Today, Explained - The Charlie Kirk revenge plot

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

The motives behind Charlie Kirk’s killing are still unclear, but the Trump administration is mounting a crackdown on people and groups he says are part of the problem. This episode was produced by Denise Guerra with help from Devan Schwartz, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Danielle Hewitt, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Adriene Lilly, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Tyler James Robinson attending a virtual court hearing from Utah County Jail. Photo by Utah State Courts via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the weekend, flags from the McDonald's at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a transgender pride flag in West Hollywood, California, to flags all over our nation's capital flew half-staff for Charlie Kirk. Coldplay's Chris Martin sent love from a concert in London. South Koreans were out in the street chanting. The world was mourning a pretty divisive guy, but the Trump administration wasn't satisfied. They're doubling down on retribution.

So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer. We will absolutely target you, go after you. We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. They're doubling down even though we still don't fully know why Charlie Kirk was murdered.

What we do know on Today Explained from Vox. Support for this show comes from Icey Hot. You know those moments when you've already given it your all and you're still ready to come back for more? But the only thing standing in your way is pain. Well, you don't need to let achy joints and muscles hold you back anymore. With Icey Hot Original No Mess, you can experience fast-acting pain relief and come back strong.

Ice works fast and heat makes it last. You're so back with Icey Hot. By Icey Hot Original No Mess Now. Most AI coding tools generate sloppy code that doesn't understand your setup. Warp is different. Warp understands your machine, stack, and codebase. It's built for the entire software lifecycle from prompt to production. With the powers of a terminal and the interactivity of an IDE,

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I'm a correspondent for CNN and author of the book Black Pill. Okay, and Ellie, it's been almost a week since Charlie Kirk was murdered. What do we know at this point about his alleged shooter? Tyler Robinson To me, we still don't know enough. We know that he was a young man referred to as very smart

and quiet by a lot of his friends that have talked to the press. Tyler was always kind of quieter since we were little, but not like quiet weird. Kid was smart, quiet. He never caused any problems. I don't know. He just I think this is really unexpected. I didn't see it

coming at all. You know, he was a big game. like really into video games. And according to investigators, he was dating his roommate who was transitioning to be a woman. The first sort of tranche of information we got about this alleged shooter was when investigators revealed what he wrote on the bullet casings, allegedly. Could you help us understand what exactly he wrote? yeah i have the indictment pulled up so it's easiest for us to go through so the first one is notice is bulge oh whoa what's this so this is a furry meme it's a 10-year-old meme it comes from

an image that's a drawing of two middle-aged unattractive men role-playing with each other online like making sexy talk as furries uh and if people don't know that's kind of like a thing where you like imagining yourself as an anthropomorphic animal usually a specific one and so notice his bulge is an erection oh whoa that's a

emoticon that's like kind of really cute surprise it's like cute but a little sexy and what's this as in again the erection so just starting out here he allegedly wrote a bunch of jokes on these casings

he wrote a whole bunch of jokes He wrote dumb internet jokes. Some of them, if it were in a movie, would be funny. But he wrote them before killing a person. And that's what's like, honestly, like, pretty chilling. It's one of the details that's hard for me to get past. So this can be interpreted as a pro-fury joke or an anti-furry joke because hating furries on the internet is a big thing,

both in the right-wing world and other very online spaces. But it's also been reclaimed by furries, kind of like the word queer. So the point of saying all that is that an outsider trying to establish with certainty what exactly was being expressed by this message, that's a fool's errand. I mean, you just don't know. We just don't know. But we're getting a few more details, but it's still pretty ambiguous. Which feels similar to another casing, which said, if you're reading this, you're gay,

L-M-A-O. Exactly. And that one, again, and I saw other people pick this up on the internet, you're supposed to imagine, or for me, what it conjures is, like, a grizzled law enforcement veteran, you know, bulletproof vest bends down in the dust to pick up a piece of evidence. And it says, if you read this, you're gay, right? You're supposed to laugh, or the image is funny. And yet, he did it before killing somebody. What did the rest of them say? So the second cartridge says, hey, fascist, catch, and has these arrow symbols.

It's a reference to a video game called Hell Divers 2, which is kind of like a fascist satire, like stormtroopers. The aero symbols are what bring the biggest bomb in the game. The third cartridge is, oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow. So that's an old anti-fascist song. like history buffs are very familiar with this it's an Italian anti-fascist song I'm told it's a meme among anti-fascists

I have done quite a bit of reporting with them and I had never come across it but that doesn't I mean that's the internet I guess so is there some sort of like through line in what Tyler Robinson may have written on these casings

well he's really into video games and the like dominant pose in these very online chat rooms is ironic detachment or so many layers of irony that you can't even fully understand the author's meaning other than that they're implying we're part of an in-group and the people outside don't understand and what do we know about the online spaces that tyler may have lived in we don't know enough we don't know enough we Just don't know enough.

