Monday, September 15, 2025

Part I

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The Arrest of Tyler Robinson: What Do We Know About the Suspect of Charlie Kirk’s Murder?

It was not yet a week ago that Charlie Kirk was assassinated there on a Utah University campus. Since then, the story, understandably enough, has dominated domestic news here in the United States, and it’s made ripples far beyond the United States, but we know much more now than we did.

And as we try to think about this in a particularly Christian way, a distinctively Christian way, we need to put it in the context of the fact that we are talking here about an intentional murder. We need to remind ourselves of that. So much of the chatter in the larger culture right now is centered on politics and the future of his political movement and all the rest. We need to understand that we are first and foremost talking about a human being, who was murdered last Wednesday, deliberately so, intentional murder, rightly described as assassination, a murder intended to send a political signal.

And of course, it did send a massive political signal, but the biggest issues here are moral. So let’s just try to take it apart. What do we know now that we didn’t know last weekend? Well, we know who almost assuredly did it. Now, in order to put this in proper language, we have to say that he is, at this point, a suspect who we expect to be formally charged tomorrow by law enforcement officials there in Utah.

The man’s name is Tyler Robinson from Washington County. That’s about three and a half hours from Orem where the shooting took place. And we’re talking about someone who evidently did not fit a pattern to many people around him that would’ve immediately made him a suspect in this case. But the more pieces came together over the course of the last several days, the more it did begin to make sense.

So let’s try to make sense of it for a moment. We’re talking about the deliberate calculated murder of Charlie Kirk. And when you look at the messages that were found on the unspent ammunition and other things, it was pretty clear this was coming from the left. And not only from the Left, but from the radical left, the activist left, the violent left. And what we know now is that that was indeed the case.

Some point over the last several years, Tyler Robinson was activated and became a radical on the political and ideological Left. He saw Charlie Kirk as an enemy. And even with Charlie Kirk’s announced coming to Utah, a matter of conversation, he said to people close to him that he basically despised Charlie Kirk. And furthermore, he may have made some comments that will become very much a matter of importance in his trial.

At this point, we need to keep our conversation very limited to what is well-documented and publicly available. It does not help the cause of the prosecution of this case for false information to be carelessly set loose in public conversation. Now, when you look at Tyler Robinson, you’re looking at someone who is described as a young man, as a boy, as being very bright, a scholarship student at another university, but he seems to have dropped out after a maximum of about one semester. He was in a vocational education program and he was living with a roommate. More on that in just a moment.

But the big thing is that this is a young man who was not living up to what the people around him thought was his potential. He was raised in the conservative structures of Mormonism. His family seems to be very conservative, both parents registered Republicans, a rather traditional family in a rather traditional neighborhood.

But when you look closer at the story, you also find out that Tyler Robinson was already an issue of concern because he was going deep into online areas of all kinds of ideologies. He was deeply into video games. He was living, at least to a considerable extent, an online existence. And as we know, it hatched in his mind and in his heart a plan to murder Charlie Kirk. Now, as we speak of this, let’s remind ourselves of something. This was a political murder. Now, how do we distinguish that act from others? It is because of the context.

This was a public shooting. When Charlie Kirk was speaking on a public campus, about 3,000 students, we were told, were gathered there on the lawn at Utah Valley University, and it was a public political event. That is to say it was intended to send a political message. And at least in terms of very authoritative media reports and some statements made by law enforcement there in Utah, he was speaking of the fact that he was very angry about the fact that Charlie Kirk was going to be speaking on that campus.

Now, there’s another aspect of this, and that is that it was about a 36-hour period between the time that the assassination took place and Tyler Robinson was taken into custody. He actually presented himself to law enforcement for arrest there about three and a half hours from Orem, Utah. So how did the arrest come about? Well, it came about because of the publicity about the murder. It came about because as more information was released by law enforcement and others, even members of Tyler Robinson’s family, including his father, he began to suspect that his own son might well be the shooter.

