Federal officers have arrested a suspect in the assassination of right-wing media star Charlie Kirk at a Utah university on Wednesday. The FBI and major media homed in on some superficially antifascist writings on the alleged shooter’s bullet casings. But people with deeper knowledge of internet subcultures have identified 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as, most likely, a “Groyper” — a follower of the far-right Gen Z white supremacist Nick Fuentes.¹

Fuentes is no stranger to readers of this newsletter. I wrote about him and his band of short, sad little men at the National Conservatism Conference last year, when Fuentes dined with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and other moments. This always seemed like the most obvious answer to me: the killing happened at a conservative university in a deep red county in a deep red state. And Fuentes’ Groypers and Kirk’s Turning Point USA have been in a low-grade civil war for years, with the Groypers taking the position that Kirk was insufficiently reactionary due to his support for Israel, less-homicidal position on LGBTQ rights, etc. (Fuentes has called Kirk a “neocon” and a “Jew lover” — though he did praise him last year for becoming more of a “hardcore white nationalist.” Fuentes himself has been an avid admirer of Adolf Hitler.)

Whether the arrest or the analysis hold up or not will probably be irrelevant in the short run, though. Donald Trump has moved ahead of both the investigation and reporting to blame Kirk’s public killing — an event with which he clearly identifies — on his main political enemies: “the radical left.” Hence also the full-court press to instantly canonize Kirk, with flags lowered half staff, and congressional toadies floating the possibility of a Capitol statue or allowing him to lie in state in the Rotunda. The clear purpose of this is to elect Kirk to the pantheon of Trumpian Horst Wessels, along with Ashli Babbitt and Corey Comperatore, as holy martyrs under whose banners the faithful will fight.³

On the night of the killing Trump issued a rare Oval Office address, an event which for generations was reserved for epochal historical events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Challenger explosion, not only to memorialize Kirk but to vow revenge on his behalf. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” Today, he went on Fox News and upped the ante even more, seemingly endorsing far-right extremist violence (not for the first time), and thus the growing calls on the right for a full-scale “civil war.”

In his Oval Office speech, Trump threaded together a litany of events: his own attempted assassination last year, “the attacks on ICE agents,” the recent shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive in New York, and a mass shooting at a congressional baseball game in 2017. He grouped these under the heading of “radical-left political violence,” which he said “has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives” — with the clear implication that the Sept. 10 shooting was just the latest in an unending string.

It’s hard to unpack all the ways in which this is bullshit, but we can try: First, right-wing political violence in our era has been far more common and deadly than that from the left. That fact is easily discernible when you just stop to think of the events he chose not to include in that list, none of which required reaching back eight years: from the shooting of two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses by an anti-abortion extremist in Minnesota last month to the bludgeoning of Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a Holocaust denying right-wing conspiracy nut, to Trump’s own coup attempt that culminated in the violent assault on the Capitol of January 6, 2021. (If you want to go back further into the annals of right-wing extremism, there’s always the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.)

You could also put it in the context of other acts of violence, for instance the school and public event shootings that remain epidemic in our society (another school shooting happened one state over in Jefferson County, Colorado, home to Columbine, on the very same day as Kirk’s), or, depending on the ultimate motive, some other series of events entirely. As I never tire of pointing out: framing matters because narratives tend to lead to conclusions. (There’s also an effort afoot to place Kirk in a lineage of publicly assassinated national heroes including Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., and Martin Luther King, Jr., which I find somewhere between disingenuous and deeply weird.)

Most importantly, it isn’t even clear that the four previous events Trump linked — not to mention Kirk’s killing — were perpetrated by people even nominally on the left. The apparent Trump shooter was a registered Republican who left no discernible political views other than a love for guns. Luigi Mangione, as I’ve written, combined his obvious hatred of healthcare executives with admiration for noted Trotskyites² Ted Kaczynski, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Only the 2017 congressional baseball game shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, seems to have been perpetrated by a confirmed ideological Democrat.

That leaves the unspecified “attacks on ICE agents,” whose inclusion is interesting for two reasons. One, it frames agents of the state confronted in the course of their duties as victims on the level of an unarmed campus speaker. And two, it ignores the far more salient and deeply political violence being committed by many of those agents of the state — almost always masked and heavily armed, with the protection of tactical armor and the full power of the state — against unarmed and often completely innocent people, including U.S. citizens and legal residents, to gleeful MAGA cheers.

Whether the shooter turns out to be from the further right, the left, or from some other precinct entirely, the logic here is as clear as can be. There is an in-group — Trump, Kirk, complicit federal agents, favored CEOs — against whom no resistance is permitted, but who can commit or support as much violence as they want. And there is an out-group that is either expected to behave or to be hunted. Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.

Correction (9/13/25): I initially said that Nick Fuentes had in the past disparagingly called Charlie Kirk a “fascist.” In fact he praised Kirk last year for becoming more of a “hardcore white nationalist.” The reference has been edited.

1  The evidence is being hotly debated online at this hour. For instance, internet sleuths uncovered a Facebook photo from Halloween 2018 showing Robinson dressed as “Pepe” — a meme frog closely associated with the Groyper movement. I linked to it above. But Fuentes and other Groypers jumped in on Musk’s X to say that the particular Pepe Robinson was imitating is not one of theirs. (I plead ignorance about that level of Pepe specificity.) Another issue concerns reports that Robinson seems to have marked some of his casings with misspelled lyrics from the Italian folk song Bella Ciao, which was famously an antifascist anthem in the 1940s. But others have noted that a version of Bella Ciao is popular with Groypers, and in fact found on a public Spotify playlist named “Groyper Wars,” which happens to be what Fuentes’ followers called their vitriolic campaign against Kirk. The evidence seems clearest that Robinson came from a right-wing family and was a committed gamer. Fuentes, it seems, has been preparing for the contingency that the shooter was one of his followers since at least last night.

2  This is sarcasm, I’m being sarcastic.

3  Major media have, under either a desire to conform to power or some misguided pundit-class solidarity, gleefully contributed to this effort. The New York Times has not only covered the assassination as the by-far most important news event happening in the world, but run wall to wall flattering coverage of Kirk nonstop since the murder. This coverage portrays him as a moderate hero to his allies and a colleague to his foes, who, as Ezra Klein would have it, was “practicing politics in exactly the right way.” All this for a glorified far-right influencer who, the Groypers’ objections not withstanding, contantly trafficked in bigoted, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric camouflaged, as far-right trolls have long done, under the banner of “free speech.” (This historical tendency will be explored in greater detail in my upcoming book, The Legend of Skokie.)