The Charlie Kirk revenge plot

Over the weekend, flags from the McDonald's at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to a transgender pride flag in West Hollywood, California, to flags all over our nation's capital flew half-staff for Charlie Kirk.

Cold plays Chris Martin sent love from a concert in London.

South Koreans were out in the street chanting,

the world was mourning a pretty divisive guy, but the Trump administration wasn't satisfied.

They're doubling down on retribution.

So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer.

We will absolutely target you, go after you.

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.

They're doubling down even though we still don't fully know why Charlie Kirk was murdered.

What we do know on Today Explained from Vox.

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Okay, my name is Ellie Reeve.

I'm a correspondent for CNN and author of the book Black Pill.

Okay, and Ellie, it's been almost a week since Charlie Kirk was murdered.

What do we know at this point about his alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson?

To me, we still don't know enough.

We know that he was a young man

referred to as very smart and quiet by a lot of his friends that have talked to the press.

Tyler was always kind of quieter since we were little, but not like quiet, weird.

Kid was smart, quiet.

He

never caused any problems.

I don't know.

He just,

I think this is really unexpected.

I didn't see it coming at all.

You know what?

He was a big gamer, like really into video games.

And according to investigators, he was dating his roommate who was transitioning to be a woman.

The first sort of tranche of information we got about this alleged shooter was when investigators revealed what he wrote on the bullet casings, allegedly.

Could you help us understand what exactly he wrote?

Yeah, I have the indictment pulled up so it's easy for us to go through.

So the first one is notices bulge, oh woah, what's this?

So this is a furry meme.

It's a 10-year-old meme.

It comes from from an image that's a drawing of two middle-aged, unattractive men role-playing with each other online, like making sexy talk as furries.

And if people don't know, that's kind of like a thing where you like imagining yourself as an anthropomorphic animal, usually a specific one.

And so notice his bulge is an erection.

Oh, oh, that's a emoticon that's like kind of really cute, surprise.

It's like cute, but a little sexy.

And what's this?

As in, again, the erection.

So just starting out here,

he allegedly wrote a bunch of jokes on these casings.

He wrote a whole bunch of jokes.

He wrote dumb internet jokes.

Some of them, if it were in a movie, would be funny.

But he wrote them before killing a person.

And then that's what's like, honestly, like pretty chilling.

It's one of the details that's hard for me to get past.

So this can be interpreted as a pro-furry joke or an anti-furry joke because hating furries on the internet is a big thing, both in the right-wing world and other very online spaces.

But it's also been reclaimed by furries, kind of like the word queer.

So

the point of saying all that is that an outsider trying to establish with certainty what exactly was being expressed by this message, that's that's a fool's errand.

I mean, you just don't know.

We just don't know.

We're getting a few more details, but it's still pretty ambiguous.

Which feels similar to another casing which said, if you're reading this, you're gay, L-M-A-O.

Exactly.

And that one, again, and I saw other people pick this up on the internet.

You're supposed to imagine, or For me, what it conjures is like a grizzled law enforcement veteran, you know, bulletproof vest, bends down in the dust to pick up a piece of evidence.

And it says, if you read this, you're gay, right?

You're supposed to laugh, or the image is funny, and yet he did it before killing somebody.

What did the rest of them say?

So the second cartridge says, hey, fascist catch, and has these arrow symbols.

It's a reference to a video game called Helldivers 2, which is kind of like a fascist satire, like stormtroopers.

The arrow symbols are what bring the biggest bomb in the game.

The third cartridge is

Obella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow.

So that's an old anti-fascist song.

Like history buffs are very familiar with this.

It's an Italian anti-fascist song.

I'm told it's a meme among anti-fascists.

I have done quite a bit of reporting with them and I had never come across it.

But that doesn't, I mean, that's the internet, I guess.

So is there some sort of like through line in what Tyler Robinson may have written on these casings?

Well, he's really into video games.

And

the like dominant pose in these like very online chat rooms is ironic detachment or so many layers of irony that you can't even fully understand the author's meaning.

Other than that they're implying we're part of an in-group and the people outside don't understand.

And what do we know about the online spaces that Tyler may have lived in?

We don't know enough.

We just don't know enough.

We know he was in a few Discords, a gaming chat platform, but you don't have to be using a video game to use it.

I've done quite a bit of reporting in these Discord servers that become cultures unto themselves.

Like they become almost cult-like.

I've interviewed incels who spent like 18 hours a day in their Discord server.

The Discord server of white nationalists became very important evidence in a federal civil trial involving Charlottesville.

It can become this bubble that leads to very intense groupthink.

But what we've seen so far of his messages on Discord, and Discord did confirm that Tyler Robertson had an account, isn't like that.

They messaged him being like, bro, you look like these pictures of the alleged shooter.

He's like, oh, my doppelganger doppelganger's trying to get me in trouble.

Ha ha ha.

