The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man from Utah, has been arrested for allegedly assassinating right-wing activist and influencer Charlie Kirk. As of this recording, people on all sides of the political spectrum have been ransacking the internet to try to assemble a picture of Robinson’s views and motives. And it’s murky going. But one thing is not murky. President Donald Trump is signaling very clearly that he’s going to seize on this horrific killing to wage open warfare on the liberal left. And many of his top supporters are a hundred percent there with him. It appears very clear as of right now that Tyler Robinson’s actual views and motives don’t matter in this equation at all. Whatever is learned about him over time, the decision to exploit this shooting has already been made. We’re talking about this with one of our favorite analysts of the far right, The Bulwark’s Will Sommer. Will, thanks for coming on, man.
Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So we’re recording this on a Friday afternoon. By the time people hear this on Monday morning, some of the info might be outdated. Apologies for that. But Will, what can you tell us about Tyler Robinson’s views and motives as of this moment?
Sommer: Yeah, well really, you know, pretty much everything we’re getting here is coming from law enforcement. And so there hasn’t been—I think in part because he had such a generic name, and perhaps because a lot of his online activity was happening on Discord, according to the police, which is a kind of private chat room where the average person can’t just go and search his activity. So what we’re looking at here is a lot of it is coming from the writing he allegedly did on the bullet casings that he brought to assassinate Charlie Kirk.
The one on the casing of the bullet that ultimately hit Kirk says, Notices, bulges, oh-wo, and then, comma, What’s this? Now that is you might say I think it’d be very reasonable to have no idea what that means. And I didn’t this morning. But it’s a reference to an internet meme that’s basically about a cartoon. People can look it up on Know Your Meme dot com. It’s a cartoon about two men pretending to be furries—or being furries. Furries are adults who pretend to be animals that have sex with each other. And the joke is that these guys are gross and old, pretending to be silly animals. But basically it’s an internet meme. And you might compare it to—for people who are a little older, like me—something like All your base are belong to us, or other early internet memes.
So this, I think, was initially what people took to be—the Wall Street Journal reported that there was supposed to be trans writing. And I think the bulge is maybe what people are thinking of there, but this seems to be kind of like random internet ephemera. If there is a political valence to this, it’s weird, refracted by so many hours on the Internet. Just running through another one: it said, Hey, fascist, catch, followed by a series of up and down arrows that police, I think, initially took to be some kind of Antifa symbol. But in fact, it’s a code from the popular game Helldivers 2.
Sargent: Well, isn’t the bottom line that this guy appears to have been really, really steeped in online meme madness? It sounds like there’s a whole stew of incoherences here that are very hard to make sense of—he’s just internet-brained.
Sommer: Yeah, I think that’s that’s right. I mean there really is no clear message here. I mean, it’s almost like people in the Air Force writing silly memes on bombs they’re going to drop. What does that mean? At the same time, his family claims he was saying that Charlie Kirk spread hate—that he hated Charlie Kirk. One thing I think we can say for sure is that this is a very kind of this like kind of internet brand, as you said, this this very kind of garbled messaging.
Sargent: Well, let’s move on to Donald Trump for a sec, because he’s being very, very clear about what he intends to do here. Here’s what he said on Fox and Friends.
Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): Radicals on the right as well. We have radicals on the left. People have gotten, are watching all of these videos and cheering. Some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?
Trump (voiceover): I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, we don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem.
Sargent: So, Will, that’s a fairly direct declaration that far right extremism is fundamentally blameless, that it’s uniformly a justified response to extremism on the left. What do you think the far right and all its associated groups out there hear when Trump says that?
Sommer: Yeah, I mean, I think they see that as sanction. I mean, whether he meant it that way or not, it’s crazy. Democrats have been trying to reach for this idea of, Well, there’s extremism on both sides. What can we do to lower the temperature? And Trump is basically saying people on the right—he’s not mentioning instances like the Minnesota lawmakers getting shot or the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi, all these things. Instead, he’s saying, Well, the people on the right who are doing that just want law and order. Really, their actions are just.
Sargent: Well, I think that’s exactly right. And in fact, we have a piece of a TNR.com about this. Check it out. We talked to several experts in right wing extremism and one of them told us pretty explicitly that far right groups will see this as an invitation to open season on the left.