And of course, the information came in, and we now know in retrospect, it was far more comprehensive than others could have put together. So if you knew this young man and he was living in your home where he had grown up in your home and you knew things about him, you’d be able to put together the video images of the car, you’d be able to put together the video images of the young man, even the way he walked, and you could put two and two together and come up with this. And indeed, the young man’s father did come to suspect that he was the murderer. And at that point, the young man, when he was addressed by his father, according to authoritative media reports, he indicated he might harm himself.

And at some point, the father reached out to a religious leader in the community known by Tyler Robinson, and that eventually led to the fact that he presented himself for arrest. The background to this is that he was facing, almost assuredly, a massive arrest event. And it is likely that to avoid that, he turned himself in to authorities.

All right. Beyond that, we learned a lot about Tyler Robinson in a hurry. Now, I want to speak about how the media work, and I’m using that in the plural, different kinds of media, their establishment media. They’re rarely going to run something recklessly. They may be very liberal in their ideology, but in their reporting, they’re going to be pretty careful not to say things they have to apologize for in terms of factual reporting.

But we’re in a media environment in which there are all kinds of people who can make all kinds of speculations. It turns out that some of the speculations apparently were true. And so it turns out that Tyler Robinson had a roommate, who was in effect, a boyfriend described that way by Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox. And this young man was transitioning to a female identity in keeping with transgender ideology. So put together this picture very quickly.

We have a young man who was thought to be filled with all kinds of promise. He drops out of university, he ends up in a vocational program. He begins to spend an awful lot of time online. And as we now know, almost assuredly in dark places on the web, he scared people around him and was politically agitated. He made statements about his opposition to Charlie Kirk. And when people began to see the images, they could do the math, two plus two equals four.

And so another thing that is now being said rather openly is that this was a massive failure of law enforcement because after all, it was the father who seemed to put this together and addressed his son. It was a family friend, a religious leader of some sort who was involved. But let’s remember that one of the strategies in this highly media-saturated age in which the law enforcement entities and agencies present information to the public hoping to crack a case, that’s exactly the way this worked. It was in that case virtually by the book.

Part II

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The Dark Mixture of Transgenderism and Shooters: Gov. Cox Confirms Robinson’s Boyfriend Claims Transgender Identity

But I want to come back to the fact that the young man who’s been arrested here, Tyler Robinson, had another young man with whom he was living, identified as a roommate who was identified as his boyfriend. Governor Cox said that quite clearly. And when I make a statement like that, I want to back it up with the statement from the governor himself.

And so I want to read to you exactly what Governor Cox said yesterday morning. He said, “We can confirm that again, according to family and people we’re interviewing, he does come from a conservative family, but his ideology was very different from his family. And so that’s part of it. We do know that the roommate that we had originally talked about, we can confirm that the roommate is a boyfriend who is transitioning from male to female.”

He went on to say that this roommate has been cooperating with law enforcement authorities. Okay, so the picture becomes more clear. And Spencer Cox has been receiving a lot of attention, Utah’s governor, for the kinds of statements he has been making, calling for an end to political violence, for settling differences by argument, and by the political system, not by violence. But it is also very interesting that at two points in all the media saturation yesterday, he did two other things of interest.

One was, he basically embedded a lot of information in this one sentence fragment. And I can just tell you that he’s an experienced politician. He’s been in public office for a long time. He knew exactly what he was doing. I want to read his words again. “We can confirm that the roommate is a boyfriend who is transitioning from male to female.” He went on to say, “So we know that piece.”

Okay, that’s a big piece. It is a very big piece, and it is a piece that so many in the culture do not want us to connect with other pieces. So we’re going to have to do that though. Let’s connect that piece to some other pieces. One piece is just about a month ago, and that was the school shooting, the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minnesota. And in that case, the shooter was transgender and had a very interesting transgender identity.