Better throw away my manifesto and exact copyrightful.

If he was in a very political space, we have not yet seen evidence of that.

And Discord itself does not necessarily have a right lean or a left lean.

No, no.

It's not for that.

There are anti-fascist servers and communist ones and right-wing ones and fascist ones and incel ones.

And

the thing that, like, the part of the culture that is unsettling is that you see in a lot of these spaces is just

this nihilistic, black-pilled, like, ironic culture where nothing is taken seriously.

Like, you're a loser if you take something seriously.

Tyler Robinson, of course, now in jail at least, incarcerated, and appeared in court virtually yesterday for his indictment.

He's been charged with aggravated murder.

What more did we learn about Tyler from the charges yesterday?

So the most interesting thing in the indictment goes to the motivation.

We're joined today by our sheriff and our prosecution team and our county commissioners.

They said that over the last year, his family had told investigators that he had become more left-wing in his politics, including more interested in gay rights and trans rights, that he had had disagreements with his father over this.

She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was

transitioning genders.

This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views.

And the really fascinating thing is his texts with his significant other/slash roommate after the shooting.

Roommate, why?

Robinson, why did I do it?

Roommate, yeah.

Robinson, I had enough of his hatred.

Some hate can't be negotiated out.

Now

there are no timestamps and there are ellipses in this, so we're not exactly sure when all of these messages were sent,

but

it's clear from the transcript one that the roommate was surprised by this.

After reading the note, the roommate responded, what?

You're joking, right?

Robinson, I am still okay, my love, but I'm stuck in oram for a little while longer yet.

Shouldn't be long until I can come home, but I gotta grab my rifle still.

To be honest, I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age.

He over and over and over in this transcript, he's obsessed with the rifle that was his grandfather's rifle.

and particularly that his father will be angry if he has lost the rifle.

If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence.

It's one of the other like just surreal things in this exchange, you know, like you just killed a guy and all he can think about is my dad's gonna be so mad if I don't bring back grandpa's rifle.

Not about the fact that I just killed a guy.

Yeah.

In front of thousands of people.

And there's another message that's related to what we've been talking about.

He says, remember how I was engraving bullets?

The fucking messages are mostly a big meme.

If I see notices bulge, ooh woo on Fox News, I might have a stroke.

And then he goes back to saying, man, I'm going to have to leave my rifle behind.

That sucks.

It's crazy.

This whole incident, or at least what we know of it so far, just feels like a very

uncomfortable clash of like, I live online versus I live in the real world.

Yes, yes.

And particularly when talking to older colleagues who did not grow up online, it's been very hard to like explain like, and you see it in the, in the national discourse too, like this is not about like support Trump, anti-Trump.

Like it's not, it doesn't break down into easy political motivations.

It's

many of the young people that I have talked to who are like

locked into these worlds, like they think that's absurd, like rooting for one party or another.

You're a dupe or a fool if you care about that stuff.

I can't stop watching the way people are trying to pull like their own ideological

goals out of this horrible event.

So

it's like

even as people are lecturing, like that people haven't been taking seriously the death of this young man and father, They're still making it crass themselves by trying to turn it into an ideological prop to further their own ends.

Ellie Reeve is the author of Black Pill, How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics.

When we're back on today, explained using Charlie Kirk's murder as an ideological prop to further your own ends.

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Today Explained is back with Zach, Zach Beacham, senior correspondent at Vox.com.

Zach, we still don't fully know what motivated the alleged shooter, but that doesn't seem to be stopping Trump to Trump Harder from ramping up their response.

Whom is it that they blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

A lot of the time the language they use is they.

They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism,

faith, and of God's merciful love.

They did this.

They killed Charlie.

And they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy.

The they is not very well defined, right?

But from what I can tell from listening to a lot of what they have to say, and listening especially to J.D.

Vance's guest hosting Charlie Kirk's radio show, where he hosted

Stephen Miller and a bunch of other notable folks to talk about this.

They seem to believe that there is a wide-ranging

web, a cell, but bigger than that, right, of left-wing organizations and individuals who work to inspire hatred targeting them personally.

Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder.

When you listen to Vance talk about it,

his closing monologue in that show, he talks very personally about how it's a threat to leading right-wing figures, not just because he was friends with Charlie, but also the way that he talks about Trump's assassination.

Donald J.

Trump escaped an assassin's bullet by less than an inch.

Our House majority lever, Stephen Scalise, came within seconds of death by an assassin himself.

He believes that these people, the they, these liberal institutions,

are responsible for fomenting an atmosphere in which he and his friends can be killed, and in fact have been targets of assassins' bullets.

Vance says explicitly, people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.

Is that true, Zach?

Is the left more violent than the right in the United States?

No, it's not.

And the key thing to look at is actual data on political violence, specifically politically motivated murders.

And there was a recent recent attempt to tally this by Alex Narasta, who is a scholar at the Libertarian Cato Institute.

