There was a brief rumor yesterday about the gun and ammunition being “scrawled with anti-fascist and pro-trans” messages — at least according to the WSJ, but not more reputable news sites — which was then silently retracted, but only after giving the usual trolls like Nancy Mace the opportunity to pounce on it.
Today, as the killer was turned in by his own family, the actual messages were released, and people — with the press rather behind the curve — have identified them as “Groyper” memes. Some of them are references to the game Helldivers, where the player characters fight on behalf of a fascist state which calls everyone else fascist.
The Groypers are a far-right white supremacist group led by Nick Fuentes, who turned against Trump and hated Charlie Kirk. Part of their beef is a hatred for Israel due to rabid anti-semitism (as opposed to dislike of the state of Israel for its genocide), and part of it is their belief that Trump isn’t extremist enough where it comes to things like immigration and shouldn’t have wasted time talking about the economy when he should have been more hateful instead. They had a campaign of trolling Charlie Kirk events and claiming he was “anti-white” and a “fake conservative”, as well as attempted platform manipulation of various sites.
Having learned that the murderer was actually (probably) a Christian white supremacist troll, Mace immediately switched from ranting about trans people to calling for people to pray for the poor misguided boy.
(I suppose it’s possible that those memey messages were also misdirection, and things are even less coherent. But that seems less likely. It’s known that the killer’s dad who turned him in is a Christian minister, that the family are gun nuts, and the killer is registered as an independent and didn’t vote in the last two elections, which seems plausibly consistent with someone who’s far right but also anti-Trump.)