Police in Utah have arrested 22-year-old Tyler Robinson in connection with Wednesday’s shooting death of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, according to a press conference held Friday by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Robinson allegedly confessed to a family member that he had been the shooter, and a family friend called the police before he was arrested in the early morning hours of Friday.
“Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff’s Office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident,” Cox said during the press conference.
Kirk’s death was captured from several angles and posted to social media platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram. Many of the videos were very graphic and bloody, sparking a discussion about what kind of violence should be permitted on some of the internet’s largest platforms.
Many social media users ran wild with speculation about who may have been behind the killing, with several allies of Kirk insisting the person must have been trans or a far-left radical. But Robinson isn’t trans, and his exact politics are unclear at this point.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that markings on the bullet casings found at the scene were in some way “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology,” citing a bulletin from the ATF. But the newspaper edited its article late Thursday to hedge on that claim, noting that experts urged caution in drawing conclusions from early internal reports.
What do the bullet casings actually say? Images of the casings haven’t been released, but Gov. Cox read out loud what he said were the messages at the press conference on Friday. The exact capitalization of each word is unknown at this point.
Fired casing:
- “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”
Unfired casings:
- “Hey fascist! Catch!” [Symbols that include an up arrow, right arrow, and three down arrows]
- “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao ciao”
- “If you read this you are gay LMAO”
Officials said the inscriptions had been “engraved on casings,” but didn’t explain whether they were hand-etched or relied on some kind of technology.
The message on the fired casing, “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?” is a meme that dates to at least 2013, according to Know Your Meme, and was used to mock furry romantic roleplay. The “OWO” is an emoticon that’s meant to resemble someone dressed as an animal while looking seductive. There’s no evidence that’s emerged showing Robinson was associated with furries, and the meme has spread over the years to be included in many different contexts.
The directional arrows “up, right, down down down,” likely refer to the video game Helldivers 2, where pressing that sequence of buttons brings Hellfire missiles down on the target.
The subreddits for Helldivers and Helldivers 2 include a lot of discussion about the shooting right now, including someone who wrote, “Damn. Not for nothing, but it’s gonna be weird to have one of these tattoos.” The tattoo shows the “up, right, down down down” sequence.
The Helldivers subreddit has been locked temporarily by moderators. “Due to recent events and the high amount of posts about the topic, we will be locking the subreddit temporarily. We’re aware of what happened, our modteam doesn’t condone it,” a message on the subreddit reads.
“Bella Ciao” is an old anti-fascist song dedicated to anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Italy during World War II.
The casing that reads “If you read this you are gay LMAO” is likely a reference to a broad category of juvenile and homophobic jokes that are popular online. One version includes six tests for color-blindness. The meme reads “If you can’t see these numbers, you are/have:” and includes six circles that read things like “depressed,” and “autistic,” among others. The circle for “gay” is not a real colorblind test, implying that the reader is homosexual.
Other versions of this meme have more recently appeared on TikTok and Instagram, where people claim they’ve written a song or are speaking words that “only straight people can hear.” The videos don’t actually have any sound and again imply that the person watching the video is gay.
Social media users continue to pick apart unverified information gleaned from the social media accounts of the alleged shooter’s family. But it’s still too early to definitively say what Robinson believed.
Groypers, the term for far-right and white nationalist social media users who are terminally online and follow white supremacist Nick Fuentes, seemed uneasy in their discussions on 4Chan Friday, with some seeing overlap in the etched messages and typical Groyper humor.
Fuentes himself wrote in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting that it was “one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen,” and asked people to pray for the influencer. “The violence and hatred has to stop. Our country needs Christ now more than ever,” Fuentes tweeted.
But other MAGA fans seemed less convinced that Robinson had Groyper sympathies. Tim Pool only highlighted the “hey fascist” bullet casing in a tweet on Friday, leaving out the casing that included a gay joke.
FBI Confirms AntiFa aligned engravings on bullet casings.
Hey Bella Ciao – a Reference to a WW2 Antifascist song
“Hey Fascist”
Among othershttps://t.co/BmJUVunlaV
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) September 12, 2025
President Donald Trump appeared on Fox & Friends before the FBI press conference on Friday, rejecting the idea that the “radical right” was a problem.
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” Trump said about right-wing radicals. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.”
“They’re saying, we don’t want these people coming in,” Trump said, presumably referring to immigrants. “We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”
EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?
TRUMP: I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 12, 2025 at 5:34 AM
Far-right commentator Matt Walsh also still insisted Friday that the alleged shooter was a “leftist militant.”
“There is now no doubt (as if there was any doubt) that this was a targeted political assassination by a leftist militant who had been radicalized by left wing propaganda,” wrote Walsh. “Political violence is nearly exclusively a left wing problem. It is a tool of their trade.”
Robinson was arrested on aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily harm, and obstruction of justice, according to court documents seen by the New York Times.
Kash Patel addressed Kirk during the press conference, saying, “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you in Valhalla.”
