So many questions arise since a sniper with demonstrated skill assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk in broad daylight on Sept. 10 — this as he addressed a crowd of several thousand no less. We have only our questions as of now, and history suggests these may be all we will ever have as to the who and why of this very public crime. But we damn well better get on with the business of posing them: Questions, the right ones, have a power all their own.
Charlie Kirk’s murder abruptly confronts us with the disintegration of what little remains of any shared identity and purpose among Americans, with the force of ideology, the invisibility of power, how much may be left out or simply falsified when officials give accounts of politically momentous events and when media reproduce these accounts with no hint of questioning them. We find ourselves plunging well beyond the apple-pie authoritarianism that threatened a few years ago. No apple pie this time.
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To begin at the beginning, who is Tyler Robinson, the 22–year-old formally charged Sept. 16 with murdering Kirk with a single shot fired from a .30–06 Winchester at considerable range? Who — the much larger question for its implications — was Charlie Kirk, the 31–year-old wunderkind of America’s conservative movement? At this point we have no certain answers in either case. We have, instead, what appear to be fraudulent narratives that are messily under construction even as we speak.
Tyler Robinson, by all accounts, was an upright student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah, until Sept. 10. Churchgoing, “very considerate, quiet, respectful:” These are the descriptions of a neighbor in a Utah suburb called Washington. “He was a good kid,” Kristen Schwiermann added when she spoke to NBC News the day after Robinson was detained as a suspect. His grandmother called him “squeaky clean.”
The NBC report noted: “Robinson’s evolution from standout student to the subject of an FBI manhunt is not clear.” This is to put the point too mildly.
On Sept. 11 the FBI — admitting they had no certainty on this point — released two blurry photographs that showed someone in a stairwell at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was assassinated the previous day. A friend of Robinson’s saw them and remarked in a messaging platform called Discord that Robinson resembled the man in the photos. Robinson replied immediately, according to a widely circulated New York Times report, that “his ‘Doppelganger’ was trying to ‘get me in trouble.’” Somebody else on Discord then wrote, “Tyler killed Charlie!!!!”—this “apparently in jest,” as The Times rightfully reported.
The thought that this was anything other than a humorous exchange among friends is patently ridiculous, in my read. But matters nonetheless proceeded. Robinson was arrested at his home later that day. Initial reports had it that he turned himself in peaceably; we now read he is not cooperating.
The air has since been thick with innuendo. So far as one can make out, Robinson seems to be of mildly progressive political persuasions and, naturally enough, did not like Kirk. We read that he favors the sort of gender politics Kirk stood against. There are reports he, Robinson, has been romantically involved with a roommate who is transitioning from male to female. There are other reports that bullet casings found at the scene have, Luigi Mangione-style, inscriptions on them referencing video games with various anti-fascist and gender-related messages. OK, but strictly for the sake of argument. None of this comes even close to holding up as a motive.
“We’re trying to figure it out,” Spencer “We got him” Cox, Utah’s conservative governor, said on “Meet the Press” last Sunday—this as he explained how a clean-as–Gene college student, in a feat of exceptional marksmanship, turned into a deadly assassin after he was “deeply indoctrinated in leftist ideology.”
How and when did that happen, we are compelled to ask. There seems to be no record of any such conversion. Here is Cox elaborating his case:
Friends have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.
Deep and dark places and going deep, just as friends have confirmed. I’m sorry, Governor. This starts to come over like “Invaders from Mars,” that 1953 Cold war classic, wherein plain-vanilla suburbanites fall into a pit and aliens from outer space turn them into enemies of the state by putting mind-control buttons in the backs of their necks.
Brilliant, if you go on for that sort of thing. And I suppose some people do.
Governor Cox has it that Tyler Robinson acted alone. As if to confirm this, we now read he plotted his plan of action for a week and wrote text messages to this effect beforehand. President Trump and his adjutants say — I may as well quote The Times again — “the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives.” Here is Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, speaking apoplectically on Fox News Sept. 12:
There is a domestic terrorist movement in this country. When you see these organized doxxing campaigns, where the left calls people enemies of the republic, says they’re fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil, and then prints their addresses, what do you think they are trying to do? They are trying to inspire someone to murder them. That is their objective. That is their intent.
Questions, questions. Is Robinson the lone gunman, the Lee Harvey Oswald of the case? Or does he belong to some dangerous movement on a murder spree? What is this “left” Miller and his employer talk of incessantly? We do not know even this much. But these questions lead to the obvious conclusion — obvious to me, in any case — that the official account of the Kirk assassination is still under construction and good old American paranoia and ideological imperatives mix to make the mortar that will bind its bricks together.
This seems even truer in Kirk’s case than in Robinson’s.
Charlie Kirk was a true-blue conservative and ranked very high among President Trump’s most prominent and influential allies. He was handy enough in the cause of this or that propaganda op. His movement, Turning Point USA, had received millions of dollars in support over the years from Zionist donors — Israel’s American cutouts, as some commentators have it. He stood for freedom, truth, Judeo–Christian values, and the Zionist cause and against, among very much else, liberal censorship and wokery of all kinds. This is the Charlie Kirk the narrative- builders speak of now that Kirk is dead. It is the Kirk you can read about in any mainstream publication you may come across.
It was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu who set the ball in motion. In a bit of timing many have questioned, the Israeli prime minister went on “X” with prayers for Kirk within a matter of minutes of his death. Two hours later he posted this:
Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. A lion-hearted friend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo–Christian civilization. I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not take place. We lost an incredible human being. His boundless pride in America and his valiant belief in free speech will leave a lasting impact. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.
A day later Bill Ackman, the Zionist billionaire, followed Netanyahu on “X” to boast of his close friendship with Kirk. “I feel incredibly privileged to have spent a day and shared a meal with @charliekirk11 this summer,” Ackman wrote. “He was a giant of a man.”
On Sept. 15, J.D. Vance sat behind Kirk’s desk as host of “the Charlie Kirk Show.” Here is Stephen Miller, speaking to the vice-president on that occasion:
We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
Kirk as a martyr to the right-wing and Zionist causes: To term this shocking hypocrisy is wholly inadequate. As Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil reported in The Grayzone Sept. 12, by mid-summer Kirk had turned on Netanyahu, if not Israel, and was vigorously critical of the Trump regime’s relations with “the Jewish state.” Here is a snippet from the Blumenthal–Parampil report, which ScheerPost also carried. It is based on a source who was close to Kirk and well-connected in the White House:
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In the weeks leading up to his Sept. 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.
Those who had so recently benefacted Kirk turned against him as he turned against them when he finally grew disgusted by their undue influence. He thereafter faced incessant pressure — such that he came to fear for his life — from Israel’s most powerful American allies, many of whom had donated millions of dollars to Turning Point USA. In a separate piece published Sept. 15, Blumenthal reports on an early August meeting Ackman arranged with Kirk and various American Zionists in the Hamptons, the fashionable east end of Long Island. Kirk was so viciously attacked for his betrayals that he came away feeling “frightened.”
So much for that day and that meal Ackman was privileged to spend with Kirk a month before he was assassinated.
The Grayzone’s reports explode the orthodox narrative of Charlie Kirk and the meaning of his murder. Apart from the close-in account of Kirk’s political turn, we have now had a look at just how directly Netanyahu has habitually imposed his will on the Trump White House. These pieces are Pulitzer-worthy for what they reveal, although Blumenthal and Parampil will never see a Pulitzer, as mainstream media, busily defending the parallel universe they assist in constructing, continue resolutely to ignore their work.
