Note that I wrote “the suspect,” not “a suspect.” His name is Tyler Robinson, 22, and he is a Utah resident.
Cracking this case demonstrates the tremendous usefulness of the ubiquitous surveillance cameras in public places, plus the technology to enhance them. Then of course television and the internet can spread the information around the world, with the result that someone somewhere recognizes that person. And if the person hasn’t successfully fled the county or killed himself (or herself, although with the exception of Charlotte Corday political assassins are virtually always young males), it’s just a matter of time. Sometimes a short amount of time.
That’s what happened with Mangione, and that’s what has happened with Robinson. Reports are that, in a twist reminiscent of the turning in of the Unibomber and yet even more poignant, it was the subject’s father who got him to surrender.
It will take some time for me to digest the information out there, but I wanted to put up this first post quickly. A great deal of information can be found here, including this mugshot:
No doubt the young women of the left will swoon, although he’s not really in Mangione territory in terms of looks. But I strongly suspect that becoming a leftist hero was one of his motives, although hardly the only one.
I am extremely glad this person has been apprehended.
All the people in the MSM, politics, and punditry who’ve been calling those on the right Nazis and are now wondering what on earth could have caused this killing need to look at their own heavy responsibility, although I doubt any of them will. Words are not violence; they are words. But they can beget violence when they affect impressionable minds. That in no way absolves the assassin of criminal responsibility. Let justice be served.
I plan to write another post dealing with the details as they emerge, but for now I’ll just mention this, which I think is very telling:
Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson was “full of hate” in the days before the shooting, according to a family friend, as authorities revealed the 22-year-old had confessed to the assassination and had been turned in by a relative, after the suspect first said he would rather kill himself than go into custody.
Bullets found in the chamber of the rifle reportedly used by Robinson included apparent left-wing slogans such as “Hey fascist! Catch!” and another referencing “Oh, Bella Ciao!” a popular Italian anti-fascist song, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said.
Ah, but he had already had plenty of opportunity to kill himself and didn’t. Perhaps he had thought they wouldn’t be able to trace him. Perhaps he thought, like Raskolnikov, that he had committed the perfect crime.
But “Hey fascist! Catch!” is especially telling. It combines the common accusation “fascist” – although a less fascistic person than Charlie Kirk you could hardly find – with the comic-book type of snark we’ve come to expect from social media postings. An assassin for our times.
I keep hearing in the MSM that Charlie Kirk was “divisive” and “polarizing,” two of their favorite words for any figure on the right. What do these pundits really mean when they call Kirk that? They mean that he said things with which they disagree. That’s the “divisive” part. The “polarizing” part means he succeeded in convincing some young people that the leftist point of view might not make as much sense as they’d previously thought.
Oh, and he was up-front about being a Christian. And pro-Israel. And a proponent of what not long ago was so basic as to be universally accepted, but is now considered by the left to be “hate speech” – that there are only two sexes and that, when born as either one or the other, a person cannot switch.
The left has long been about stifling free speech once their own numbers reach a certain critical mass. Because of many decades of the leftist Gramscian march though our cultural and educational institutions, that mass was reached some time ago and the left is determined to silence voices on the other side. For quite a while, cancel culture was the method. But that segued into murder, and the killing of people who are dangerous to the left because of their voices or because of their stances or jobs is now not only accepted and excused by a broad segment of the left, but applauded and celebrated.
Many people have pointed out that there’s quite a bit of that going on at various social media sites such as Reddit, which comes as no surprise.
Kirk was especially dangerous to the left because he was so effective on campus, with young people. His work there may even have been responsible (at least in part) for putting Donald Trump over the top in 2024:
Charlie Kirk just went around debating college kids who had likely never heard a viewpoint outside the narrow ones they had been taught. He used words, ideas, that’s it. And someone found this so threatening that they decided to kill him for it.
Kirk also was unfailingly polite, respectful, and good-natured when he argued. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it with earnestness and a smile and never seemed to get angry. And yet it hasn’t kept the left from characterizing him as hateful. Fortunately, his videos remain to tell a different tale.
