Two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, lured their friend into the woods to murder her over 10 years ago. They stabbed Payton Leutner 19 times, according to police, to appease a fictional horror character of online lore named Slenderman.
The crime was shocking because these were suburban girls motivated to kill by basically nothing. A made-up story manifested itself in shocking violence in real life — “IRL,” as the kids used to say. How did obscure internet lore cross the chasm from online to real life?
A similar question hangs over the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Ideology played a role in the killing — a central role. But the environmental cause in common here, and in so much disorder and evil of the past decade, is a very online sort of nihilism. Young people spend so much time in a fake reality that we have gone from the millennial “LOL nothing matters,” to the Gen Z “LOL there is no IRL.“
THE BLACK HOLE OF PENNSYLVANIA
The evidence suggests the alleged shooter’s left-wing ideology drove him to hate Kirk — to conclude that he was an agent of “hatred.” Whether triggered by Kirk’s Christian views on marriage, abortion, or gender, his conservative views on guns and immigration, or his allegiance with Trump, the alleged assassin seemed to believe that Kirk was intolerable.
We can, and ought to, interrogate the leftism of today that casts all traditional or conservative opinions as “harmful” to the disadvantaged. We can, and ought to, reconsider the apocalyptic tone used by partisans and ideologues on both sides of the political debate.
But we must not ignore the cancer working its way through our culture: a detached nihilism. This nihilism is born of media, especially social media, that unmoors us from real life, and it thrives in an atomized world that deprives young people of purpose and normal sources of identity.
Kirk’s alleged shooter wrote jokes on the bullet casings. “The f***in messages are mostly a big meme,” the shooter allegedly wrote in a text message. “If I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new[s] I might have a stroke,” he joked, referring to a juvenile meme that originated on a website called DeviantArt.
He allegedly murdered a man as a deviant joke.
“Bella Ciao,” and “Hey, fascist! Catch! ↑ → ↓↓↓” were also inscribed on the casings. These both reflect antifa sensibilities and someone who spent too much time playing video games — they are references, including the arrows on the control pad, to video games Helldiver and Far Cry.
The most frivolous inscription was “if you read this you are gay LMAO.”
This is the language of the dumbest, darkest corners of the internet. “Dumb” is not an insult here: The posters know their memes are dumb. Anyone trying to discern a meaning from their endless flow of sarcasm, mockery, and vulgarity becomes the butt of the joke. As a result, the denizens of this dark, dumb web adopt a permanent stance of ironic detachment, even while venting their vociferous and typically extreme political opinions.
Kirk’s assassination isn’t the first time online idiocy has leaked into real-life murder.
When a man in 2018 mowed down a Toronto sidewalk of strangers, mostly women, he told the police that he was part of an “incel uprising.” This was an entirely online idea, rooted entirely in fantasy. But this one Canadian man actually went out and murdered “Stacys” in the name of “Pepe the Frog.”
It’s all fake. It’s imaginary.
And untold millions live in this world where nothing is real. Video games, media, social media, and our culture as a whole strip people of any connection to reality.
Chronic gamers, who might play 40 hours or more a week, just become further immersed in a world where nothing’s real. Die and respawn. Shoot the hostage. Kill fascists one day, be the fascists the next.
All of us, not the just the gamers, swim in a massive sea of information, personalities, and opinions. Mass media, beginning with 24-hour national news replacing local news, accelerated the problem. Social media has multiplied it a hundredfold.
Spend enough time online, and you’re reading about gruesome death or watching young people tell their phone camera how awful their parents are, and then you’re laughing at some idiot embarrassing himself, or you’re gawking at women.
Never before have so many people spent so much time face-to-face with strangers they will never meet. The people we watch and read about are so distant, their actual fate so irrelevant to us, that other people become mere characters, even nonplayer characters, or NPCs — characters that aren’t selves and that no one will miss.
“Social dissociation” is a good term for this.
It was exacerbated for Generation Z by the lockdowns and school closures. Much of life stayed permanently remote, virtual, contactless. Without any daily unchosen contact with others — with folks you might disagree with, folks different from you — you socially dissociate more.
Nothing is real and nobody is real.
This helps explain not only Kirk’s alleged killer, but also his online supporters and the supporters of fellow alleged assassin Luigi Mangione. Why would many liberals happily state online that they are glad Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson were killed? To them, it’s as if a reviled movie villain had been killed off.
This impoverished way we now see others is a consequence of the deeper problem: our inability to grasp ourselves.
Normally, we get our identity from the roles we play in various institutions. I am a husband and a father in my family, as well as a brother and a son in my childhood family. I am an assistant coach on a Little League team, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and an active member at our parish and our children’s schools.
We now have fewer institutions and fewer commitments in our lives. The spirit of the age that elevates autonomy above all else and in many circles rejects the unchosen — tradition, hometown, family. This leaves young people to concoct an identity from scratch.
Not only do other people become fictional characters, but so do we. When nothing’s real and nobody’s real, no deed is out of bounds.