The tyranny of memes

Before trying to kill Donald Trump, in 2024, Ryan Routh, a self-styled “Global Citizen” in his late fifties, authored an exhaustingly self-important book about his all but non-existent role in Ukraine’s fight against Russian invasion. “I personally have failed humanity,” he wrote, with an all too earnest sense of gloom. 

Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher, who is suspected of trying to kill Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, strikes a very different tone in his manifesto.

“Hello everybody!” Allen begins. It’s the way you would start an email to your flatmates about the state of the fridge.

“I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for Most Wanted,” Cole quips in the sort of joke he might well have expected to shoot to the top of a Reddit thread.

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” Cole snaps in the grip of sudden earnestness. Soon, though, he returns to the memes — calling himself “Friendly Federal Assassin” and saying, “Stay in school, kids.”

Hilarious. 

Mr Allen is not the only suspected assassin to have been a silly goose while allegedly attempting to enact political violence. Tyler Robinson, who is on trial for the murder of Charlie Kirk, allegedly scratched references to video games and sexual fetishes into his bullets. 

If alleged left-wing assassins have sounded like Reddit users, right-wing terrorists have sounded like 4chan posters. Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in a deranged anti-Muslim murder spree in 2019, said “subscribe to PewDiePie” before his shootings — in a reference to a popular YouTuber — and described his murders as a “real life effort post”.

The last thing I want to do is romanticise someone like Ted Kaczynski — who killed harmless people with nail bombs to promote his radical beliefs. But he really did believe in his radical beliefs. Perpetrators of modern political violence can seem intent on undercutting their own seriousness.

This is not always the case. (I’ve written before about “philosophical terrorists”.) But where it is the case, it seems to illustrate a bizarre form of pretension — a desire to be seen as brave and principled without wanting to be seen as too self-serious. Ideas of honour and devotion, it seems to me, are viewed as being so problematic, or so cringe, that people preparing to kill or die must disclaim them. Don’t worry, guys, I’m not one of those terrorists.

A lot of modern assassins, and alleged assassins, are also curiously post-ideological. They don’t seem to have ideas or arguments. They appear to think in memes. Allen’s alleged manifesto does not contain an argument for assassinating Trump beyond calling him a paedophile. Tyler Robinson allegedly mentioned nothing deeper than Charlie Kirk’s supposed “hate”. Luigi Mangione, who is on trial accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly wrote a manifesto the size of a long Twitter post that acknowledged that arguments about healthcare were “complex” and said: “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument”. (If he is found guilty, it will be tempting to think that instead of murdering someone he could have become more qualified to lay out arguments.)

It is, more often than not, a LARPer’s idea of taking action

It is tempting to wonder if people who had spent incessant hours “doomscrolling” wanted to do something inarguably real as a means of escaping the online nature of their involvement in public life. Yet even disregarding moral implications — and of course there are grave moral implications — political violence tends to be essentially unserious, producing no lasting or constructive change. It is, more often than not, a LARPer’s idea of taking action. It is also a convenient means of maximising one’s individual publicity, and no amount of memes can obscure the fundamental self-importance of that. 

It looks like President Trump was not in serious danger (dangerous as I’m sure that it seemed at the time). For all the security failings that allowed the event to take place at all, Mr Allen is alleged to have rushed a security checkpoint with no real prospects of getting through. He might regret spending time on epic punchlines in his manifesto instead of on making an actual plan.

The next person to try, though, might be more effective. Alas, that someone does not know why they are doing something does not always mean that they do not know how to do it.