Sommer: Well, and look, I mean, he already pardoned everyone involved in January 6th. I mean, these kinds of Trump outrages—it’s obvious in a way, but there’s such a long list that we forget he pardoned, I think, thousands of his supporters who committed crimes. And so, if that wasn’t a sanction to do whatever you want in terms of political violence on Trump’s behalf—that he would at least look the other way—I don’t know what is.
Sargent: Well, Will, you know, all these characters better you than me, I would say. Stephen Miller is a very close ally of FBI director Kash Patel.
I’ve got to think Miller is whispering in Patel’s ear right now about how the FBI has to really ramp up against the left, against the liberal groups and so forth, and how the Kirk assassination is their moment. I don’t think they put it that way, but I think they see it that way. What do you think of that?
Sommer: I think that’s right. I think this administration has been looking for kind of like an incident that they could use as a real crackdown on the left. I think they were in some ways almost disappointed that the occupation of D.C. hasn’t produced really violent protests or some kind of incident they could lean on. I also think about when they sent the troops into Los Angeles during the riots—basically, they didn’t seem to get what they wanted in terms of a big enough excuse, like a 2020-level civil unrest, that they could use. But even then, I think there was some of this groundwork being laid of, what are the organizations that are funding these protests? What are, you and sort of these three degrees of, well, you had this protest and then one guy did something violent.
So now you as this wealthy liberal are responsible. And so I think that was kind of laying the groundwork. And now I think they’ll see something like this as a potential opportunity.
Sargent: Trump said just after the assassination of Kirk, he said he blamed the radical left for producing the rhetoric that is directly responsible, he said, for the terrorism we’re seeing in our country, meaning terrorism like this assassination. And he said this.
Trump (voiceover): My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that funded and supported.
Sargent: Will, I want to underscore that he deliberately made that vague. He said, We are going to use our administration—meaning this is a full government response, a state response. We are going to go out and find everyone who ‘contributed’ to this atrocity—which is really loose language. This was for a pre-written speech. I think what they’re basically saying is that they’re going to unleash the power of the American state on a pretty large ideological group. And they’re not even really hiding the fact that they’re doing this speciously and pretextually.
Sommer: I think that’s right. I think this administration has wanted for a long time to crack down on the left, and they’ve already done it. Whether it’s grabbing foreign students because they didn’t like their participation in protests, or punishing colleges where pro-Gaza protests happened. But yeah, this is going to be an accelerant here—even though, again, the motivations for Trump to say, We’re going to punish these organizations that fueled this… I mean, if you look at it, are they going to go after the people who made Helldivers 2? There’s really no way to discern at this moment what set this young man off.
Sargent: I’m really glad you brought up the fact that he said he’s going after the organizations. That’s really critical. He’s basically saying that he’s giving himself license to essentially blame whatever organization on the liberal left he wants for the assassination of Kirk and then to crack down on them.
Sommer: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very Orban-in-Hungary move to say, These are prescribed organizations, and then try to, you know—Putin-esque as well—to say, This is an organization that in reality is just against my political goals, but they’re extremists. One thing I’m seeing a lot of is Republicans saying, You can’t call them Nazis anymore, or saying that calling them dangerous to democracy is somehow inciting language. But at the same time it’s very muddled—what qualifies. For example, if you’re saying Trump cuts anti-Nazi programs, I saw Dave Rubin say that qualifies as suggesting he’s in league with Nazis. So I think they’re casting a really broad net here.
Sargent: They certainly are. You had this great piece for The Bulwark explaining how Charlie Kirk has kind of shaped the contemporary rights understanding of how to do media and politics. I want to bring in a point Dave Weigel made as well that Kirk
did debate ideas, which he’s getting all this posthumous credit for, but Kirk also wanted the state to investigate and harass the left, as Dave put it. So now that’s becoming kind of a way for Trump and Stephen Miller to kind of honor Kirk’s legacy by ramping up that assault on the left. And in your piece, you talked about how previous luminaries like Rush Limbaugh and Andrew Breitbart also had this big influence in
shaping how the party and the right did politics. Are we seeing something like that now already with Kirk’s legacy? In other words, he’s sort of taught this approach. He’s honoring his legacy will be using the state to target the left essentially.
