The assassin of Charlie Kirk has been arrested and charged.

 

The mugshot of Tyler Robinson. New York Post/AP.

An arrest has been made in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. New York Post. Tyler Robinson is a 22 year old Utah college student who was turned in by his father after he recognized him in police handouts. Robins was found with chat logs that requested that his friend recover the rifle he used to shoot Charlie Kirk in the neck. He also told the friend about what he had written on the shell casings, including antifa messages. 

Robison was a Mormon with what appears to be a happy family life and it is unclear why he decided to assassinate Kirk, but he was described as being increasingly political. New York Post. He had got into a major argument about Charlie Kirk and described him as being "full of hate". Neighbors speculate that he had been radicalized on the internet. 

My Comment:

There were serious concerns that this crime would go unsolved and it was notable that the assassin was able to escape from the scene of the crime and then remain at large for two days. I think he would have been caught eventually, someone would have turned him in, but it's lucky that his dad recognized him and was willing to turn him in. Given that Robinson will face the death penalty and will most likely be executed for his crime, that could have have been an easy thing for his dad to do, but it was the right thing. 

Robinson is very obviously on the left. Not only did he leave antifa messages on his shell cases, news media outlets, including Liberal ones like The Guardian, are reporting that he was very critical about President Trump despite his family being largely conservative. There is also the widely shared report that he got very upset at a family dinner when he was discussing the fact that Charlie Kirk was visiting the college that he got killed at. 

It seems likely that he was radicalized online. I saw a clip where a high school classmate of his said he was a "Redditor" and that passes the smell test to me. Reddit is an absolute cesspool and it is a breeding ground for this kind of person, largely because the extreme moderation and the echo chamber effect said moderation leads to. In short, Redditors tend to exist in communities where no dissent is tolerated and no opposing viewpoints are to be found. He also used Discord, which is, by all reports, even worse. Discord appears to have three functions, letting pedophiles groom kids, letting transgender people groom kids and letting far left nutjobs groom kids. 

It's not like 4chan, ironically a much better website for a young person to visit, as at least there any viewpoint can be found, even though you will likely be shouted down. And it's not like X/Twitter, where being a left wing grifter is just as profitable as a right wing one and both sides get fact checked and counterarguments. 

I am guessing that he actually didn't know too much about Charlie Kirk, other than he was supposed to hate him because Reddit (or whatever lefty websites he hung out on, including Discord) told him to. If he actually knew anything about Kirk he would know that he was actually pretty moderate, and not a far right extremist like, say, Nick Fuentes. I am guessing he killed Kirk because he thought the strawman the online left made him into was legit, even though it would be laughable under less serious circumstances. Indeed, Kirk spent much of his career getting made fun of by the actual far right for being a "cuckservative" or a Zionist. 

Speaking of the online left, this is an absolute example of why they are so messed up right now. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have lost their jobs and livelihoods in the wake of Kirk's assassination as they really didn't understand that their echo chamber hugboxes aren't the real world and that celebrating the death of a man that was beloved by many was a horrible idea. Of course celebrating the death of someone is almost always terrible, but these folks didn't think there would be any consequences for doing so because they seriously thought that nobody really disagreed with them. They are quickly finding out that yeah, most people do find it horrendous to celebrate the death of a man who was shot in front of his wife and children because he had the temerity to host a dialogue. And those people include their employers. 

This mostly seems to be an online left thing as there have been a much more sane response from actual elected Democrats. Some have beclowned themselves, such as Elizabeth Warren, JB Pritzker and Ilhan Omar, but in most cases they have made the right noise about how violence is never ok and how it was wrong to shoot Charlie Kirk. Some of them, Gavin Newsom and Cenk Uyguer, actually seem to mean it, probably because they had met Kirk professionally and personally.  

Of course, the internet being what it is, the news of an arrest did not stop the online left from beclowning themselves. Before his capture they spent two days celebrating or downplaying his actions but when he was finally captured and it was clear that he was leftist, they could not wait a second to claim he wasn't one of theirs. And this isn't a weird edge case like the guy that shot the state senators in Minnesota, where it was clear he was just insane and the motivation wasn't political. This was about as explicit as you can get without him coming out and saying "I am a Democrat/Antifa/furry". They were at first claiming he was MAGA despite there being absolutely no evidence of that and now are claiming he is a groyper, a follower of Nick Fuentes, again, without evidence. 

As for the long term effects of this, I think I have underestimated just how important Charlie Kirk was on the right. He essentially ran the youth outreach with his Turning Point USA organization and he was a close personal friend of both Donald Trump and JD Vance. He also might have played a role in why the zoomer males have had such a swing to the right in the last election. I don't know how you easily replace someone like that. I know Ben Shapiro is going to try, along with a few others, but none of them had the charisma and reach that Charlie Kirk did. And some are genuinely afraid of retaliation, for good reason. Like I said in my last post, this is as angry as I have ever seen the right be in this country and I a hoping against hope that nobody on my side snaps. 

I also expect there to be some kind of crackdown on the far left for this crime. What that would look like I don't know, but it's possible that antifa could be declared a terror group, or perhaps they will look into who is funding groups like it. Supposedly George Soros could be in the crosshairs, but that might be unrelated. 

What I would like to have happen is for the hammer of the gods to come down on websites like Reddit, Discord, TikTok, and Bluesky for the festering wounds they have inflicted on the internet. How you do that is a real problem, because I also don't want freedom of speech to be curtailed, I don't want age checks on websites and I don't want actual good websites to be caught up in the purge. But if something has to be done to turn down the temperature in this country, that would be a good start. Who knows how many more Tyler Robinsons are out there? And who knows what they are planning?