Facts

In their haste to make the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk an excuse for authoritarian consolidation, the administration and other players in the Republican media game are flooding the zone with shit. I feel like there are too many stories, not fully formed into narratives, out there, and the net result is confusion. One fairly consistent narrative is that “they,” meaning liberals and antifa and other creatures of fantasy, are responsible. That one may yet take hold, even though it lacks convincing specifics.

Anyway, they can hope to cover over what Kirk actually said, although there are a great many audio and video recordings.

So here’s my not very well researched sense of what facts we actually know about Tyler Robinson, the person to whom much of the evidence points as the shooter.

• His family is Republican.
• His father urged him to turn himself in.
• He seems to have admitted he did it.
• He is a good shot with a rifle.
• He wasn’t living at home but rather with a roommate.
• He is a white man in his early 20s
• He is very online, as indicated by the inscriptions on the bullets.

I may have missed some things, but I think all of these are correct. I find the claims of the roommate’s sexuality shaky, given their sources. I am also curious how one inscribes bullets. If you want to add what you think are facts, please give your supporting evidence. Someone said so doesn’t count.

I think that all of this points to a very online motive, which several recent shooters may have shared: a desire to impress his fellow onliners, with a dash of online apolypticalism. Not something that falls into the left-right classifications.