\n<\/p>\n
On Friday, <\/span>Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah native, was identified by federal law enforcement as a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk. During Friday\u2019s press conference, officials said that several bullet casings recovered from a hunting rifle found near the crime scene had messages inscribed on them.<\/p>\n During the press conference, officials appeared to take the inscriptions literally, to the extent they ascribed meaning to them at all. But the four messages apparently written by the alleged shooter instead seem to invoke a variety of memes and video game references.<\/p>\n One of the casings was said to be engraved with the phrase \u201cHey Fascist! Catch!\u201d followed by an up arrow, a right arrow, and three downward-facing arrows. That sequence is an apparent reference to the \u201cEagle 500kg bomb\u201d in the popular third-person-shooter game Helldivers 2.<\/em> The bomb has become a meme in the Helldivers<\/em> community for being comically excessive.<\/p>\n Arrowhead Game Studios, the developers of Helldivers 2<\/em>, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Launched in 2024, the game has grown a cult following for its Starship Troopers<\/em>\u2013like storyline. The cooperative shooter allows teams of up to four players, called \u201cHelldivers,\u201d to spread \u201cfreedom\u201d across a fictional universe\u2014fighting bugs, robots, and squid-like aliens rather than other humans. Their form of managed democracy is \u201cbasically fascism,\u201d says independent extremism researcher Harry Batchelor, who works with the Extremism and Gaming Research Network.<\/p>\n Helldivers 2<\/em> is satire, and the vast majority of players are in on it. The game, says Batchelor, \u201ctakes \u201cthe whole \u2018pretending to be democracy while actually being a fascist government\u2019 so seriously, it’s obviously a joke.\u201d The community around the game has generally maintained a positive reputation, even working together to combat \u201creview bombing\u201d\u2014coordinated negative reviews intended to hurt a game\u2019s chance of success.<\/p>\n The arrows that activate the Eagle 500kg bomb have been used in other memes to show that a user is \u201cgoing to do a big, violent action,\u201d Don Caldwell, editor in chief of Know Your Meme, tells WIRED. \u201cThat\u2019s maybe a cheeky way of expressing it on the casing.\u201d<\/p>\n Shortly after the Friday press conference about Kirk\u2019s fatal shooting, moderators locked the r\/Helldivers subreddit. \u201cDue to recent events and the high amount of posts about the topic, we will be locking the subreddit temporarily,\u201d a post on the subreddit reads. \u201cWe’re aware of what happened, our modteam doesn’t condone it.\u201d<\/p>\n Helldivers<\/em> may not be the only game reference on the casings. Another casing was allegedly engraved with lyrics to a famous Italian folk song called \u201cBella Ciao,\u201d which translates directly to \u201cgoodbye beautiful.\u201d The song, which has associations with postwar anti-fascist movements in Italy, has seen a resurgence on social media in recent years. Notably, \u201cBella Ciao\u201d holds significance for rebel forces during a mission in Far Cry 6<\/em>, a video game set on a fictional Caribbean island ruled by a dictator. A USB stick with the song is a collectible item labeled \u201cBella Ciao de Libertad,\u201d a reference to the rebel group; the in-game description notes that the song has been \u201cinspiring guerrillas and partisans for over a century.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Friday, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah native, was identified by federal law enforcement as a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk. During Friday\u2019s press conference, officials said that several bullet casings recovered from a hunting rifle found near the crime scene had messages inscribed on them. During the press conference, officials appeared to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[12875,12876,7176,613,12560,2813,4527],"class_list":{"0":"post-20998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-bullets","9":"tag-carried","10":"tag-charlie","11":"tag-heres","12":"tag-kirk","13":"tag-messages","14":"tag-shooting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}