Political radicalization or even the effect of violent video games online? It is one of the questions that serve the media about Tyler Robinson, the shy and peaceful model student who became the killer of the right -wing activist Charlie Kirk on the campus of his former university in Utah.
While the FBI tries to better reconstruct the 22 -year -old profile, which for now does not collaborate with investigators and who will appear for the first time in court, the testimonies of friends and acquaintances seem to throw a new light on him.
Raised in a suburb of the Utah, a murmur -majority state, Tyler seemed on a promising journey: he had a united family, well inserted in the community, and excelled at school with the highest votes, so as to obtain, after graduating in 2021, a rich scholarship for Utah State University. But Robinson left the courses after only a semester, without returning to a university more, if not to kill Kirk with a shotgun from the roof of a building.
The young man then signed up at the Dixie Technical College of St. George, where he attended the third year. Friends and acquaintances paint him as a shy, introverted, reserved, quiet boy who loved video games and spoke little about politics.
Coming from a pro -trump republican family, it was not recorded with any party, but some remember him as a sympathizer of the Tycoon – at least until 2020 – while others at the antipodes. A position more consistent with the aversion he had manifested during a family dinner towards Kirk, a person called “full of hatred and who spread hatred”.
The attention of the investigators focused on the engravings found on bullets, indicating them as possible proof of a political motive: “Hey fascist, caught this”, “if you read this you are gay, ah ah ah” and “beautiful hello, beautiful, beautiful bye bye bye”. But the messages on bullets also include a mixture of memes and references to video games, suggesting a deep immersion in an ironic online world where meanings can be difficult to decipher precisely.
Among others, a series of arrows that represent the commands used to perform an attack in the video game Helldivers 2. But also the refrain of the song of the Italian partisans appears in the world of videogames, as well as in the popular series on Netflix “La Casa di Carta”: in “Far Cry 6”, the song is inserted in the context of the plot, where the player is part of a rebellion against a dictator, while in a dictator, “Call of Duty: Warzone” is used by the players as a sound meme of a resistance or a victory against opponents. In both, of course, virtual weapons are used.
But Tyler had a custom from an early age with the real ones, as some photos show. Others suggest that Robinson had long been deeply immersed in online culture: in a photo of Halloween, his mother noted that the son was dressed as “a guy who came out of a meme”.
Even the inscription “If you read this you are gay, hahah” suggests ties with trolling on the internet. To understand if, and possibly how much, the virtual world – what the republican governor of Utah Spencer Cox has called “a cancer of our society” – has influenced Robinson.