As we just learned a little while ago, Tyler Robinson not only confessed to his boyfriend by text, he also answered a direct question asking him why he did it. HIs answer: "I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out."
According to his mother he "had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro gay and trans rights oriented." That's also probably not a coincidence.
All of this seems to add up to a pretty obvious motive for the crime. And the NY Times has a new story up titled "Texts From Suspect in Charlie Kirk Shooting Offer Insight Into a Motive."
The 22-year-old man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk said in text messages to his romantic partner that he had “had enough of his hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated out,” according to prosecutors who filed a murder charge against the suspect on Tuesday.
The text message exchange between the suspect, Tyler Robinson, and his romantic partner provides the clearest explanation yet into a motivation for the killing of Mr. Kirk, a conservative political activist.
The story goes on to recount some of the other things in the charging document. It's all fine until we get to the final two paragraphs. [emphasis added]
The text messages are illuminating, but they do not show Mr. Robinson discussing which specific views of Mr. Kirk’s he found to be hateful. Jeff Gray, the Utah County attorney, was asked directly at a news conference on Tuesday whether transgender issues played a role in the shooting. When he was shot, Mr. Kirk was debating a person on the subject of shootings carried out by transgender people.
“I’m going to stick to what I just stated in our” court documents, Mr. Gray said. “I think that is pretty much set forth there.”
At this point my eyes are rolling back so hard that I'm staring at my own brain.
What exactly is the point of trying to fog up the obvious left-wing pro-trans motive here? Is the author suggesting it would be somehow better if Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk because he hated his views on Israel or tax cuts? Probably not, but you do get the sense that he's trying to avoid the most obvious conclusion until it's absolutely impossible to do so.
Why do that? Because there's a right wing narrative about trans people being connected to mass shootings that they want to be able to say is absolutely wrong. It would pain them to admit that this case seems to fit a pattern or very nearly so. No, Robinson isn't trans but he was trans adjacent and that seems to be part of his motive.
So getting back to what specific views did Robinson found to be hateful? I think we have a pretty good idea. He's dating a trans person and had recently moved left on trans rights issues. And he shot Kirk literally as he was discussing those issues. How many more hints do you need? I suspect that until Tyler Robinson gets up and says, 'I hated him for his trans views!' we're not going to be allowed to put two and two together and say they equal four.
County Attorney Jeff Gray's decision not to expound on the relevance of trans issues is not indicative of the motive not being clear at this point. On the contrary, his statement that "I think that is pretty much set forth there" reads more like he's saying to the dopey reporter if you don't get it already, maybe read it again.
This is all part of a larger pattern we've all seen play out over the past week, both in the media and online. The left has dragged its heals to avoid the obvious from the moment the shooting happened until now. They claimed Robinson was a Groyper. They claimed the bullet engravings didn't mean anything. They ignored claims from his family he was moving left and they played up claims he had grown up in a Republican, gun-loving red state.
It's time to stop pretending there's any real mystery here. The shooter is exactly what everyone on the right suspected. No, not trans himself but personally devoted to the issue by way of his relationship with his trans boyfriend. That's the "hate" he felt he needed to resort to murder to stop.
Update: The Times has published another new story about the killer's motive. This one admits the left got it wrong but also seems to be trying to fuzz up the corollary, i.e. the right got it mostly right.
The charges filed against Tyler Robinson on Tuesday in the killing of Charlie Kirk depicted him as a lone assassin with hardening left-wing, pro-L.G.B.T.Q. views that led him to violence.
What the charging document did not include, however, was any mention of the more provocative theories circulating about what kind of radical political ideology was to blame.
Mr. Robinson is evidently not a disgruntled member of the hard-right, white nationalist “groyper” movement, as some on the left had insisted in recent days. Several prominent progressive activists on Bluesky had insisted that the suspect must have been inspired by ideology farther to the right than Mr. Kirk’s. Many scoured social media for clues, and some on the left claimed an old Halloween photo and a Spotify playlist were signs showing that Mr. Robinson could not be one of their own.
Nor did the charging document contain any suggestion that Mr. Robinson was working with either a “radical left-wing transgender terror cell” or a vast network of progressive radicals, hypotheticals that were floated on social media.
This is not a fair accounting of what the left and right were saying. What most people on the left thought was that the shooter would be a left-winger, possibly another trans shooter. What we got was a left-winger motivated by trans issues. As for their being a trans terror cell in on the killing that only arose because there seemed to be a few trans anti-Kirk people promising something big would happen at the UVU appearance. Those messages are still being investigated.
Bottom line, the left was way off and promoted nonsense online for days. The right was pretty close to accurate about what motivated this awful crime.
