from the ironic enjoyment of furry, and all that entails, to the ironic embrace of anti-fascism. Freedom is all or nothing. And the heart is a great bazaar. Some Italian partisans sincerely fought against Mussolini for the monarchy, for Italy, and for democracy. Many others fought for communism and carried Italy into the violent years of lead. And that is part of the irony. No doubt, the killer believed that, like “This Machine Kills Fascists” scrawled on Woody Guthrie’s guitar, his proclamation, “Hey fascist! CATCH!” on his bullets would be seen as the same. Just as Woody Guthrie’s music was pop culture antifascism, so are Helldivers 2 cheat codes. Update: apparently only the arrows carved next to “Hey fascist! CATCH!” are in the game Helldivers 2. Many leftists have made clear they seriously consider him a hero. The Left has always taken itself very seriously. Another data point comes from Jean Raspail. Consider him and Yarvin our guides, experienced detectives assisting us in this strange case.

Those who truly love tradition never take it too seriously, laughing as they march to the front, for they know that they are marching off to die for something intangible, something sprung from their fancy, half humor, half nonsense. Perhaps it's a bit more subtle than that. Perhaps this fancy conceals the modesty of the well-born man who does not wish to make a fool of himself by fighting for an idea, and so dresses it up in heart-wrenching bugle calls, empty words, useless gold trim, and gives himself the supreme joy of sacrificing his life for an utter masquerade. This is what the left has never understood, and why it is capable of nothing more than hate-filled mockery. When it spits on the flag, pisses on the eternal flame, jeers as old farts in the berets march past - to cite just some of themore obvious examples - it does so in the most dreadfully serious way, like "dumbasses" the Left might itself say, if it were capable of self-critique. The true Right is not serious. This is why the left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing. The Right is a flickering flame that gaily dances, a jack-o'-lantern in the gloomy forest reduced to ashes. - Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints

So, the Left takes itself seriously. A precise example: Starship Troopers is satire, you’re not supposed to laugh. The insistence we not laugh is the insistence we obey, that we admit that we deserve the hangman’s noose. This same self-seriousness animates both the insistence that we not enjoy Starship Troopers, that we take yard signs that proclaim all the beautiful things this house believes in seriously, and that we accept that the killer was genuinely killing a fascist. The Cathedral takes itself very seriously. The only difference between the film, the sign, and the bullet is the degree of conviction, of readiness to be the hangman. There are wide degrees between them. But a large number of people seem quite ready to at least cheer on hangmen. And what is “Catch This! Fascist!” written on a bullet, but taking Helldivers 2 too far too seriously? The Left must take itself seriously. When the assassin shot Kirk, like the hangman escorting the laughing victim to the gallows, who knows he has committed no crime, he must will himself to hate his victim. He must will himself to be so serious, to take a laughing man, and let his neck break upon the rope. The slogans are then serious for the shooter and the Left, but serious for no one else, for we know he was not an anti-fascist, and his victim was not a fascist. They take themselves seriously: seriously enough to kill. And perhaps the killer knew this, too. Perhaps that is why he had to write two anti-fascist slogans. To prove to himself that he really was a hangman. And his victim was really not a victim. We must learn to see this seriousness, this earnestness, that is violent, destructive, and utterly hateful. Is there not some strange, insistent, serious impulse behind scrawling messages on bullets and putting messages out on the street? Some level of unbearable self-righteousness? For normal people, this seriousness does not extend very far. But in a large movement, there are many abnormal people who will take things too seriously, too far.

