When Extremism Becomes Performance
What the assassination of Charlie Kirk reveals about how online culture incubates violence
Two days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Utah’s governor stood at a podium and read aloud the words carved onto the killer’s bullets. One casing said: If you read this you are gay. LMAO. Another mixed an antifascist slogan with cheat codes from a video game. The spectacle was surreal: a senior official solemnly intoning the language of trolls, trying to decode jokes meant for an entirely different audience.
That moment captured a deeper truth. We keep searching for ideological motives in fragments that were never meant to carry ideology. We treat them as manifestos when in fact they are performances. The killer was speaking in the grammar of online subcultures, not political programs.
For decades, political violence could be explained by doctrine: terrorists acted in the name of revolution, racial supremacy, or jihad. They pursued delusional utopias or holy wars. Today’s emerging actors often lack that anchor. What drives them is not a plan for the future but the need to perform violence in ways that win recognition among peers online. That is why their symbols look incoherent, where an antifascist anthem appears next to gamer codes, and furry in-jokes sit beside fascist slogans. The mixture is not contradiction but style. The message is not “I believe” but “look what I dared to do”. Violence is no longer a means to an end, it has become the end itself.
This shift was born in the edgesphere: a cluster of fringe online communities where gore forums, meme boards, gaming chats, and extremist networks overlap. These spaces reward transgression. To gain status you must shock, escalate, and outdo the last participant. Violence is currency in this economy of clout.
There is also a branch of that ecosystem that explicitly celebrates breakdown. Accelerationists, most visible on the far right, promote collapse as a goal rather than a trauma to be avoided. On encrypted channels, communities often shortened to “Terrorgram” aestheticize destruction with posters, edits, manuals, and memes. Collapse here is spectacle, and spectacle is the point. Within the incubator, ideology is often an afterthought. A participant might enter through boredom, loneliness, curiosity, or status hunger. Only later do they borrow fragments of political rhetoric, not as conviction but as decoration. The true driver is recognition; in these ecosystems, notoriety counts more than coherence.
The entry points often look harmless: a teenager watches true-crime videos; another scrolls TikTok for looksmaxxing tips (self-improvement memes that, in some corners, slide into obsession and self-harm); a third follows tradwife feeds, whose prairie-dress domestic nostalgia looks harmless yet, in radical corners, becomes a symbol of resistance to feminism and a gateway into purity myths. Even homesteading, the ethos of DIY self-sufficiency, can drift into survivalist, conspiratorial distrust of society. Algorithms amplify the drift. They reward content that shocks, simplifies, or polarizes, nudging users from the benign into the extreme one video, one meme at a time. That porousness is what makes detection so difficult: cultural aesthetics that appear wholesome or ironic can serve as gateways to harder spaces.
Some of the clearest incubators sit on the right. Incels (“involuntary celibates”) form communities around sexual frustration that hardens into misogyny and finally into the blackpill, the fatalist belief that hierarchies are fixed and improvement impossible. When fatalism becomes identity, some celebrate violence as the only decisive act. Accelerationism has a clearer lineage here. Historically and practically, the right’s accelerationist currents have produced manifestos and organizational experiments that openly celebrate societal collapse. Those currents feed and are fed by meme cultures that make atrocity into content.
A different current flows through the Groypers. Born in the United States around the figure of controversial political agitator Nick Fuentes, this subculture looks less like a support group and more like a trolling army. Their mascot, a frog-like meme, signals membership in a club where white nationalism is disguised as humor. They gained notoriety by ambushing conservative events, mocking speakers like Charlie Kirk himself for not being radical enough, a reminder that online extremism radicalizes inward as much as outward, devouring even its own. In Europe they are mostly obscure, but in the U.S. their online pile-ons and “Groyper Wars” have shaped the climate of the Republican youth base.
Radicalization on the left often looks different in tone if not in texture. It feeds less on novelty than on the flattening of intellectual tools once meant for analysis. Concepts like intersectionality and decolonial critique, created to analyze how power and history intertwine, can be stripped into slogans, becoming fast-moving moral tests in short-form media. That process hardens argument into dogma where certainty becomes a badge of authenticity and debate collapses into moral ranking.
At the fringes, this discursive hardening can take a nihilistic bent too. There are pockets, less organized than their right-wing counterparts but real nonetheless, where the imperative is to tear down, not to rebuild. For some, sabotage and symbolic violence are framed as necessary preliminaries to any transformation. Think small anarchist or eco-sabotage milieus that valorize disruption. These are not the centralized, manifesto-driven accelerationists of the far right, but they share a destructive mood: collapse is desirable, or at least acceptable. The tactics tend to be symbolic, such as arson of targeted offices or attacks on institutional sites, rather than campaigns designed to maximize casualties. Still, the nihilistic posture is recognizably similar, with destruction as statement, not strategy.
It would be misleading to assert strict equivalence. The right’s networks have built more durable pipelines to organized violence and have historically produced more lethal outcomes. The left’s extremist fringes are often more fragmented and discursive. But both are shaped by the same platform incentives: attention economies that reward certainty, communities that valorize escalation, and algorithms that push users toward ever-edgier content. In both cases the motive that matters is rarely tidy ideology; it is recognition.
Misdiagnosing ideology while ignoring the stage that rewards escalation guarantees we keep chasing the wrong clues. Today’s extremists often act not for causes but for attention. Their violence is staged for an imagined audience, rehearsed in the digital fringes long before it reaches the offline world. If we want to understand this new form of extremism, we must stop hunting for ideology in the slogans left behind. We need to look at the incubators that bred them, where destruction is performance and recognition the ultimate prize.
Because the bullets were not the message. The performance was.