We know he was in a few discords gaming chat platform, but you don't have to be using a video game to use it. I've done quite a bit of reporting in these discord servers that become cultures unto themselves. Like, they become almost cult-like. I've interviewed InCels who spent, like, 18 hours a day in their Discord server. Wow. The Discord server of white nationists became very important evidence in a federal civil trial involving Charlottesville. It can become this bubble that leads to very intense group think.

But what we've seen so far of his messages on Discord, and Discord did confirm that Tyler Robertson had an account, it isn't like that. They messaged him being like, bro, you look like these pictures of the alleged shooter. He's like, oh, my doppelganger's trying to get me in trouble. Ha, ha, ha. Better throw away my manifesto an exact copyrightful. if he was in a very political space, we have not yet seen evidence of that.

And Discord itself does not necessarily have a right lean or a left lean? No, no. It's not for that. There are anti-fascist servers and communist ones and right-wing ones and fascist ones and insult ones. The thing that, like the part of that culture that is unsettling is that you see in a lot of these spaces is just this nihilistic, black-pilled, like, ironic culture where nothing is taken seriously. Like, you're a loser if you take something seriously. Tyler Robinson, of course, now in jail, at least, incarcerated

and appeared in court virtually yesterday for his indictment. He's been charged with aggravated murder. what more did we learn about Tyler from the charges yesterday? So the most interesting thing in the indictment goes to the motivation. We're joined today by our sheriff and our prosecution team and our county commissioners. They said that over the last year, his family had told investigators that he had become more left-wing in his politics, including more interested in gay rights and trans rights, that he had had disagreements with his father of. She stated that Robinson began to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders.

This resulted in several discussions with family members, but especially between Robinson and his father, who have very different political views. And the really fascinating thing is his texts with his significant other slash roommate after the shooting. Roommate, why? Robinson, why did I do it? Roommate, yeah.

Robinson, I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. Now, there are no timestamps and there are ellipsies in this, so we're not exactly sure when all of these messages were sent. But it's clear from the transcript one that the roommate was surprised by this. After reading the note, the roommate responded, what? You're joking, right? Robinson.

I am still okay, my love, but am stuck in Orem for a little while longer yet. Shouldn't be long until I can come home, but I got to grab my rifle still. To be honest, I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. He over and over and over in this transcript, he's obsessed with the rifle that was his grandfather's rifle, and particularly that his father will be angry if he has lost the rifle. If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I who will be. will have left no evidence. It's one of the other, like, just surreal things in this exchange, you know, like, you just

killed a guy. And all he can think about is my dad's going to be so mad if I don't bring back Grandpa's rifle. Not about the fact that I just killed a guy. Yeah. In front of thousands of people. And there's another message that's related to what we've been talking about. He says, remember how I was in great.

waving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see, notices bulge, O-Woo on Fox News, it might have a stroke. And then it goes back to saying, man, I'm going to have to leave my rifle behind. That sucks. It's crazy. This whole incident, or at least what we know of it so far, just feels like a very uncomfortable clash of like, I live online versus I live in the real world. Yes, yes. And particularly when talking to older colleagues who did not grow up online, it's been very hard to explain. And you see it in the national discourse too. Like this is not about like support Trump, anti-Trump. Like it's not, it doesn't break down into easy political motivations. It's many of the young people that I have talked to who are like locked into these worlds. Like they think that. That's absurd, like rooting for one party or another. You're a dupe or a fool if you care about that stuff.

I can't stop watching the way people are trying to pull, like, their own ideological goals out of this horrible event. So it's like, even as people are lecturing, like, that people haven't been taking seriously the death of this young man and father, they're still making it. themselves by trying to turn it into an ideological prop to further their own end. Ellie Reeve is the author of Black Pill, how I witnessed the darkest corners of the Internet come to life, poison society, and capture American politics. When we're back on today, explained using Charlie Kirk's murder as an ideological prop to further your own ends.

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don't fully know what motivated the alleged shooter, but that doesn't seem to be stopping Trump to Trump harder from ramping up their response. Whom is it that they blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk? Well, you know, it's interesting. A lot of the time the language they use is they. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God's merciful love. They did this. They killed Charlie. And they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy. The they is not very well defined, right?

But from what I can tell from listening to a lot of what they have to say, and listening especially to J.D. Vance guest hosting Charlie Kirk's radio show where he hosted Stephen Miller and a bunch of other notable folks to talk about this, they seem to believe that there is a wide-ranging, a web, a cell, but bigger than that, right, of left-wing or. organizations and individuals who work to inspire hatred targeting them personally. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so was to justify his murder. When you listen to Vance talk about it, his closing monologue in that show, he talks very personally about how it's a threat to leading right-wing figures, not just because he was friends with Charlie, but also the way that he talks about Trump's assassination. Donald J. Trump escaped an assassin's bullet by less than an inch.

