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The assassination of Charlie Kirk is rapidly proving to be one of the most consequential incidents of political violence of the MAGA era. The Trump administration is promising a crackdown on liberal institutions, people who have publicly commented on Kirk’s death are being fired from their jobs, Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening to strip away the First Amendment for speech she doesn’t like, and so on.
Much of this has to do with who Kirk was—a talented showman and cunning organizer who became instrumental to the American right’s rising tide—but tensions have also risen around the purported motivations and identity of his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson. Why did he pull the trigger? Was he an ideologue? A terrorist? A nutcase?
It’s still too early to know the full answers to these questions, but that hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of people putting out a whole bunch of misinformation, half-truths, and inflammatory claims on the matter. Tuesday was, however, an eventful day in the case against Robinson, with formal charges brought in court and new information on the shooting revealed. Below, what we know, what we don’t, and what we can’t, despite what many on the internet are claiming.
OK, so what do we know for sure about Tyler Robinson’s biography?
Still not that much, honestly. Tyler Robinson is a 22-year-old from Utah who seemed to grow up in a loving family. He attended Utah State University on a four-year merit scholarship, but dropped out after a single semester back in 2021. Robinson’s contemporaries have largely described him as a quiet, smart kid, and a bit of a recluse who spent most of his free time gaming. An electrician Robinson worked with weeks before his alleged assassination of Kirk told CNN that he wasn’t especially politically minded, unless the subject was broached in conversation. (“He wasn’t too fond of Trump or Charlie,” the electrician said.) That said, a former high school classmate of Robinson knew him as a “die-hard Trump” fan, which makes you wonder what happened during the intervening years. Robinson’s parents are registered Republicans; Robinson himself was not registered with any party, and did not cast a vote in the 2024 election.
And how is right-wing media portraying him?
As a hardcore Antifa radical, or a trans-sympathizing sleeper agent—something along those lines. In the days after Robinson was apprehended, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox claimed that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated by leftist ideology,” a characterization also wielded by Stephen Miller in his campaign to “identify, disrupt, eliminate, and destroy” a supposed syndicate of far-left organizations inciting violence against the state, and conservatives writ large.
Is there anything to support that claim?
As far as Robinson being the product of a dark-money leftist cabal, no. But according to the charging documents in Utah, Robinson did confess to the shooting and tell one person why he did it. In a transcript of text messages released by investigators, Robinson told a romantic partner he had “had enough” of Kirk’s hatred, and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” In the aftermath of the killing, some liberals held on to the faulty hope that Robinson might be either a Groyper, the very online, infamously bigoted associates of hard-right Kirk critic Nick Fuentes, or a dissociative wingnut in the John Hinckley variety. So far, that’s not where the evidence points.
But there is plenty of confusion about what else was going on in Robinson’s head in the lead-up to the killings. You know by now that the bullets in the gun that killed Kirk were engraved with various snippets of internet slang. In that same text transcript, Robinson refers to those inscriptions as “a big meme.” But the revelation that right-wing media is most preoccupied with is Robinson’s romantic involvement with that partner, a queer roommate who is transitioning from male to female. Naturally, some conservatives have metabolized this information to mean that Robinson was living an un-Christian lifestyle, thus begetting his violence. On the front page of National Review, a headline reads, “The Aberrant Killed The Normal.”
That partner from the texts isn’t implicated in any of this?
Not at all. In fact, in the text transcript, they seem downright aghast: “You weren’t the one that did it right????” they wrote. “I am, I’m sorry,” Robinson reportedly replied.
Gov. Cox himself has said that the person had no idea Robinson was allegedly plotting a killing, and has fully cooperated with the investigation. Still, given how the specter of “trans violence” has captured the MAGA imagination, it’s not hard to think that the roommate will become a media obsession. I was struck by one missive in the transcript, where—in the hours before Robinson was apprehended—Robinson tells the person: “you are all I worry about.” No kidding.
This is all so bleak. Is there anything else I should know?
Unfortunately, yes. The New York Times and independent journalist Ken Klippenstein got their hands on a trove of records from the Discord chat server that Robinson and his friends were active in. That Discord has been the subject of white-hot speculation, with some commenters claiming it might hold the answers to his radicalization. So it is revealing just how banal the community appears to be.
Robinson made exactly one message containing the word “Trump” on the server. It was in September 2019 when the president was staring down an impeachment inquiry. According to Klippenstein’s reporting, the rest of the archive consists mostly of gamer memes and loose group-chat chatter. It wasn’t very partisan. After Kirk was assassinated, and once Robinson was taken into custody, one of his friends posted an appeal to our shared humanity. It got downright spiritual. “While Charlie Kirk’s politics were not acceptable to some I ask that we all say a prayer for him and his family during these confusing times,” they wrote. Six heart emojis dot the bottom, left by other members of the server.
I’ve found myself lingering on that. Here is a group of kids blindsided by the reality that one of their friends had taken such drastic, world-altering measures out of a misguided sense of vengeance, threatening to endanger everyone around him. And now, everyone in the country braces for whatever is coming next.