If you read this, you are gay LMAO

And now, the vindictive admission. As our fourth and final data point for understanding ironic conversion, this is the most pathetic. This is nothing. This is an admission of emptiness. Some part of leftist violence is envy, spite, and jealousy. Some part is literally as simple as hating God, hating oneself, hating beauty, and loving ugliness. “If you read this, you are gay LMAO” can be imagined to be sent as a post or a message at the tail end of a debate, when a troll has surrendered. Or when someone is spiteful and debating a conservative and believes that they can call them gay to upset them. Can we not notice that, as the Left has become more radical, they have begun to call the Right “gay” and “fag” ever more viciously? Though just a few years ago, they would have thought us monstrous for saying “fag” ourselves? Can we see the same spite behind a street poster showing Trump sucking Putin’s cock as we can see in the message scrawled on the bullet? A sort of earnest insistence that they can make you mad on your own terms, as if they are taking all of this too seriously? Aren’t they sort of assholes? Does Democracy Die in Darkness? Or does it die with an actual bullet because democracy is people. If Charlie Kirk stood for debate, his killer stood for the end of debate in the most spiteful, violent way. His killer stood for the poisoning of debate, which he does not think is worth having, and so inscribed his bullet with something that, in a way, sought to proclaim the unseriousness of the whole affair but, pathetically, admitted the killer’s own seething, delusional rage. “You are gay, lmao.” A surrender. An admission of nihilism, of how seriously the killer took himself, and how he sought to take meaning from Charlie Kirk, yet ironically, made Kirk more meaningful than ever. Everything they tear down as ugly, they inadvertently proclaim as beautiful. We can see the same impulse in the Left media’s insistence, upon Kirk’s death, that he did all this “for clicks” and ragebait. When watching his videos, he seemed motivated by exactly what he said motivated him: his faith. Because leftists have no faith, cannot fathom faith, they can’t ever take him seriously or sincerely consider his perspective. So, taking themselves too seriously, they must transform him into something worse. So that they have a justification. They take themselves too seriously for faith. They must imagine that behind honest faith is crypto-fascism, surely a much more serious opponent than a bearded man in the sky. Surely Kirk was not simply going to campuses to debate. He was normalizing homophobia, racism, and transphobia...and though I don’t think he should be shot...that is unacceptable. And he should be deplatformed. Democracy dies in darkness, after all.

A Lengthy Fin

When someone turns from evil to good, we should be thankful and welcome them. I turned evil to good. I was Saul. I was a naive leftist. I would have laughed once, too. I sang Bella Ciao, and I made fun of Charlie Kirk. I took that path; I simply chose the good ending, where you become normal, fall in love, and fall away from evil. Where you stop ironically doubling down until you can feel nothing at all except hate. The slogans are coordinates for a teleporter. But the teleporter goes two ways. One way is towards Damascus. The other... I know exactly how all of the people mocking Charlie Kirk feel. If I had not fallen in love, I would have still been like them. And so allow me to say: they feel nothing at all except hate and glee over his death. They can feel nothing anymore except glee at their enemy’s death. Because this really isn’t about their enemies. This is about them, and their own hatred of themselves, and self-hate is always terribly serious. A person who hates themselves cannot laugh at themselves; they are not strong enough to bear the gentlest stings. And they always hate people who can laugh at themselves, because they are reminded how weak they are. We are in days of conversion. And people will be converted. The good will become evil. The evil good. And the bad worse. All instantly. As if teleported. Because that is the nature of the age. That is what the teleporters do. We are no longer in a time of gradual shift; we all know the stakes, and we all know that there are fewer places to stand. Powerful forces have made it this way. We are in an era of ironic politics, as sincere politics has become impossible for many people. The cause is obvious. The earnest profession of belief in certain things, such as things Kirk professed, was brutally punished. And so tens of millions of people began to conceal their beliefs as if we lived in a Soviet regime. And what became of Soviet art? It became ironic. The Master and Margarita is ironic. Hard to Be a God is ironic. And devout. Irony is evasion; always one step ahead, and this evasion gave us the finesse to dodge the censors, to speak without the risk of being seen as sincere. And the best method of evasion is instant teleportation. And now we are all marred as we exit the years of censorship. Every time you teleport, as the old question goes, do you die? I don’t know. After all this, I feel less like a person than before. We have done terrible harm to our culture. And those who benefit the least from the end of the years of censorship will lash out. Because they are angry and because they have nothing else. They may have been the police. Or fear the police chasing them.