Our house majority leavers, Stephen Scalise, came within seconds of death by an assassin himself. He believes that these people, the they, these liberal institutions, are responsible for fomending an atmosphere in which he and his friends can be killed and in fact have been targets of assassin's bullets. Vance says explicitly, people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate. political violence. Is that true, Zach? Is the left more violence than the right in the United States? No, it's not. And the key thing to look at is actual data on political violence, specifically politically

motivated murders. And there was a recent attempt to tally this by Alex Narosta, who is a scholar at the Libertarian Cato Institute. And what he found was if you exclude 9-11, which because 9-11 is such an outlier that it makes everything else look small by comparison. Political violence in the U.S. is overwhelmingly perpetrated by people on the political right, a majority. So the left, if you look just at the actual raw data, is not even close to as violent

as the political right is. We have, however, seen recent high-profile instances of what might be termed left-in political violence. The targeting of Donald Trump is not one of them, right? The first, the assassin who nearly killed Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, has no discernible left-wing ideology, no evidence that he has any left-wing politics. They were, his motivations were weird and odd, and at one point there was a report that suggested that he also looked at Joe Biden's campaign movements, and he may have just shot Trump because he was there, right? Like, it's this sometimes violence targeting major political figures has no explanation. The entire underlying belief here is a fiction, right, a sense, and this is widespread in the right-wing press, that the American left is celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.

Those people do exist. They're real, and I find it disgusting, do. I don't think they should be fired for their beliefs. But they're treating it, you know, these mainstream voices on the right up until the president's senior advisors. Like, this is the position of the institutional Democratic Party, when in fact, Like, no one in any serious level of democratic politics has even come close to justifying Charlie Kirk's death. I haven't read an op-ed in a major left-wing publication or saying that Charlie Kirk

deserved to die or that it was good. This is just not the opinion of the American left. It isn't. But there's an effort to make it look as if it is. What are they proposing the country does about this problem that they character or as them, very much us versus them. You mentioned firings. I mean, the first wave of the response has been an overwhelming attempt at what can best

be described as cancellations, right? You know, we're familiar with the concept of an ordinary person saying something that offends someone's political sensibilities and losing their job over it, right? That's what I take that term to mean. And there's been a huge wave of those since then. We will absolutely target you, go after you. This morning, some harsh critics of Charlie Kirk are now looking for new jobs. Cobb County schools placing an unknown number of employees on leave after officials said the workers made comments on social media about the conservative activist who was killed last week.

I read through some tweets by Libs of TikTok, who's an account that's famous for sort of doxing and trying to get punished liberals that are or leftists who have allegedly bad opinions. And lives of TikTok has been working overtime after Charlie Kirk's murder to try to get people. They canceled and debanked us for saying men can't get pregnant. They're getting fired for celebrating assassination. This distinction is important. We are not the same. This person reportedly works for Social Security, and he's calling for white people to be killed. Our tax dollars pay his salary.

He needs to be investigated at FBI. Chi, the author, high-right chick behind it, will say, is this acceptable to you a person's employer? when she tweets about whatever their comment is. Make these lunatics famous. And sometimes they are justifying violence. Again, I find it abhorrent. We are talking about people who will often say things like...

People will tell you to have respect for someone who spent their whole career making sure others couldn't live equally, happily, or safely. Or... Charlie Kirk is not a martyr for the gospel of Jesus Christ. These are things that are well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse about a public figure. And it seems like at no point has the top of this administration, the president, the vice president, someone like Stephen Miller, acknowledged that this is a problem that both parties have had to deal with in recent years, if not since the dawn of time in this country.

I haven't heard a lot of talk about Paul Pelosi. And we'll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi who ruined San Francisco. How's her husband doing, by the way? Anybody know? Or Josh Shapiro, or the deceased Minnesota lawmaker, Melissa Hortman. Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well? I'm not familiar.

The Minnesota House Speaker. No, it's not. That's not what. what's happening here because that would those facts, those incidents contradict the story that's being told, which is, as Vance said in the clip that you played, which is of a uniquely violent left whose institutions deserve to be targeted by the state. I suppose there's like lots of levels of irony here in the response from this administration, but one of the most tragic ones feels to me that they're overlooking what most Americans are. agree on in a moment like this. Like maybe not every single person wants to come out and mourn Charlie Kirk. Maybe not every single person believes what Charlie Kirk believed.

But more Americans than any other aspect of this assassination here can agree on, I think, one thing, which is that we shouldn't do this to people. Yeah. We shouldn't go out there and murder people because we'd disagree. agree with them. That's un-American. And yet, here we are blaming the left and leftist institutions and leftist thinkers.

And what's that going to lead to? It feels like the most obvious answer is like more violence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, violent episodes tend to last for a while once they start. And I'm very worried. What the Trump administration is talking about

the language they're using, the measures they're proposing in response, will continue to escalate political violence. 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. There are so many different permutations for how bad things can get. that the only responsible thing to do right now is to say, we have to be able to trust each other.

That's not the route the White House has gone, though, and it really scares me. Zach Beecham is the author of the reactionary spirit how America's most insidious political traditions swept the world. Denise Guerra made our show today with help from Devin Schwartz, Jolie Myers, Laura Bullard, Danielle Hewitt, Patrick Boyd, and Adrian Lilly, and myself, I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. With LPL Financial, we provide the services to help push you forward. When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, the only question should be. What if you could?

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