Editor’s note: Tyler Robinson has been arrested and charged in connection with the killing of Charlie Kirk. He has not entered a plea and has not been convicted. Facts remain preliminary.

It took 33 hours between the shooting of Charlie Kirk and the announcement that a suspect had been detained by the FBI and Utah state law enforcement. In that time, theories multiplied online: was the gunman a far-left activist, a far-right extremist, even a foreign agent? Speculation spread as rapidly as the shock at the assassination itself. At one point, the Wall Street Journal even ran with an internal law-enforcement bulletin claiming that bullets had been engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology.” The paper later corrected the story after Justice Department officials urged caution. The inscriptions—phrases like “Bella Ciao,” “hey fascist, catch,” “If you read this, you are gay LMAO”—appear to be more likely lifted from gamer culture and meme forums than from any coherent political doctrine. For those immersed in that world, the references to video games are obvious. However, for newsrooms hungry for a tidy ideological narrative, they can be deeply misleading. At the time of writing, one suspect is in custody and the investigation is ongoing.

According to officials, the perpetrator is not believed to be a foreign agent. Tyler Robinson (arrested on suspicion; not convicted) has been described as “becoming political” and perhaps leaning left, but no evidence has emerged yet to indicate that he belonged to any organised group. Others believe he may have been a “groyper,” i.e., a follower of online far-right communities. Journalist Mike Rothschild, who covers groups such as QAnon, commented on X that “The online brainrot world is full of things that don’t make sense, actively contradict each other, or are hopelessly insular inside jokes. You can make references that groypers make and not be one. You can post both fascist and antifascist memes, and adhere to neither ideology.”

A lot is yet to emerge about the suspect and his alleged motivations. What we do know, per public statements and reporting, is that he is a 22-year-old from Utah, who had once held a university scholarship but dropped out after a single semester to study as an electrical apprentice at a technical college. A former classmate has described him as a quintessential “Reddit kid.” For those unfamiliar, Reddit is a sprawling hybrid social media discussion forum with a generally progressive slant (certain news forums, for example, ban links to outlets like Quillette). The arrest affidavit states that the alleged shooter corresponded with his roommate and made a joke on Discord in reference to the Kirk assassination.

Discord, like Reddit, is a chat and voice platform that is popular with gamers and has been associated with extremist communities. For example, the 2017 Charlottesville rally was organised on the platform, as leaked planning chats later showed; and the 764 accelerationist network has similarly run subgroups on both Discord and Telegram to recruit and abuse victims. Beyond the far-right’s use of Discord, there are many antifascist servers as well—public listings include several “antifascist” tags and dedicated hubs.

Whether Robinson’s online milieu tilted left may end up being beside the point. What matters is the profile: a socially adrift 22-year-old dropout searching for meaning online. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the task is not to pin a tidy ideology on the act, but to confront the scourge of online brainrot.

What is “online brainrot”? It’s the sense that one’s mental capacities and emotional responsiveness have deteriorated under a constant diet of frenetic, low-quality content. The effect is easiest to see in the online subcultures that prize in-jokes and exclusion. As video game critic Superjoost notes about Roblox—one of the world’s most popular online game platforms—the most powerful communities don’t aim for mass appeal; they cultivate experiences that “deliberately exclude outsiders,” producing worlds that look “frenetic, chaotic, and nonsensical to anyone who’s not in on it.” According to this critic, the chaos is the point.

Mainstream culture has started to notice, not least because the academic performance and mental health of so many young people are suffering. In the New York Times, Jessica Roy defines “brainrot” as filtering everything through the lens of what has been posted—and what could be posted next. For kids who have brainrot, the online world isn’t an adjunct anymore; it becomes one’s primary reality. What happens in the real world is only understood through how it may serve the feed.

Clinicians who treat kids with problematic gaming and internet use describe the online world as a coping mechanism for those who haven’t learned how to self-regulate in healthy ways. Michael Rich at Boston Children’s Hospital argues that “brainrot” is less an internet addiction than a self-soothing strategy layered on top of other difficulties. Kids with ADHD, for instance, may feel lost in classrooms but then come home to World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Fortnite and feel some mastery. As Rich puts it, distractibility can become a relative strength in such environments. Gaming, then, isn’t an escape; it is a primary method of self-soothing. It is also a ready-made status ladder when the offline world offers none.

Part of the appeal of the online world is that it substitutes for real-world mastery. Learning the lingo of online communities and recognising memes is like learning a language: there is a syntax and vocabulary as well as social rules governing deployment. Fluency confers status. One can climb quickly in the status hierarchy by demonstrating command of the dialect—knowing which joke to use and when. Of course, such fluency is a cheap substitute for slower, more effortful forms of mastery in the real world, through school or work, learning a musical instrument, or playing chess. But the rewards are much more immediate: they pay out instantly in likes, reposts, and in-group recognition.

The issue today is not games per se; it is what happens when one’s digital milieu replaces the real world as one’s primary mode of existence. The issue is that for so many young people, their sleep, attention, self-image, and friendship groups get reorganised around the feed. And there is a darker element to online subcultures as well that many members of older generations are entirely oblivious to. On Discord, hundreds of communities exist devoted to accelerationism, occultism, gore/shock content, blackpill and doomer rooms, as well as various other groups that focus on general misanthropy.

This is not just a mental-health story; it is a spiritual one. Kids with brainrot are not just chasing dopamine hits. They are searching for belonging, intimacy, initiation, and a status hierarchy. In-jokes supply a counterfeit community; algorithmic highs offer counterfeit meaning. Superstimuli hijack attention until the physical world feels flat and boring, and the digital one—an infinite scroll of references to references—starts to offer its own metaphysics. When the real is displaced by the virtual, what follows is not flourishing but a slow demise—a purgatory of endless posting in which the self thins out.

Brainrot isn’t schizophrenia, even if it can mimic some of its surface noise. It’s less a thought disorder than an emotional pathology—boredom, humiliation, and loneliness transmuted into a simulacrum of intensity, status, and meaning. In the wake of the Kirk assassination, partisans will default to their scripts: ideology or campus indoctrination as cause, gun control as cure. And of course politics and access to weapons matter. But the deeper lesson is simpler and harder: many young people are not okay, and the internet—however useful—is an accelerant rather than a refuge.

(The suspect has been charged but not convicted; conclusions about motive remain provisional.)