This death is less like an assassination of an officeholder and more like a terrorist attack, because it seems meant to frighten and silence rather than to stop someone in a governmental position. Was the killer Antifa, pro-Hamas, anti-Christian, trans – who and what and exactly why? While it’s theoretically possible that Kirk wasn’t killed by a leftist, I think it’s extremely likely that he was. But at any rate, many leftists are celebrating his death.
This pro-assassination culture on the left has been going on for many years, but Trump’s tenure seems to have caused the left to escalate it exponentially. I noticed it from the beginning of Trump’s first term, when suddenly I was hearing many references by some Democrats I know (not even leftists, by the way) expressing their wish for Trump to die or be killed. They said it without apology or any seeming sense that what they said was wrong. The desire had already been normed, or even seen as a sign of virtue.
A few months ago, someone I’ve known since childhood (although we’re not especially close) told me that if she had a terminal disease she’d get a gun and try to kill Trump. Fortunately, she seems healthy enough. But it didn’t sound like a joke; not that she would do it even if ill, but she was expressing a very strong wish. And I can attest to the fact that, until Trump was elected, she was politically moderate.
It will take quite some time for the effects of Kirk’s death to become apparent. But I think the author of this piece, that appeared in The Federalist, has a good point when she writes, “Kirk wasn’t just assassinated. He was also martyred.” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if opposition to Kirk’s strong Christian beliefs, which formed a core part of his identity, was a significant part of the assassin’s motive for killing him.
And yes, the assassin did evil and many on the left advocate evil – including my old friend. It’s shocking, but true, and – as often happens with evil – one of the most shocking things is that they think they’re advocating good.
Many of you are old enough to remember the assassinations of the 1960s. I certainly am. There was a feeling of things spiraling out of control. But this seems worse, and I’ll tell you why: the left has grown stronger and more numerous rather than weaker. And social media is a very potent factor in its spread. Charlie Kirk was instrumental as a counterforce, and he will be very sorely missed.
The modus operandi in the Kirk assassination seems somewhat similar to that of the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. One difference is that, when an ex-president and presidential candidate speaks at a large open-air venue, the roofs are supposed to be secured. That’s not been the case – till now – for people like Kirk, who are political speakers and commentators (“activist” is the term much of the MSM is using for Kirk) but are not high officeholders. The targeting of someone like Kirk is new; although plenty of people in the political public eye get death threats, I can’t offhand think of one that’s been carried out successfully before.
And no, Breitbart was not murdered.
The big difference is, of course, that the Kirk assassin was successful and Trump’s fortunately was not. Trump’s would-be killer was himself killed at the venue before he had time to leave the roof, while Kirk’s killer escaped.
“We are asking for the public’s help identifying this person of interest in connection with the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University,” the FBI’s Salt Lake City office said on X on Thursday while sharing two images of the individual, who is wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and was captured in a stairwell in one of them.
The FBI said it is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person responsible for Kirk’s murder.
Here are the images:
More:
The FBI also said Thursday it has recovered what is believed to be the weapon used in the deadly shooting. A “high-powered bolt action rifle,” which officials believe was the weapon used in the shooting, was recovered in a wooded area near where the shooting took place, according to Salt Lake City FBI Special Agent Robert Bohls.
The rifle is an older model imported Mauser .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle wrapped in a towel, multiple law enforcement sources told ABC News. The location of the firearm appears to match the suspect’s route of travel, the sources said.
The spent cartridge was still chambered and three unspent cartridges contained wording on them expressing what some law enforcement officials described as “transgender and anti-fascist” writing, according to preliminary information shared with agencies. It’s unclear what that means and authorities are still working to determine the meaning or whether the markings were intended as misdirection for investigators.
This writing of messages on cartridges is similar to the act of leftist heartthrob Luigi Mangione; you may recall this:
Three 9 mm shell casings from the crime scene had the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose” written across them, one word per bullet, NYPD’s Chief Detective Joseph Kenny has said. Police have been looking into whether the words, which title a 2010 book critiquing the insurance industry, may point to a motive in CEO Brian Thompson’s killing.