Sommer: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s right. I mean, as you said, I mean, we’re seeing this kind of canonization of Charlie Kirk, who I think, putting it mildly, was a very controversial personality with a lot to criticize about his legacy. And now they’re talking about, we’ve got to put in, I believe, as a member of Congress who said, we have to put in a statue of Charlie Kirk in the rotunda. And someone said, Doesn’t that seem like a bit much? They said, Well, we have a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. So they’re putting him on that level—or at least trying to.
I should say also, I guess the other aspect of this is this kind of like politics as total war thing. We’re seeing a lot of Andrew Breitbart being quoted. It’s funny to call it a quote, because his line was just War—which isn’t much of a quote. But in response to Kirk getting shot, they’re all saying, This is war, or simply War, just like Andrew Breitbart said. And of course, Charlie Kirk got his start at Breitbart. And so you can see this kind of like all consuming just this anger.
You know, on one hand, I certainly sympathize with the anger. You know, if one of my colleagues was shot in such a gruesome way and it was all videotaped, you know, I’d be mad too. But I think the language you’re seeing is really, The time for debating is over. Charlie was the last person who believed in debate, and they shot him. The implication being that there now has to be further violence from the right, or some kind of crackdown.
Sargent: Well, I think it’s worth underscoring that they said all that before we had any idea who had shot Charlie Kirk or what he believed. Right.
Sommer: Yeah. I mean, there was really this sense of like the right has really gotten into this idea just over the past few weeks that like transgender women are just on a sort of mass shooting rampage.
And we saw Nancy Mace was like, yeah, this is absolutely a trans shooter. And obviously, that’s turned out not to be the case. But, you know, I think there’s also this asymmetry where the right, I think, feels comfortable throwing out just enormous amounts of chaff and just saying, well, we know the left did this, whatever. And then I think, you know, on the left, you know, hopefully people are a little more restrained and sort of waited to see, you know, who it turned out to be, allegedly.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. Senator Tom Tillis was one of the few who called out his own side for exploiting Kirk’s death. He accused conservative talking heads of seeing this ‘opportunity to say we’re at war so they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this. It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend you’re a leader of a conservative movement.’ So Tillis is free to speak like that because he’s retired, but Will, why aren’t any other elected Republicans calling on their own side in quite that way to tone it down.
Sommer: I mean, I think perhaps some of them are scared. think it’s there is such a mood of wanting revenge for Charlie Kirk, rightly or not, that I think if some of these senators were to say, this guy is being prosecuted, there is going to be justice in this case if he did it. But on the other hand, I think some of them do see this. I this is, I think, a great political opportunity for Republicans, it makes Democrats.
I think whether they were behind his motivation or not, think look completely, you know, unhinged in the way this is being portrayed. You know, if you imagine you’re sort of a non-political person who’s consuming this in short form video, you know, you’re seeing the guy you knew from TikTok get assassinated. And so I think your mind would naturally jump to this being Democrats fault.
Sargent: Yeah, I suppose that’s possible. Although I think people are really, really checked out. You know what I mean?
Sommer: Yeah.
Sargent: And plus, there’s just the assassination of the Democratic state legislator up in Minnesota.
Sommer: I mean, this is the they did the moment of silence at the Yankee game, the NFL more broadly honored Charlie Kirk and Charlie Kirk also, I should say, had kind of a platform outside of politics. He was a guy who would go on these sort of apolitical podcasts and YouTube shows. He was kind of like this, you know, this kind of mischievous, perhaps right wing guy who would tweak people, stuff like that.
Sargent: He had real penetration in the culture, you’re saying that that.
maybe makes it possible to kind of jar people a little bit more.
Sommer: Exactly. And I think the videos of his assassination as well, I think are so graphic and we’re sort of inexplicably so available on social media that I think that will pull people in as well.
