The Daily Populous Saturday September 13rd, 2025 day edition
Authored by usatoday.com and submitted by gradientz

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s tragic shooting death, Republican lawmakers, influencers and President Donald Trump have been wildly and irresponsibly predicting and posting online, with great certainty, that the shooter must be a radical leftist.

They all but declared war on “the left” over the death of Kirk, a controversial right-wing activist whom they swiftly elevated to sainthood.

Predictably, the grotesque prejudgment has fallen flat, and the actual suspect in no way fits the right’s cynical political narrative.

On Sept. 12, authorities identified Kirk’s suspected killer as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old White guy from Utah registered as an unaffiliated voter. Shell casings recovered by authorities were engraved with references to internet memes and online gaming. Robinson shows up in a family Halloween photo in a Trump-related costume. Neighbors said he grew up in a church-going Mormon family.

Charlie Kirk's suspected killer does not fit the right's political narrative

Well, that’s awkward. I was told, moments after Kirk’s death, that this was undoubtedly the work of the radical left. I saw social media posts and heard comments saying we need to immediately go to war with the left and demanding that the Democratic Party be labeled a terrorist organization. Trump himself said on Sept. 11: “We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.”

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And now that the Kirk shooting suspect doesn't appear to be a radical left lunatic, what are those narrative creators supposed to do? Apologize? That seems to be forbidden in MAGA circles.

Republicans won't admit that their speculation on Kirk's death was wrong

It seems in lieu of an apology, we’ll get a sudden shift in tone.

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina gave a solid demonstration of how to do that. Responding earlier in the week to wholly unfounded early rumors that the bullet casings had pro-transgender messages on them, Mace railed against “lunatic trannies” and said definitively that a “raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through" Kirk’s neck.

When the suspect was revealed to not be exactly what Mace was convinced he’d be, she posted on social media: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”

Got it. The suspected shooter is a seemingly average White kid from a Republican family and doesn’t fit neatly into my desired political narrative, so I will pray for him and await another opportunity to declare war on all liberals.

Are we all too obsessed with scoring political points off violence?

Narrative chasing is absolutely a bipartisan problem. There were liberals, myself included, who pondered if the shooter might be a MAGA loyalist seeking to create a Reichstag fire-like situation that would allow Trump to blame the left and take more authoritarian control of the country under the guise of “safety." We just happened to be a bit quieter about it, as most on the left still cling to old-fashioned concepts like “facts.”

The MAGA narrative machine regarding Kirk’s killing, on the other hand, blew past facts faster than I’ve ever seen in a high-profile shooting. There was no suspect and quite literally zero evidence of a motive, and the right – from the president on down – leaned fully into howls about liberals. It was shameful and wildly irresponsible.

They didn’t want justice; they wanted a narrative. Now they’ll hopefully get justice, but without the neat-and-tidy anti-liberal story they desired.

Maybe killers don't fit neatly into political narratives

It’s almost like people who kill other people tend not to be clear thinkers with precise motivations that align with a certain political party. So I’d posit this: Maybe we should stop speculating so much and trying to score political points before we know who might have actually committed the crime.

I know – what naive thinking. It’s like me sitting back and waiting for Republicans and MAGA figureheads to apologize for their preemptive and vitriolic conclusions in the wake of Kirk’s death, conclusions that put Democrats and liberals in general at risk.

Alas, the narrative must never be wrong!

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

Notchibald_Johnson on September 13rd, 2025 at 00:11 UTC »

Just another edge lord memer with a family trained gun fetish like 90% of 'em.

If they had literally anything to the contrary, Trump, Kash and Bongbong wouldn't spend a second off camera.

We know it. They know it.

RuneofBeginning on September 13rd, 2025 at 00:02 UTC »

I don’t really care. Do you? - Melania

They built this hydra, they can take it down on their own. I’m ok with watching them off their own.

ChloeGranola on September 12nd, 2025 at 23:36 UTC »

They're now saying he was radicalized at college.

He lasted one semester. In engineering. At the University of Utah.

EDIT: It was Utah State actually. Which makes the insinuation even more absurd.

EDIT 2: Several repliers to this little post are under the mistaken impression I'm trying to deny he's "liberal". I have no fucking idea and I don't care. I'm pointing out how highly unlikely it is that it was his college "experience" that radicalized him.