The photos of the suspect in Kirk’s killing are indistinct, but nevertheless they might help someone make an identification. I haven’t seen any explanation of how this person originally came under suspicion, but they say that they’ve been able to track this suspect’s movements quite well through surveillance footage.
Also:
After the shooting, the suspect traveled to the other side of building, jumped off and fled off-campus into a neighborhood, Mason said. Officials are working through nearby neighborhoods, contacting people with doorbell cameras and speaking to witnesses to identify any leads, Mason said.
Along with recovering the weapon, Bohls said investigators have also collected a footwear impression, palm print and forearm imprints for analysis.
Some of my thoughts (hunches only): this was not a professional hit; this was a leftist and the cartridge messages are not misdirection; yesterday I’d come to believe they would never find the killer, but now I think they have a decent chance although $100K seems a very low reward.
It’s been almost a quarter of a century. When put that way, it seems hard to believe, doesn’t it?
And yet in some ways a lifetime ago. As the British poet Philip Larkin wrote in a poem looking back on the days prior to a different historical event: “Never such innocence again.”
September 10, 2001, felt like an idyll compared to September 11, 2001, and all the years since then. 9/11 opened our eyes to the vulnerabilities most of us hadn’t seen before or had ignored and denied until then. It gave us a brief illusion of unity – marred by a few sour notes – that quickly dissipated even as an illusion.
And now there are adults who were born after 9/11. Now there are middle-aged people who were young children then.
We remember, although we’ve ultimately assimilated that day into our view of the world and it no longer seems so strange. The pain is still there and the heroism is still there. For the many families who lost loved ones, the scars and the memories remain.
Many years ago I wrote my own reminiscences about that day and how it affected me: here’s that post. The events of 9/11 were the beginning of a learning process for me that took several years and ended up changing my politics and led me to start this blog. All of that was unforeseen at the time.
There are so many videos about 9/11 it’s hard to select one or even a few. There are documentaries that trace the day through cable news coverage, through talks by survivors, or through re-enactments. There are videos that concentrate on air traffic control, or the military response, or the phone calls from people who would die that day. They are uniformly fascinating, compelling, chilling, haunting – even now.
So I’ll just choose one to highlight here.
RIP to all the victims and the many heroes of that day and beyond.
Trump, 79, announced Kirk’s death in a post on Truth Social, writing: “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
It’s awful on so many levels. There’s the human one: Kirk was 31 years old, with a wife and two small children. There’s the political one: the hatred and violence towards the right continues. There’s the ironic one: he was a man who was dedicated to reasonable debate rather than angry polemics; I’ve watched some of his videos on YouTube and that’s my impression.
Early reports were that the shooter was in custody, but now they’re saying that’s not the case. That is also terrible, terrible.
RIP to Charlie Kirk, and may his family find comfort and the killer be found and punished.
UPDATE 6:40 PM:
I’m watching a news conference right now about the killing. They said there’s a person of interest in custody; that doesn’t seem to be the person originally arrested who has been cleared. No details about the person of interest.
My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that the person who killed Kirk was not in the crowd, but on a rooftop or in a building.
They said they have some security footage of the shooter – potentially from a roof (the spokesperson just said that; when I made my guess I hadn’t yet heard it). There were supposedly eight security people of Kirk’s there, plus about six other security people connected with the campus.
I would say one lesson is: don’t have open-air events with buildings around.
It’s really really hard to know what to make of this sort of thing. Seems like a lot of rumors and anonymous sources. But make of it what you will:
Israeli officials appeared on Wednesday to increasingly cast doubt on the success of the previous day’s strike in Qatar targeting the leaders of the Hamas terror group’s politburo, with a series of anonymous quotes to Hebrew-language outlets.
The Kan public broadcaster said in an unsourced report that Israel had informed the United States that the chances that the strike had been successful had decreased significantly.
“Right now there’s no indication that the terrorists were killed,” an anonymous source was quoted telling Channel 12 news. “We continue to hope they were assassinated, but optimism is fading.”
Similar sentiments were reported by Kan, which quoted an official as saying that the final results needed to be seen but that it was possible the strike had not achieved “the desired result.”