And what he found was if you exclude 9-11, which because 9-11 is such an outlier that it makes everything else look small by comparison, political violence in the U.S.

is overwhelmingly perpetrated by people on the political right, a majority.

So

the left, if you look just at the actual raw data, is not even close to as violent as the political right is.

We have, however, seen recent high-profile instances of what might be termed left-wing political violence.

The targeting of Donald Trump is not one of them, right?

The first, the assassin who nearly killed Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, has no discernible left-wing ideology, no evidence that he has any left-wing politics.

motivations were weird and odd.

And at one point, there was a report that suggested that he also looked at Joe Biden's campaign movements and he may have just shot Trump because he was there, right?

Like it's this sometimes violence targeting major political figures has no explanation.

The entire underlying belief here is a fiction, right?

A sense, and this is widespread in the right-wing press, that the American left is celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

Those people do exist.

They're real, and I find it disgusting to.

I don't think they should be fired for their beliefs.

But

they're treating it, you know, these mainstream voices on the right up until the president's senior advisors.

Like this is the position of the institutional Democratic Party.

When in fact, like, no one at any serious level of Democratic politics has even come close to justifying Charlie Kirk's death.

I haven't read an op-ed in a major left-wing publication or saying that Charlie Kirk deserved to die or that it was good.

This is just not the opinion of the American left.

It isn't.

But there's an effort to make it look as if it is.

What are they proposing the country does

about this problem that they characterize as them, very much us versus them.

You mentioned firings.

I mean, the first wave of the response has been

an overwhelming attempt at what can best be described as cancellations, right?

You know, we're familiar with the concept of an ordinary person saying something that offends someone's political sensibilities and losing their job over it, right?

That's what I take that term to mean.

And there's been a huge wave of those since then.

We will absolutely target you, go after you.

This morning, some harsh critics of Charlie Kirk are now looking for new jobs.

Cobb County Schools, placing an unknown number of employees on leave after officials said the workers made comments on social media about the conservative activist who was killed last week.

I read through some tweets by Libs of TikTok, who's an account that's famous for sort of doxing and trying to get punished liberals or leftists who have allegedly bad opinions.

And Libs of TikTok has been working overtime after Charlie Kirk's murder to try to get people fired.

They canceled and debanked us for saying men can't get pregnant.

They're getting fired for celebrating assassination.

This distinction is important.

We are not the same.

This person reportedly works for Social Security, and he's calling for white people to be killed.

Our tax dollars pay his salary.

He needs to be investigated at FBI.

Chi, the author Haya Raichik behind it, will say, is this acceptable to you, a person's employer, when she tweets about whatever their comment is.

make these lunatics famous and sometimes they are justifying violence again i find it abhorrent we are talking about people who will often say things like people will tell you to have respect for someone who spent their whole career making sure others couldn't live equally happily or safely or charlie kirk is not a martyr for the gospel of jesus christ these are things that are well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse about a public figure and it seems like at no point

has the top of this administration, the president, the vice president, someone like Stephen Miller, acknowledged that this is a problem that both parties have had to deal with in recent years, if not since the dawn of time in this country.

I haven't heard a lot of talk about Paul Pelosi.

And we'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco.

How's her husband doing, by the way?

Anyone know?

Or Josh Shapiro,

or the deceased Minnesota lawmaker, Melissa Hortman.

Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?

I'm not familiar with the Minnesota House Speaker.

That's not what's happening here because those facts, those incidents contradict the story that's being told, which is, as Vance said in the clip that you played,

of a uniquely violent left whose institutions deserve to be targeted by the state.

I suppose there's like lots of levels of

irony here in the response from this administration, but one of the most tragic ones feels to me that they are overlooking

what most Americans agree on in a moment like this.

Like maybe not every single person wants to come out and mourn Charlie Kirk.

Maybe not every single person believes what Charlie Kirk believed, but

more Americans than any other aspect of this assassination here can agree on, I think, one thing, which is that

we shouldn't do this to people.

Yeah.

We shouldn't go out there and murder people because we disagree with them.

That's un-American.

And yet, here we are blaming the left and leftist institutions and leftist thinkers.

And what's that going to lead to?

It feels like the most obvious answer is like

more violence.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, violent episodes tend to last for a while once they start.

And I'm very worried.

What the Trump administration is talking about, the language they're using, the measures they're proposing in response, will continue to escalate political violence.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.

There are so many different permutations for how bad things can get that the only responsible thing to do right now is to say, we have to be able to trust each other.

That's not the route the White House has gone though, and it really scares me.

Zach Beecham is the author of The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Traditions Swept the World.

Denise Guerra made our show today with help from Devin Schwartz, Jolie Myers, Laura Bullard, Danielle Hewitt, Patrick Boyd, and Adrian Lilly.

And myself, I'm Sean Ramesfurum.

This is Today Explained.