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“A 22-year-old Utah man was arrested in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk during an event on a college campus, authorities said Friday. ‘We got him,’ Gov. Spencer Cox told reporters at a news conference announcing the arrest of Tyler Robinson… “According to Cox, Robinson’s family said he had become ‘more political in recent years’ and had criticized Kirk. During a recent dinner with family, he mentioned Kirk was due to appear at the university event and they discussed whether Kirk was spreading hate, Cox said.” AP News
Here’s our previous coverage of the killing. The Flip Side
Both sides worry about the state of online discourse:
“For some shooters, online communities—with all their irony-poisoning, shitposting, and feuding—are more real, or at least more meaningful, than physical ones. With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality…
“There is so much anger right now, plenty of it justified. A young father was murdered on a college campus. Few public or private spaces seem to be safe from the specter of a mass shooter. Institutions that once functioned for the benefit of the public are now sclerotic, having been partly dismantled, or seem indifferent to suffering. The economy operates like a casino, and there’s a feeling that traditional pathways to prosperity are gone. People are being rounded up off the streets without due process. The list goes on…
“Every minute of every day, all of these thoughts and feelings are uploaded into [online] platforms… The internet is not a monolith. For every community of mass-shooter fandoms, there is another that is silly, joyous, productive, or totally harmless. But it is hard not to notice that, in the aggregate, something poisonous is in the architecture of its platforms and the way that our technologies demand not just our attention, but our most heightened emotions.”
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic
“The ‘fringe’ tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The ‘fringe’ tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln… The ‘fringe’ created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The ‘fringe’ killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December. The ‘fringe’ tried to kill Donald Trump last summer. The ‘fringe’ killed Charlie Kirk on Wednesday…
“The ‘fringe’ is a bunch of very normal people I went to high school and college with… For years, well-intentioned voices have told us that the madness we see online is somehow unreal – that the internet is not real life. It may be true that the internet cannot replace real life, but it can certainly destroy very real, meaningful parts of life…
“To say that the radicalization we’re seeing is a ‘fringe’ issue is to simply admit you have no idea the scale of the problem… If you’re a Boomer, or a ‘not very online’ person, you won’t understand the extent of the problem… You’re not seeing the kinds of vile images and videos and calls to arms that create the world’s Luigi Mangiones and their disciples. But just because you’re not seeing radical, politically insane, very subversive, and dangerously attractive content online all day doesn’t mean others aren’t.”
Luke Lyman, Spectator World
Other opinions below.
“Trump contended that Kirk’s murder follows a pattern by the ‘radical left.’ In an address on Wednesday from the Oval Office, he also cited the assassination attempt against him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania; attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; the killing of a health care executive in New York; and the 2017 shooting that wounded Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana)…
“Absent from that list were incidents against prominent Democrats, including the 2022 bludgeoning in his home of Paul Pelosi… a 2020 plot by members of a right-wing paramilitary militia group to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; the arson in April of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion… or the far-right zealot masquerading as a police officer who in June allegedly killed Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman.”
Karen Tumulty, Washington Post
“White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, ‘The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.’ The Democratic National Committee, several historically Black colleges and the homes of the Maryland House speaker and Senate president, on the other hand, received bomb threats the day after Kirk’s killing.”
Sophia Tesfaye, Salon
“Most Americans aren’t sociopaths who hate anyone who disagrees with them. Most Americans do not celebrate political violence even if it hits what they consider the ‘right’ target. But the minority of Americans who are consumed by their longing for chaos and violence are doing what they can to draw the rest of us into their warped logic…
“Over the past days, these merchants of rage have been frighteningly successful. If there is any political duty which this darkest of timelines calls forth, it is to resist these bad actors.”
Yascha Mounk, Substack
“Posts on TikTok mocking Kirk’s death racked up millions of views. Some influencers even openly celebrated it, calling it ‘karma’ or ‘justice.’ Others used their platforms to validate the public’s lack of empathy, saying it was OK not to feel compassion for Kirk’s death because, ‘if someone spent their life dismissing other people’s pain, mocking it, minimizing it, even actively contributing to it, it makes sense that your empathy tank might run dry.’…
“His death should have sparked a sobering reflection about how far we’ve strayed from being able to disagree without dehumanizing. Instead, it became clickbait. Over the course of my 25 years as an American, our country has transformed from one that found unity in tragedy to one that exploits it for political gain. We no longer mourn together. We fight over who deserves to be mourned. The loss isn’t just of one man’s life. It’s of a shared national conscience. And that’s the deeper tragedy.”
Colleen Dean, Washington Examiner
“As is often the case with political violence, it’s not ‘they’ who did this; it’s one guy… But the spectacle of so many figures in different corners of the political left — including celebrities, educators, journalists, health care providers, and elected officials — either celebrating this moment or at least choosing to kick Kirk while he’s permanently down makes it easier for people to see this as a pivotal cultural moment rather than the aberration of one young man’s madness…
“This could have been any of us — anyone engaged in public argument or governance or journalism or activism on the right, locally or nationally. Everybody feels that. Everybody knows that you can be MAGA or you can be Reaganite or you can be a Bush/McCain neocon or a Romney moderate, and the same people will call you a fascist or a racist and hate you. Je suis Charlie.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
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