We also now know going back to The Covenant School shooting in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023, that there was a trans identity that was involved there. And of course, you’re looking at the fact that now there are three very highly publicized shootings in which this transgender identity has become a factor. Now, how exactly has it played out in this? I think it’s difficult for us to know at this point, but I think as Christians, we can certainly understand that we are looking at an incredible nexus, that is to say a connecting point between personal identity and worldview and ideologies and the transgender movement.

And so I don’t think we should be particularly surprised about this in some ways. And I think at least one thing we need to say is that one likely aspect of this is the fact that this transgender identity, even when it comes down to treatments, surgeries, and all the rest, it almost, by definition, can’t deliver on its promises. There is something basic, basic going on here when it comes to a deep, deep problem.

And we can say that and should say that with full sympathy to the persons who are involved in such deep problems. But we do need to understand that our society has been rushing headlong into the embrace of the transgender ideology, doing so against all moral sense, against creation order, against scriptural teaching, and frankly against common sense. But it’s been doing so driven by an ideology, and that ideology on the Left is so sacrosanct that they will oppose any effort to say it could have anything at all to do with this. But I think moral sense just helps us to understand it’s actually very difficult to believe it doesn’t have something to do with this. And we don’t say that with hatred. We do say that with moral conviction.

In this respect, I think of an article that ran right after the Annunciation School shooting. This one was in the New York Times by Amy Harmon. The headline was, “Right-Wing Activists Make Attack In Minnesota Part of Anti-Trans Push.” Well, that’s a pretty politicized headline, but in the article we read this, “Fixating on one aspect of a shooter’s identity is not that unusual. Social scientists said that the public tends to focus on the identities of violent offenders when they are members of minority groups.” 

So the article itself is a way of trying to dismiss the transgender identity as having anything to do with it. But that’s becoming harder and harder as an argument to make. Now, I want to step back for a moment from that issue, and even from the arrest. It is expected that Utah authorities will bring formal charges against Tyler Robinson by tomorrow. It is also expected that federal authorities are seeking to find a way they can bring related federal charges. Although the fact that Tyler Robinson did not cross state lines, for example, may be a limiting factor, but it is certainly not exhaustive in terms of that limitation.

We’re likely to learn a great deal more just over the course of this week.

Part III

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Justice for Charlie Kirk: As Christians, We Must Keep the Most Important Things Central Even as Other Issues Press on the American Conscience

Okay, so something to note, this is still a very big story on the nation’s mind, a very big story on the nation’s conscience. And I want to say that for that reason, we need to step back for a moment and say the most important thing that should be the center of our concern is seeking justice in light of this act of murderous violence. We should also, as Christians, be thinking very much about what this says about our society. But right now, we also need to focus on one family now without a husband and father.

We need to consider Erika Kirk and those two precious children and understand that they are in a crucible of unbelievable grief. And at the same time, they are the subject of so much concentrated public attention. And that is a very, very difficult position for a young widow, and for these precious young children to be in. And at this point, it appears that Erika Kirk is doing her best to shield the children from all of this. And they’re both very, very young preschool children.

And so this is just absolutely heartbreaking. And as Christians, we just can’t telescope out from the grief and the pain being experienced by this family. We need to acknowledge that and we need to remind ourselves that that is one of our central concerns. And over the weekend, Erika Kirk made a statement of her own, heartfelt, very tearful statement of determination as well as absolute loyalty to and love for her husband, grief over his loss and anger at the injustice of his murder.

And all of this is what’s absolutely right in terms of our response.

Part IV

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The Murder Chic on the Left: This Response is Evil and Utterly Shocking – How Did It Become a Pattern for the Ideological Left?

I think it’s also very interesting to see that the response to the murder brings forth, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the response to it brings forth a pattern that certainly demands our attention. And I think we need, in terms of moral urgency, to look at this even today. And that has to do with the fact that I think one of the shocking things to many people is how many persons went online and on the air and in other contexts to celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk. And I think for most of us, that becomes almost incomprehensible. 

But you know what? I’ve got files before me right now of persons in all kinds of sectors of life who have lost their jobs, or at least have basically invited the rightful response of being fired from their jobs or their positions by some of the statements that they have made. And I am not going to give them airtime. That is to say, I’m going to speak of them, but I’m not going to cite them.