There are few details as yet on this story, but it sounds bad:
Charlie Kirk was shot at an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah on Wednesday.
Bystanders report seeing Kirk shot near his neck during a Q&A with students.
A suspect is in custody, according to a UVU alert sent to students. The campus has been evacuated.
“A single shot was fired on campus toward a visiting speaker. Police are investigating now, suspect in custody,” an alert from UVU said.
An older man was arrested and taken into police custody.
No metal detectors?
I’m not sure how old an “older man” would be, on a college campus.
Some reports say Kirk was shot in the neck, not just “near” his neck. I assume more information will be coming out shortly. In case you’re not familiar with Kirk, he’s a conservative who goes to college campuses and debates students and others on various issues; there are many YouTube videos of him doing this.
If you’re the praying type, now would be a good time.
UPDATE 3:45 PM: I still haven’t seen any reports on his condition. But, looking at the comments here, if they’re correct it sounds very very bad.
UPDATE 4:05 PM: This AP article says he’s in critical condition. That’s better than dead, but not at all good.
UPDATE 5:20 PM: I am very sad to say that Kirk has died. RIP. I have put up this new post.
When I was very young – in my early teens – I was alone, flipping around the TV dial late one night, and came across the Ingmar Bergman movie The Virgin Spring.
It’s not for young people. I didn’t know anything about it or about Bergman, but it seemed interesting and I started to watch it. It seemed to be about a medieval family in Sweden and its beautiful blond teenage daughter, who set out on an errand and – well, what happened to her profoundly shocked me. I didn’t see it coming, and it terrified me and affected me deeply enough that I remember it still, all these years later, although certainly not every detail. The images and plot, which featured beauty and innocence defiled, and retribution and revenge (sometimes literally overkill, I might add), were incredibly powerful. I didn’t really understand the movie and yet I partly did, at least on a visceral level.
You may or may not have ever seen the movie. If you haven’t, spoiler alert for the discussion in this clip. But I put the video up here because it features a number of scenes from the movie, and a summary of the film’s themes:
Yesterday, in pondering the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the video images of it that have been circulating, and the reaction to those images, I kept thinking about The Virgin Spring. There is noting racial in the movie, by the way; everyone is white because after all this is Sweden in the 13th century (or 14th, depending on your source). But the theme of evildoers defiling and ending the life of a young blond girl is there, and the “evil versus good” images are extraordinarily powerful. Thus it is with the video and images on the train. The still image of the killer, standing up, hand raised to strike, poised above the diminutive Zarutska who looks younger than her years, is blood-curdling and bone-chilling.
One wants to yell “stop!”, to go back in time and stay his hand. But no one can.
So there is blame, and suggestions for retribution. In this case, there are many many people to blame. The first is, of course, the perpetrator Decarlos Brown. He is a violent career criminal, and this was an utterly unprovoked crime against the most innocent – and unaware – of victims.
But wait – there’s also the judge who set him free for his last offense, which was a 911 call that he made and then hung up. A forensic psychiatric evaluation was ordered in that case at his lawyer’s request, but it never happened. Why? “The system” was broken, or set up to fail.
Then there is the soft-on-crime policy of the city, courtesy of Democratic politicians. And the idiocy of allowing people to ride the light rails without paying.
One thing I think is clear, however: no one on the train that night could have prevented the crime. Even if the equivalent of Daniel Penny had been there, Brown wasn’t verbally threatening anyone, and he acted so quickly I don’t think anyone could have stopped him. What they should have done afterward – and didn’t do – is another question, one I have dealt with previously in yesterday’s post and my comments on the thread there (see this as well as this).
Now, finally – and too late – Brown is in custody without bail. A great many people are calling for his execution. But although I understand the call, I’m not one of them – for the simple fact that I think Brown is almost certainly a schizophrenic. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think he’s not guilty. But mental illness of that nature, with active psychotic delusions – and his were documented prior to the crime and not just as an ex post facto excuse (which also happens sometimes) – can be a mitigating factor in the sentencing phrase. I am not in favor of executing people who commit crimes, even heinous ones, while under the influence of active hallucinations.
