The engraved bullets that killed Charlie Kirk in September 2025 were not simply evidence; they were content designed for viral circulation. Mimi Mihăilescu argues that this represents a trajectory first made explicit in the 2019 Christchurch massacre: terror reimagined not as ideology, but as performance art optimised for algorithmic engagement
It isn’t surprising that 'brain rot' was designated the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year: it recognises a measurable transformation rather than linguistic curiosity. Social media platforms deliberately trigger dopamine reward systems through intermittent reinforcement patterns. This is the same mechanic as addiction, where users become dependent on constant stimulation, their working memory overloaded, and their capacity for sustained thought systematically degraded.
When critical thinking erodes and attention fragments, complex ideologies must condense into digestible units that bypass rational scrutiny. Memes provide precisely this functionality. They package radical beliefs into shareable formats that exploit, rather than challenge, cognitive limitations.
Memes package radical beliefs into shareable formats that exploit, rather than challenge, cognitive limitations
The result is not merely shortened attention spans but wholesale outsourcing of political thought to algorithmic curation. Users feel politically engaged through meme circulation while becoming cognitively incapable of sustained political analysis. The irony proves profound: users acknowledge their brain rot with self-deprecating humour while perpetuating precisely the behaviours that cause it. This performative self-awareness – without behavioural change – transforms genuine cognitive concern into merely more content for consumption, creating distance between action and accountability.
The 2016 meme war established the template: flood platforms with content combining white supremacist ideology with digital irony, and package fascism with edgy humour aesthetics. The creators of these memes discovered that they could exploit cognitive decline as recruitment infrastructure.
The genius lies in strategic ambiguity. Memes like Yes, Chad appear innocuous to casual observers but function within extremist communities as coded affirmations of racist ideology. (In alt-right meme culture, 'Chad' is shorthand for an idealised, hypermasculine Aryan.) This duality serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It evades moderation through plausible deniability, shifts the Overton window through progressive exposure to malign content concealed as parody, and cultivates in-group solidarity through shared understanding of coded meanings. By operating through association rather than explicit argument, memes create communities bound not by coherent ideology but by participatory co-production.
As users edit and share memes, they become invested in community success. The boundary between consumption and creation collapses
As users edit and share memes, they become invested in community success. The boundary between consumption and creation collapses. Users radicalise themselves through their own participation, believing they maintain ironic distance while gradually normalising extremist viewpoints through repetition and community reinforcement. The transition from ironic performance to genuine belief does not occur through explicit conversion. Rather, it takes place through sustained immersion in environments where transgressive content becomes normalised through community validation.
The Christchurch, New Zealand massacre in March 2019 marked the point when meme culture's relationship to political violence became explicit. Before killing 51 people, Brenton Tarrant posted a manifesto to 8chan saturated with memes and in-jokes recognisable only to that platform's community.
His explicit call to 'create memes, post memes, and spread memes' was a strategic directive: he understood memes had become more effective than manifestos at mobilising extremist movements precisely because they exploit cognitive decline rather than appealing to rational ideology.
Tarrant did not simply murder worshippers; he staged a massacre for an audience. He live-streamed his killing spree, plastered his weapons with cultural references, and seeded meme-coded phrases into his manifesto. He understood that terrorism could double as content creation; that bloodshed could circulate like any viral video.
The 8chan community’s response validated Tarrant's strategy. Community members generated waves of memes glorifying the violence, and celebrating the attacker as a martyr in creations such as the Chad Saint Brenton meme. Four copycat attacks followed in 2019, in Poway, California, El Paso, Texas, Bærum, Norway and Halle, Germany. Each incorporated memes into pre-attack manifestos.
The pattern established itself: political violence reimagined as content creation, with attackers positioning themselves as producers – rather than merely consumers – of extremist media.
Where the Christchurch attacker still gestured toward ideology, Charlie Kirk's shooter Tyler Robinson leaned entirely into meme logic. Violence became content optimised for circulation, not persuasion. Robinson's bullet casings bore inscriptions designed for maximum viral ambiguity and crude internet trolling masquerading as political statements.
'Notices bulge OwO whats this?' on the fired round, 'Hey fascist! Catch!' paired with Helldivers 2 bombing coordinates, the lyrics 'O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao' from an anti-fascist Italian folk song, and 'If you read this you are gay lmao'. This is not ideological confusion but calculated exploitation of context collapse. Each inscription operates simultaneously across multiple interpretative registers.
Casings of the bullets that killed Charlie Kirk bore inscriptions designed for viral ambiguity and crude internet trolling
Law enforcement misread references, media outlets issued retractions, and online users labelled the perpetrator far-right and far-left, based on identical evidence. For example, references like the song Bella Ciao, which appears in Netflix's Money Heist and Far Cry 6, is also used ironically by 'groypers', followers of the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who viewed Kirk as insufficiently extreme. It renders interpretation impossible, and this was the point: incomprehensibility guarantees sustained engagement.
The inscriptions functioned as Rorschach tests, allowing communities to claim or disavow violence while ensuring perpetual discussion through deliberate opacity. Violence became routine content creation; as Payton Gendron, the man who shot ten people dead in Buffalo in 2022 termed it: 'It’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort shitpost. I will carry out an attack on the replacers'. Gendron was creating a grotesque performance calibrated for screenshots, hashtags, and endless commentary rather than ideological commitment.
The meme-ification of terror weaponises cognitive decline as extremist infrastructure. It exploits brain rot, transforming shortened attention spans, fragmented thinking, and emotional numbing into vectors for violent mobilisation. Charlie Kirk's murder is the logical conclusion.
Tyler Robinson created his violence as content, ensuring maximum circulation among communities where notoriety constitutes social capital. The Christchurch massacre and the shooting of Charlie Kirk are both logical outcomes of digital environments engineered to maximise engagement through cognitive exploitation. Until architectures of engagement change, meme terrorism remains a structural inevitability.
The question is not whether memes inspire violence; they demonstrably do. Rather, it is whether democratic societies have the cognitive capacity to recognise this threat while their collective attention continues its engineered collapse. The evidence suggests they do not. And that is precisely what makes the meme-ification of terror so devastatingly effective.
