The Aberrant Killed the Normal

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

 

There is an alternative to the dizzying confusion we’ve created for ourselves about identity: the message of traditional morality that Charlie Kirk delivered.

 

The culture war wasn’t just a metaphor at Utah Valley University last week.

 

We need to learn more about Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, but based on what we know so far, he represents the polar opposite of Kirk in every important respect.

 

The young man with the transgender boyfriend shot the young man with the wife and two kids.

 

The guy with a reported interest in “furries” killed the guy with an interest in spreading the Gospel.

 

The believer in gender fluidity murdered the believer in traditional gender roles.

 

In cultural terms, it was aberrant versus normal, a representative of all that is fashionable and bizarre, on the one hand, and a spokesman for the tried and true, on the other.

 

Elite culture has, for decades, worked to flip the script on these values. It has defined conventional views on gender and family as out of the mainstream and radical new notions of human sexuality as beyond dispute.

 

So, Kirk was considered outrageous for saying that men and women should have relationships built around marriage and child-rearing. As for Robinson, he may be a murderer, but at least we can assume that he doesn’t believe in the gender binary.

 

It’s funny how the purported hater showed up at Utah Valley only with a microphone and a willingness to engage, while the supporter of new and advanced views showed up with a rifle and an escape plan.

 

Robinson appears to have carried out the first major political assassination in U.S. history that requires a knowledge of furry culture to totally understand.

 

The spent casing from the bullet that killed Kirk was engraved with a cryptic message referring to a sexually fraught internet meme about people who wear animal costumes.

 

When a four-year-old child pretends to be a mouse or some other animal, it’s cute; when an adult does it — unless he’s a mascot for a sports team — it’s disturbing, especially when a sexual fetish is involved.

 

Robinson’s other engravings on the bullet casings featured anti-fascist messages and online memes clearly meant to be a jokey nod-and-wink to those who are extremely online. Revolutionary anarchists in the 19th century spoke of “the propaganda of the deed”; the murder of Charlie Kirk in the 21st century was, in part, a trolling internet post as deed.

 

One of the engravings on the bullet casings literally ended with the abbreviation, LMAO.

 

As far as we know, the story of Tyler Robinson isn’t one of childhood deprivation or mental illness. No, the narrative arc of his life seems to have been: a nice kid from a nice family, who got acculturated — largely via fetid corners of the internet — into a thoroughgoing nihilism and a world of gender fluidity.

 

According to authorities, Robinson was in a romantic relationship with a boyfriend who was “transitioning” from male to female and this may have been a motive for the assassination.

 

“Hey fascist! CATCH!” Robinson wrote on one of the bullet casings. Usually, anti-fascists object to their ideological adversaries’ wanting to establish a dictatorship or conquer neighboring countries. Charlie Kirk may be the first supposed fascist whose offense was refusing to use the correct pronouns and insisting that gender is innate and can’t be changed on a whim.

 

It’s not clear what we can do to combat the online obsessions of isolated young men. We can certainly stop pretending, though, that meeting the demands of trans activists is the great civil rights issue of our time and stop denigrating as narrow-minded bigots those who — backed by the data, by the way — advocate young people getting married and starting families.

 

There is an alternative to the online miasma and to the dizzying confusion we’ve created for ourselves about identity. That’s the message of traditional morality that Kirk delivered in strong, uncompromising terms to students not hearing it from anywhere else. And that may well be why his killer thought he had to die.