The Making of a Delusion in Real Time

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

 

In fact, we know quite a bit about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, and we’re going to learn a lot more about his motives and state of mind at his arraignment later today.

 

Even before prosecutors weigh in, we know from Governor Spencer Cox’s survey of the evidence against Tyler Robinson that he was attracted to “leftist ideology.” We know from his high school friends that the suspect was “pretty left on everything.” Indeed, even though “the rest of his family was very hard Republican,” the purported gunman was “the only member of his family that was really leftist.”

 

We can glean some inferences, too, from the messages Robinson etched onto bullet shell casings. “Hey fascist! Catch!” is pretty self-explanatory. “Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao ciao ciao,” references an anti-fascist anthem from the Second World War that became a Soviet hymn and has enjoyed a second life as a leftist protest song and the soundtrack to gaming videos on forums like TikTok. “Notices Bulges OwO what’s this?” would be familiar to consumers of “online furry and role-play culture.” That has a special resonance in this case, given Robinson’s reported romantic relationship with his biologically male transgender roommate.

 

It’s essential to restate the facts for the benefit of an audience that is not only skeptical toward them but is actively crafting an alternative reality that its fabricators hope will bury the truth beneath an impenetrable mountain of prevarications.

 

Yesterday, I wrote about what was then a sad attempt to revise the historical record — an exercise that took the form of insisting, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that Robinson was, in fact, a pro-Trump Republican. “Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals,” wrote onetime Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. Indeed, Robinson was pegged as a “Groyper,” a disciple of the racist podcaster and Charlie Kirk critic Nick Fuentes, by those who desperately wanted it to be true.

 

Until last night, this could be chalked up to the motivated reasoning that passes for political analysis on social media, when this popular delusion migrated from the internet onto a network news broadcast.

 

In a since-deleted social media post, the CBS Evening News warned that Robinson’s motives were merely what the FBI just recently started calling “nihilistic violent extremism.” The alleged shooter’s act may be attributable to a growing trend in which experts contend that “violence isn’t tied to a clear political ideology.” It’s a phenomenon similar to the child murders committed by the Annunciation Catholic school shooter — both of whom were associated with or adjacent to the online culture of “trans ideology,” so, of course, their “motive remains elusive,” CBS anchor John Dickerson mused. Their violence seems “not driven by an obvious political ideology.”

 

Of course, this obfuscatory enterprise is still primarily an online phenomenon. There, Robinson’s presumed Republicanism is rapidly becoming an unquestioned article of faith.

 

As Heather Cox Richardson, one of Substack’s most popular writers with a 2.8 million-strong subscriber base, insisted that “in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left.” Rather, he is “a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical.”

 

This campaign of misdirection is having its intended effect. A YouGov poll published Sunday found that more respondents believe Robinson was “a Republican” (24 percent) than “a Democrat” (21 percent). The correct answer is likely, in the conventional sense, “not sure” (40 percent). But among self-described Democrats, more than 40 percent of respondents identified Robinson as a GOP’er. Nearly 30 percent of young adults under the age of 29 said the same.

 

It is not at all reassuring that the bloody work of an individual who was radicalized online is now being run through that same reality distortion field for the benefit of millions of Americans who prefer their unreality to the observable world around us.

 

At first, the activist left insisted they could quantify political violence to the decimal point in the effort to claim that the American right is the font from which all violence springs. When that didn’t change the subject, they pivoted to insisting that it doesn’t actually matter what the alleged killer believed when what he believed became obvious. Now, this cohort increasingly contends that the alleged murderer of a conservative icon, who virtually confessed his left-wing sympathies in writing, was really a far-right wacko.

 

This is hallucinatory. It will contribute to the delirium from which too many deranged and violent elements draw inspiration. This campaign of mythmaking is, at the very least, reckless and irresponsible. At worst, it knowingly contributes to the conditions that are encouraging would-be left-wing political terrorists to act on their paranoia.