That so many liberals and leftists have felt the urge to condemn Charlie Kirk’s beliefs, to exaggerate them, to list and cite his many thoughtcrimes upon his death shows that we have not yet fully exited the years of censorship, of silent tongues, and that if they could, they would reimpose this censorship upon us. Charlie Kirk was a moderate. But he did not censor himself. And that is why they hated him. He showed we live in a country where it is legal to speak freely, and being unable to change the law to enforce unfreedom, his enemies, and ours, had relied upon social pressure and force to maintain censorship. For Raspail and for Yarvin, there is always a better choice. The true, ironic conversion. The good path at the end of the bad, where the bad person does the right thing. There was irony in Saul’s conversion. Quite literally. The Bible says, “His eyes were opened. But he saw nothing,” as God blinded him for three days after his revelation. The scales fell from his eyes. The great enemy became the great pillar. That can mean many things to many people. There are many roads to Damascus, and the city is quite large. You do not need to become a Bible-thumping revivalist. And I will not. And I am not that. But you should be willing to acknowledge that good things are good and bad things are bad. And it’s alright to be converted. It’s alright to want to live a normal life, with normal, real love, and to want to go to church once in a while. And that does not make you a fascist. And there are still millions who believe it does, because when we say love, they hear heteronormativity, when we say normal, they hear slaughter, when we say good, they think bad, and when we say church, they think crypto-fascism. And then, when we say Charlie Kirk, one of them scrawls “OwO, what’s this?” on a bullet. Democracy dies in darkness. And so what do we learn from the slogans on the bullets, from these data points? We learn that lots of people have come into deep and close contact with the teleporter coordinates of the killer, and they could just as easily be killers as they could be redeemed. Because the teleporter works in two ways. In the good story, this means many on the Left stop with the anti-fascism and take themselves less seriously. We learned that some part of modern nihilism is found in the knowledge that online culture, in particular sexuality, is somewhat absurd, yet somehow perceived as more ethical and liberating than traditional sexual culture. In the good story, there is greater tolerance for normal sexual behavior, and strange behavior is seen as more of a quirk than a political act of liberation. This new sexual culture, which is very online, has a warping effect on people, and being so strange, can lead to political anarchism. So, taking it less seriously would be good. Imagine we return to the days of 1992, where normal things were normal, homosexuality was fun, transsexuality was odd and nearly invisible but not a death sentence, and no one was forced to learn what “OwO nuzzles your buldige wuldgie” meant as part of graduating 6th grade. And, finally, we have learned that they really have nothing but spite and hate in their hearts. And the path away from this is hardest. Because it is not in our control.

Anyone young knows that there are teleporters built into Discord and Reddit, that, if entered with the memetic coordinates scrawled on the bullets, will rape your mind beyond recognition. There are dimensions of Internet hyperreality that cannot be explained to our kind parents without breaking their hearts in some way. And their children sometimes emerge from these teleporters and break parents’ hearts anyway. If you think too long on the spite that went into scrawling “OwO” and “gay lmao” on bullets, you will break some part of your own heart, I think, no matter how hard you are. The problem is less Discord and Reddit than the teleporter-communities on these platforms, which take strange, sometimes abnormal people, and rapidly, terribly warp them. Though in truth, these online communities are only an extension of real-world communities, where real people are desperate to pull others into dark worlds with them. As to the question of the possible redemption of the soul, whether a more violent Saul or redeemed Paul emerges from the teleporter, is a question of what remains in the heart, if anything, when one makes the final leap to deeper portals, which can be the last passage to light, or the total embrace of darkness.

All we truly have control over is whether these memetic coordinates of conversion are spread or not. That is how all movements are born, live, and die. And these memetic coordinates, unless something is done, will spread: as “this machine killed fascists” traveled from Woody Guthrie’s guitar to the assassin’s bullets, as “OwO” traveled across the crowd, and as right now, the image of the shooting is inspiring so many more. That is the meaning of the messages on the bullets. And that is why it is essential to pause and understand them, regardless of how strange they are. They are telling us something about why this happened and how it could happen again.

And be clear with anyone: the idea that this is far-right violence is neither supported by the facts nor the obvious truth in front of your eyes. This is the evidence they are using:

There are millions of squatting slav memes on the internet. Vanity Fair published a Bluesky post of someone comparing a groyper slav squat meme with an old Facebook post. They googled “pepe slav squat” and got what they wanted. We are supposed to believe a years-old Facebook post is more indicative of belief than what someone wrote on bullets four days ago. They are trying their hardest to prove this was not a left-wing assassination, despite the killer writing anti-fascist slogans on their bullets. The Left must take responsibility. If they do not, then this will continue. Theirs is an escalatory pattern that prevents them from reflecting on how they are causing violence. They have ignored how the trans school shooter articulated their own desires and beliefs, and now they are ignoring why Charlie Kirk was shot. This is unacceptable behavior that will lead to more violence. Democracy dies with real bullets.