The NPR Politics Podcast - Suspect In Charlie Kirk Shooting Arrested

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Officials said Friday that they have arrested the person they believe shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk Wednesday. We discuss what we know about the alleged shooter, and why political violence seems to be on the rise.This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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If you know, you know. Yeah. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

Today on the show, officials have announced an arrest of the person. They believe shot and killed Charlie Kirk Wednesday. And we're going to talk about what we know so far. Ryan, what do we know about the alleged shooter now? So look, this is still pretty new. The officials in Utah just at a press conference about this this morning, so we are still kind of digesting what we've heard. But the individual's name is Tyler Robinson.

He's 22 years old. He's from Washington County in Utah, which is in the far southwestern corner of the state. So a good chunk of distance from Orem where the shooting occurred. We are still digging into his back. background and what more we can say. But at this point in time, that much is confirmed. Okay, why don't you bring us up to speed on how they eventually made this arrest about two days after the shooting? Well, Utah Governor Spencer Cox is the one who announced it this morning. And here's a bit of what he said at the press conference.

We got him. On the evening of September 11th, a family member of Tyler Robinson reached out to a family friend who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office with information that Robinson had confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident. This information was relayed to the Utah County Sheriff's Office and seen investigators at Utah Valley University. This information was also conveyed to the FBI. And so look, that was last night. And I will say that not long before then, officials in Utah had held a press conference appealing to the public for more information. They released another video and a couple of photos, but asking the public for more information

to help them identify a suspect, get a name, so that they could track him down. And it seems as though the appeals to the public, at least, certainly helped further this investigation. Yeah, do we have any sense yet about his motivation? So look, that's always one of the big questions. That's no different here. We do not have a definitive answer on that question yet. It's obviously something that people want to know first and foremost. There are a couple things that authorities discussed at the news conference today.

One of them is that the governor related a, conversation that investigators had with members of Robinson's family in which Cox said a family member told investigators that Robinson had become more political in recent years. And the family member told investigators that there was a recent dinner where Robinson was with the family. And he mentioned that Kirk was going to be speaking at Utah Valley University where the shooting happened. And Cox said that the family talked about why they didn't like Kirk, the viewpoints that he had. And the family member also stated that Kirk was full of hate and spreading hate. So certainly there was some sort of disdain for Charlie Kirk and his views.

There also were etchings, inscriptions that were in the bullets, Cox said, that were found with the gun that they believe is the gun used in the shooting. And there are clues that could point to a potential motive there. On the single spent casing, Cox said that the inscription read, notices, bulges, capital OWO, what's this question mark? very unclear at this point in time what that means, certainly something that investigators are digging into, as are we. The other unfired casings, there were three of them held separate messages. One was, hey, fascist, catch, along with arrows up down.

Another had the inscription of, oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, which could be a gaming reference. It could be a reference to an Italian anti-fascist song. Again, something that investigators are going to try to. be figuring out. A third unfired casing carried the words, quote, if you read this, you are gay, L-M-A-O, end quote. All of these things are certainly things that investigators are going to be investigating and are going to be talking to everyone that they can to try to understand what they mean and ultimately, of course, your question, what the motive was here.

Yeah. Domenico, I was struck by the fact that before law enforcement officials even announced this information, President Trump, announced that there had been an arrest during an interview on Fox and Friends. How unusual is this? Well, I mean, a lot of what Trump does is unusual. I mean, we've seen over the years, and he's not one for protocol. Where he chose to do it, obviously, is a choice. Did it on Fox News friendly confines. And we know that he had already come out, you know, accusing the left of doing this when really we had no idea of motive then. And all of that is still being looked at right now.

So, you know, he's not exactly always one for, you know, taking a beat and taking a minute. I was encouraged that yesterday, at least when people said, do you have an idea of what the motivation was? And he said, I have an idea. And he said, but I'll just hold off. So, you know, Trump is always going to be somebody who wants to be able to get out front of things. And it wasn't that surprising considering his history and all this. I'll also note that that's not the only kind of surprising announcement that we had from senior administration officials in the course of this investigation. And I say that, of course, in a reference to the tweets that FBI director Cash Patel had in the initial hours, within six or seven hours after the shooting took place, basically announcing that they had the shooter in hand, which one is not something that you would ever see an FBI director tweet publicly about. And then he had to essentially retract that an hour later, an hour and a half later, to say that individual has been released and the investigation continues. I will say it is normal for investigators to bring people in for questioning over the course of an investigation and for them to then be released.

That happens all the time. The issue here is you don't announce an arrest until you are certain that the person that you have in custody is indeed the shooter or the suspect who you're looking for. Yeah. Well, once we have more information, we will talk about that here as well. All right, Ryan, thanks for being here. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to dig a little more into political violence.

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Hi, Odette. Hey, Ashley. Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced the arrest this morning at a press conference. What struck me is the way he talked about this moment. Let's take a listen. This is certainly about the tragic death assassination, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. but it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us.