Sargent: That’s a smart point. Just to talk about Tillis one more second. It occurs to me there’s almost like a self-compounding problem here. If you had a president who was calling for calm and reminding everyone that political violence has claimed victims on both sides and not saying his own side’s political violence is just fine, which is what, you know, presidents ordinarily do. You might have other Republicans doing the same, but because Trump has set up this frame where any talk like that is weak, where you’re always supposed to be waging open warfare on the left at all times, other Republicans are also doing that. And the political science tells us that the masses take their cues from elites. So The MAGA masses are constantly getting inflamed and torqued up into a fury. What do you make of that? It seems like a bad situation.
Sommer: Yeah, you know, I was talking to some moderates recently who were saying, you know, I wish this political rhetoric would go down. But I think it’s just really difficult when the president is, you know, ramping it up like this. I mean, Democrats can’t really do a unilateral disarmament and say, OK, we’re not going to criticize Trump for a couple of weeks because of this, when he’s clearly seeing it as a political opportunity and relishing it. And it’s not just Trump, but the entire right-wing media apparatus and members of Congress. So I think it’s just difficult. I mean, what I think I think there are a lot of people on both sides who would really love sort of to chill out in terms of political language for a while. But you can’t really do that as long as Donald Trump is the president and acting this way.
Sargent: Yeah, it really all flows down from the very top. So you spend a lot of time in sort of these.
Right-wing informational, I guess, cesspools or whatever you want to call them, deep in the swamps or whatever. How deep do you think the anger actually is? It seems to me like in order for this to create a real downward spiral, like a real kind of plunge into something much worse, you’d have to cross over into some kind of more organized forms of violence from the right in response. And I’m not sure whether we’re at a point where we’d see that. What do you think?
Sommer: Yeah, I mean, hopefully we’re not at that point yet. And as you said, I mean, I think the challenge is, you know, I don’t think there are roving militias of Republicans who are, really like trying to take someone out at this moment. On the other hand, unfortunately, all it takes is one nut with a gun. And not just in this case—we’ve seen people become aggrieved, get wrapped up in their heads and on the internet, and then say, I’m going to go kill X person. I mean, with the Gabby Giffords shooting all these things. And so I think you’re right to note that I think this becomes really dangerous if there becomes sort of a retaliatory tit for tat situation.
Sargent: Right. And just to tease out your point a little more, we could kind of limp along in the status quo where it’s basically one lone nut after another perpetrating this stuff, although obviously January 6th is a different matter that was organized violence. But putting that aside, we could either limp along in a status quo where it’s one lunatic, another lunatic, or it could become something more organized. What’s your sense? Which path do you think we’re going to be on?
Sommer: Yeah, I mean, I think probably the path of becoming more organized, you know, over the long, like a long several year arc. I mean, the other thing to know is that the real threat here, as we’ve discussed, is that in this country we’ve unfortunately become kind of used to mass shootings and political violence—to some extent. Although not really in the way we’ve seen with Charlie Kirk. But I think there’s also this risk from the administration and what they’re going to start doing to people they view as opponents. That, I think, strikes me as a more imminent threat in terms of political liberties in this country. And now agencies like the FBI—all of these agencies—are really in the hands of, I think it’s fair to say, Trump toadies.
Sargent: That’s bad. And I think the bottom line here, just to wrap this up, is that MAGA and the right really want deep civil conflict in this country, right?
Sommer: Yeah. I mean, I think certainly a lot of them do. I mean, there’s a sense, I think, that a lot of them feel. I mean, you can look at Curtis Yarvin, for example.
who’s a Mencius Moldbug who sort of JD Vance is there’s a philosopher such as it is who’s JD Vance is praised who sort of mixed up in Peter Thiel world. And this is someone who sees basically the American establishment we live in whether it be the media, academia, you know, the government as the cathedral and that it needs to be torn down. And I mean, in his case, these are people who want like a monarchy. And for that to happen, you would need a lot more chaos. You would need a lot more deprivation in this country as it’s currently constituted. Because right now, I don’t think a lot of people are looking for a king. But if you add enough chaos, that could happen.
Sargent: Well, folks, I just want to say that Will Summer is really one of the best analysts and observers of the right out there. Make sure to follow his stuff. He’s just really terrific and always illuminating. Will, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it.
Sommer: Thanks for having me. Always happy to be on.
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