I would have to know more, however, because I could change my mind about Brown. But at the moment, life imprisonment would seem more appropriate. Brown is a very difficult case because he combines two things: a violent history that may or may not predate his schizophrenia, plus the schizophrenia itself. But the schizophrenia was documented prior to the murder – in fact, his original 911 call was about one of his delusions. To refresh your memory:
The alleged killer, however, currently has pending charges for misuse of the 911 system in January following a police welfare check — which revealed his troubling thoughts, the outlet [Charlotte Observer] reported.
Brown told authorities during the visit he believed someone had given him a “man-made” material that controlled when he ate, walked, and talked, an affidavit obtained by the newspaper said.
“Brown wanted officers to investigate this ‘man-made’ material that was inside of his body,” the affidavit said.
Officers then advised Brown that he was suffering a medical issue, and there was nothing more they could do to help him.
He became upset over their response and called 911. He was arrested after he hung up the phone, the outlet reported.
He called 911 and it sounds as though paramedics should have come, and/or he should have been taken to the hospital for an evaluation. Did the cops or paramedics try to do that, and he refused? I’d really like to know, because a hospital evaluation would have been highly appropriate. I’ve known people that has happened to, but it doesn’t even seem like he got a psychiatric consult. And yet, with evidence that he was actively psychotic and paranoid, plus his violent record about which the police had to have known if they checked, some sort of dramatic intervention was called for.
I’m not making excuses for him. I believe he needs to be locked up, probably for life this time. But he should have been locked up (and gotten treatment) earlier, and many people are at fault.
One more thing – you may think this interview (if real) is just Brown blowing smoke and making up excuses. But note that it’s very consistent with what he told the police many months ago when he made that 911 call and at the time of the original call he wasn’t facing charges for anything:
In a phone interview circulating online, Brown blames “The material. Put it like that. The material using my body. It’s that. You know, that’s not me.
“I’m talking about just for no reason. But since they did that, since they did that, now they got to investigate the material my body exposed to. Since they want to do all that, now they got to investigate.” …
“They lashed out on her. Well I was working out … Whoever was working the material, they lashed out on her.”
That is essentially what he told police long before the murder. It is consistent with a schizophrenic delusion, and also with the utterly unmotivated and unprovoked nature of the crime. You may call it BS, and perhaps it is, but the time frame indicates otherwise. Again, that does not absolve him of criminal responsibility, but to me it indicates that the death penalty should not be imposed. I expect a lot of disagreement on that.
NOTE: Here’s what happens at the end of The Virgin Spring (spoiler alert once again). You’ll have to click on the link to watch the scene, because embedding has been disabled.
Also, here’s Ang Lee on what the movie meant to him when he saw it at the age of eighteen.
You might ask: who cares? I’m not sure I do – I’ve never heard of many of these people – but their hatred of Israel is something of which they seem proud. It’s worthy of mention how captured their minds are by leftist propaganda:
Figures from across the film and TV world, including Oscar, BAFTA, Emmy and Palme d’Or winners, have signed a pledge saying they will refuse to work with Israeli institutions and companies that are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Such virtue!
The list of signatories — which has surpassed 1,200 names — includes filmmakers such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay, Adam McKay, Boots Riley, Emma Seligman, Joshua Oppenheimer and Mike Leigh, and actors including Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Ayo Edebiri, Lily Gladstone, Mark Ruffalo, Hannah Einbinder, Peter Sarsgaard, Aimee Lou Wood, Paapa Essiedu, Gael Garcia Bernal, Riz Ahmed, Melissa Barrera, Cynthia Nixon, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Joe Alwyn and Josh O’Connor.
I guess I missed this, from last year, although it doesn’t surprise me that it happened:
Last year, a similar pledge was signed by more than 7000 authors and book workers, including Sally Rooney and Viet Thanh Nguyen, boycotting “complicit” Israeli publishers.
One of the comments about the Hollywood signatories: “Thank you for compiling this list of actors and the like to be avoided.”