It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times. Let's listen to the way Trump has been speaking about this moment. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today.

And it must stop right now. Odette, what are you here in the way these two Republican leaders are talking about? talking about this. I mean, there's a big difference there, Ashley. I mean, Trump, you know, this was just hours after Kirk was killed. You know, Trump immediately blaming the radical left before we knew anything at all about who the suspect would be in this case. Cox, on the other hand, also acknowledged violence against Democratic politicians. You know, he did praise Charlie Kirk. He said many young people loved him. But he also pointed out that a lot of young people hated him. So a huge difference, and I think what's really important here is to note how Cox was sort of imploring Americans to aspire to sort of a higher ideal of like what unites us despite our political views, this talking about the American experiment, this idea that we should be able to politically disagree with each other without resorting to violence. And we talked to experts on how to avoid political violence or how to de-escalate. You know, they talk about needing politicians to be on a unified message of trying to call for calm, you know, but again, it's also not as simple as political rhetoric, as left or right rhetoric. You know, there are lots of other political and policy factors like the availability of guns, wide gaps in behavioral and mental health care. That isn't really something that oftentimes we wind up talking about, but immediately go toward this angle of political rhetoric. And people have to be careful. about what they say because we're in such a heightened environment with people so angry on either side. But there are a lot of factors that wind up pushing people to become radicalized and do

something this extreme. So, Domenico, Charlie Kirk grew to prominence in this political climate where provocation and extreme partisanship and dehumanizing language are prized. Can you give us some examples of the things Kirk said that contributed to that political ecosystem? Sure. And I mean, I think the reason part of this is important is because there's been a real whitewashing of his record. You know, there's a lot of people on the right who agreed with a lot of the things that he said who have held him up to be, you know, almost a hero and like a folk hero kind of person. And there have been people in right wing media who've basically said you shouldn't even say he's controversial. But, you know, I think that Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah was, you know, saying there that he knows that there are a lot of young people who loved him. but he also knows there were a lot of young people who hated him. And a lot of that is because of some of the very controversial and divisive things that he did say. For example, and some of this is going to be disturbing to people who hear it. But he said that the Civil Rights Act, for example, was a, quote, mistake that it had been turned into a, quote, anti-white weapon. He blamed Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King for the law. And he called him an awful person. He said King's defenders treat a serial adulterer, an alleged rapist,

reparations proponent and a race Marxist as a near deity, casting doubt on whether or not there should even be an MLK day. When it came to people who were Jewish, he said the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country. He said that Jews control not just, quote, the colleges, it's the nonprofits, it's the movies, it's Hollywood, it's all of it. On guns, he said that I think it's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given rights. And, you know, on women, he had a lot of things to say, for example, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey got engaged recently and he said maybe one of the reasons that Taylor Swift has been

so annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she's not yet married and she doesn't have children. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge. No one should be subjected to the kind of violence that we've seen in this country or be assassinated for their thoughts and feelings. But this is one reason why he was such a lightning rod for the left. Yeah, I mean, I would jump in with additional, you know, examples. And specifically, you know, to this discussion, we're talking about political violence right now. You know, if we rewind to the incident where a home intruder entered the home of Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband, you know, Kirk called for, quote, some amazing patriot to bail that suspect out of jail. If we also think to

the exchange that Kirk was literally engaged in moments before he was killed, he was again claiming that transgender people are responsible for too many mass shootings in the U.S. You know, this despite, you know, no evidence for that, the vast majority of mass shootings have been at the hands of cisgender white men. You know, there are so many of these examples of polarizing things and, you know, misinformation that he has been part of amplifying. And, Odette, you were pointing out before we were talking on the podcast about the fact that it was 9-11 yesterday. And the difference in which how George W. Bush, for example, spoke after 9-11 in trying to call for calm, going to a mosque. and trying to de-escalate after 9-11 and trying to prevent violence against people who are Muslim. That was very different than the way Charlie Kirk talked about Islam, for example, saying Islam is the sword that the left is using to slit the throat of America.

And Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. You know, I mean, these are the kinds of things that a lot of people were very upset about. And you do see a bit of a whitewashing of that on the right from people who liked him. And, you know, frankly, we've seen that on the other. other side, too, when there have been terrible instances of police brutality, for example, or someone killed by police. And then, you know, all the images you see of somebody are, oh, they're angelic, they're a great person and all these things. And people don't do nuance very well to explain, you know, there are a lot of different aspects and gray areas in people's lives.

