The suspect in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, made his first court appearance yesterday, via video link from a Utah jail. Robinson was dressed in a green suicide-prevention smock, a “heavy, quilted garment” that can’t be easily torn into ligatures a prisoner might use to hang themselves. With no sense of irony, the state then announced its plans to seek the death penalty. Keeping a man alive so the government can try to kill him. What’s more American than that?

Last week, I repeated speculation that Robinson might have come from the far right. It seems I was wrong to do so. I’m especially persuaded by a lack of evidence directly linking Robinson to Nick Fuentes’ Groypers or some other far-right subculture. The inscriptions on his bullets, which were scrutinized for days for political meaning, were, according to the charging documents, “mostly a big meme.”¹ Rather, Robinson allegedly texted his roommate — with whom prosecutors say he was romantically involved — saying he killed Kirk because he “had enough of his hatred.” This was possibly in reference to Kirk’s well documented hate-mongering against gay and trans people. (The roommate, again according to Utah prosecutors and Trump’s FBI, is in the process of transitioning genders.)

Now, it needs to be said that being gay, trans, or romantically or sexually involved with someone of either description is not exclusive to the left — or even dispositive against being on the far right.² And being opposed to a specific bigotry — especially a bigotry targeting someone you personally care about — isn’t proof of a broader affinity for left-wing causes, much less membership in a broader social movement. Whatever Tyler Robinson was going through, coming from by all accounts a deeply conservative, gun-loving Mormon family into possibly re-examining his own sexuality in a small Utah town, might have led him into a political realignment. But it also could have just as easily led him into a spiral of nihilistic self-loathing in which he felt driven to eliminate a symbol of the repressive youth culture he was struggling to leave behind. We won’t know more until more evidence is presented at trial, if even then.

The Trump administration isn’t waiting for all that. As I noted on Friday, before a suspect had even been identified, Trump was already taking full ownership of the tragedy: taking the remarkable steps of personally announcing the death of a U.S. citizen, then recording an Oval Office address blaming a massive conspiracy among the “radical left” and declaring war on liberal institutions — rhetoric that has only been ratcheted up in the days since.

There’s a historical analogy that’s at once so obvious and inflammatory here I’m almost ashamed to use it, but it is so stark I cannot resist. The burning of the German parliament building, or Reichstag, in 1933 has been an internet favorite for years, generally as the supposedly archetypal example of a false-flag act of violence that allows a leader to consolidate absolute power. (The online right has imagined everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to 9/11 to numerous school shootings and other mass casualty events as false-flag operations designed to justify gun control or expanded government power.)

In fact, historians broadly agree that the Reichstag Fire wasn’t a false flag, or at least not entirely: whatever happened after the fire began, the most convincing evidence is that a single unemployed and partially disabled Dutch council communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, started the fire alone. Van der Lubbe, who was 24 at the time, seems to have done so in the quixotic hope of inspiring an uprising to force out Hitler, whose chancellorship was at that point just four weeks old.

The Nazi lie came in what happened after, when Hitler and his adjutants invented the story of a vast conspiracy by the Communist Party of Germany to set the fire as the opening wave of an organized revolution. On the basis of that lie, Hitler convinced German President Paul von Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties across the country. The preamble and first article of the decree read as follows:

Violators of Article I were to be imprisoned for at least six months and, if found to have “caused the death of a person,” sentenced to death — a punishment rarely employed in the Weimar Republic until that point. Crimes previously punishable by life in prison were also escalated to the death penalty. Other violations punishable by death were “serious rioting” and “serious disturbance of the peace” — crimes that would now be adjudicated in Berlin by Hermann Göring's Prussian Ministry of the Interior. The Reich cabinet was also given the power to take over state governments directly, which it did.

A month later — speech stifled, the Communist party banned, many opposition deputies detained or headed into exile, and Nazi brownshirts intimidating lawmakers on the parliamentary floor — the parliament passed the Enabling Act of 1933. This law gave Hitler the power to make and enforce laws without consulting either parliament or the president (who anyway died a year later). With his control now complete, there would be no legal means to dislodge or even dissuade him for the rest of his life.

After Orem, Trump and his adjutants seem to be enacting that playbook all over again. Instead of van der Lubbe, a 24-year-old unemployed and half-blind erstwhile construction worker — aggrieved with his station in life and separated from his working-class family — they have Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old gamer from a repressive background who seems to have looked for community online and found some misbegotten purpose, perhaps, in an unexpected relationship. Instead of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, they have the Democrats — a puppet, they say, of a vast conspiracy, headed by an ancient Jewish financier whose tentacles they tell their followers reach into every American city, suburb, and town.

They don’t need much of a Reichstag Fire-style decree to stifle civil liberties. With the unsigned case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court just seemingly handed the Trump administration, for now, the power to stop, detain, or ask for citizenship papers from anyone for any reason, including on the basis of their skin color or the language agents hear them speaking. They have used federal funding in unprecedented ways to force universities to comply with demands to crack down on speech, fire ”undesirable” administrators, and to inform on their students and faculty. The State Department under Marco Rubio has also overseen efforts to deport international students for speech, especially those defending Palestinian lives and rights, and announced plans to look for “anti-American views” when evaluating visa applications.

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