Yeah. And we're living in a moment where political violence is becoming more common and more frequent. O'Don, I wonder, what do we know about the motivations behind political acts of violence more broadly? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about political violence that, you know, may not be well understood by sort of a general public, Ashley, is that we tend to think that political violence maps onto the political divides that we're experiencing in this country. So, you know, when something happens that targets somebody on the right, you know, people jump to the assumption that it was committed by somebody on the left or vice versa. And the fact is that the picture has been much more complex than that for many years now. You know, we have been seeing

an increase in political violence committed by people who are what former FBI director, Christopher Ray, used to call salad bar extremism. So, you know, people who've been influenced by sort of a mix of different extremist ideologies and they kind of pick and choose and sometimes it can be completely incoherent. But they've been radicalized into committing an act of violence. We are also seeing people that are committing violence just for the sake of violence. And we've been seeing this particularly recently with school shootings, including it appears, a school shooting that occurred in Colorado, the very same day that Kirk was killed. And so we have that. And then we also have these instances where, you know, remember,

Ashley, when there was this attempted assassination of then candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the individual involved in that had also been looking into events where President Biden would be present. It's sort of understood now was perhaps him choosing a target of opportunity to achieve notoriety. And so there really is a much more complex picture of like what the motivations have been behind high profile acts of political violence. And I think many people understand. Right. We've seen people who are targets who are of one party or the, other, even just over the last year and a half. You think about Josh Shapiro, the governor of

Pennsylvania, Democrat. His residence, a governor's residence was fire bombed while he and his family slept. But that wasn't necessarily a right-on-left crime. That was somebody who was upset over Josh Shapiro's stance on Israel. So, you know, oftentimes, though, people's conclusions get far out ahead of the facts. And social media in particular doesn't exactly lend itself to taking a beat and waiting to see how the evidence plays out before we draw these broad conclusions. And if I could just jump in to affirm that this sort of intra-party aggression is a thing. I mean, I think one thing that we've noted over the last several years is sort of the shift of the Republican Party further to the right. And, you know, I think many understand that shift to be a

result of that intra-party aggression. We all remember back when they were trying to select the new House Speaker, ultimately it was Mike Johnson. we were hearing from Republican legislators who were saying that they were fearful because they were receiving threatening messages from their constituencies about who they were going to support in the race for House Speaker. We've been also seeing this in studies of state legislators across the nation that Republican state legislators have been experiencing in particular a high degree of abuse from people that are on the right. So, Odette, I mean, we've seen political leaders on the right clearly blaming the left for this shooting, President Trump,

Laura Lumer, members of Congress. Big picture here. What effect does that have on how we understand this kind of violence? Well, I think it really kind of obscures the nuance that we need to have if we're going to really address the violence in a real way. One of the things that's been really interesting for me to note, you know, if you think back to the healing of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, the man that was charged with that shooting, we've been seeing him, frankly, kind of celebrated on the left as a sort of like folk hero, when the reality is he's really still kind of a blank slate. We just don't know very much about him other than he had this very specific grievance against the health insurance industry. And so what you're seeing in that void where we lack more information, more nuance about it, is people sort of projecting onto him like what they, wish that violence was about, which is a really bad place to be. And it doesn't help us figure out like how we get out of this cycle. Yeah. And look, I think one of the things that's been somewhat bothersome is seeing some of the glee on social media at Charlie Kirk's death from

people on the left end of the spectrum, some of them. I have to say, you know, it's interesting because this is the NPR Politics podcast. We examine politics because it's the way we get things done in the country, whether you're conservative or liberal, I mean, at a national level, we have elections that put representatives and senators and a president into office. That's the way change is made, right? Not through violence, but the problem can become when people lose faith in the system. And they don't believe politics is what works and don't think they can get things done through those normal channels, those existing channels, or that it takes too long or that they don't see the changes that are possible, you know, and some radicalized people in that kind of environment like we are in look to

alternative means. And that can be a humongous problem because all it takes is one person. And when people lose faith in the system, as we've seen, people have lost faith over the years in institutions. And this is the kind of thing experts have warned can happen. Yeah. I mean, considering what Domenico just said, Odette, can we just expect that this is going to be part of our political reality in perpetuity? Or is there something that can be done here? I do think there's something can be done. I mean, Domenico referenced earlier how President George W. Bush was very deliberate about not demonizing Islam, the religion, or Muslims in particular, back after 9-11. So that kind of messaging from influential figures in leadership is really important. I also think

that, you know, there are a couple of other things. You know, today in the press conference, Governor Cox recommended that everybody just sort of get offline and take a beat. And I definitely think that that's a really important part of this, too, because so much of the rage is sort of being churned online with an absence of facts. And so I do think if people can just take a step back and step away from sort of the intentional rage baiting that's going on, you know, I think that'll be really helpful. But, you know, and just one last thing is that some of this violence has been potentially because people feel like they don't have an avenue. to express what they want in a constructive way, you know, through our democratic process.

And so I think we really do need to look to our political leadership to be more in touch with their constituencies and talk to them about the uncomfortable differences that they may have with them and try to make sure that people do feel included in the process so they don't lose faith in the system altogether. Yeah. All right. Well, that's a wrap for today. our executive producer is Methoni Maturi. Our editor is Rachel Bay. Our producers are Casey Morel and Bria Sogs. Thanks to Kelsey Snell and Andrew Sussman. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Odette Yousaf. I cover domestic extremism. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.