And that’s driven by my own sense of what’s morally right here. And that is that I don’t want to give these evil people, I don’t want to give them airtime, and I don’t want to give them fame. I do want to point to the pattern and say I’m absolutely shocked by it, and it’s hard to be shocked at this point in my life about this kind of thing. But there are faculty members in universities, there are staff members and administrators in universities, there are political leaders and others who’ve just gone on to say stupid, stupid stuff.

I saw a university had to release a letter from its president saying that certain persons had been fired, terminated simply because of statements they had made. And this seems to go on and on and on. One of the weirdest things in all of this, and it’s absolutely infuriating, is that on the other side of the Atlantic, the president-elect, the incoming president of the Oxford Union, that’s one of the world’s most venerable debate societies where Charlie Kirk debated just a matter of recent history and did so, by the way, by debating ideas.

It was not ad hominem arguments, but he, in his own very skillful way, debated in support of conservative ideas. And that’s exactly what a debate society at a major historic university ought to be. And there are a few universities with a name nearly as prestigious as Oxford University. The Oxford Union is perhaps the most famous debating society these days in the world. This is the incoming president, a young man whose name, again, I’m simply not going to mention, but he posted on social media shortly after the news came with the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

He responded by saying things that are absolutely evil, some of them I can’t quote by the way, simply because of profanity as well. But he said at one point Charlie Kirk got shot, and then he said, “LOOOL” as the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation explained to its audience, “An elongated version of the phrase, LOL, which means laughing out loud.”

Now, honestly, I think a lot of us have known for a long time that the ideological Left has been turning itself into such a radicalized form that it is largely separate from any kind of moral code that I think most of us would recognize. And there’s something else here, and of course, that radicalization can happen at both ends of the political spectrum and just basic intellectual honesty compels us to say that. But when you look at the ideological left, some of the cynicism, some of the hatred, some of the statements being made are shocking.

Now, again, it can happen on both extremes. It does happen on both extremes. But I’ll just say this, when you have something happen and you have conservatives speaking to it, I’ll just say I don’t recall any situation in which you had a pattern of people, in authoritative positions, administrative positions in major institutions, faculty members at universities, I don’t recall any precedent like this coming from the Right. And I say that with the fear at some point we might.

But at this point, this is something new. It’s something new and troubling. It’s something new and evil. The Oxford Union says that it is going to be reconsidering the situation of its president-elect. I think, if anything, that’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. If that’s open for debate, we are in huge trouble. I think it’s also very interesting that the master of University College, Oxford, of which this man is a member, said last Friday that no disciplinary action will be taken.

The statement was that his comments are abhorrent, but the authority went on to say, “They do not contravene the college’s policies on free speech or any other relevant policy, therefore, no disciplinary action will be taken.” Isn’t that a very revealing statement? Isn’t it interesting how fast it came? And notice that we are told that the statements, and again, some of them I can’t even repeat, and I’m not even going to state his name, they do not contravene the college’s policies on free speech or any other relevant policy. Any other relevant policy?

This is Oxford University. It was established in a very clear Christian foundation. And at the very least, you would think that there would be some rules, some rules about student behavior and student language. Are they telling us there are no rules at Oxford University? I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t believe it.

Before we run out of time today, I also want to raise another issue, and that is something that I just got to call, with great regret, murder chic. It is the turning of murder, and more specifically, murderers, into celebrities. Now, we saw this and we were troubled by it. We registered concern about it in the case of Luigi Mangione and his murder of Brian Thompson.

Now, again, I should say the alleged murderer of Brian Thompson. But the point is that once he was arrested, there’s an incredible number of persons in the United States, particularly women, evidently, young women identified in the media who said that he was cute and they made of him something like a cultural hero. And so there were even movements made in his name as if he was some kind of chic revolutionary. And as is so often the case on the Left, they make posters out of these people.

Just think, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and all the rest, Mao. The making of mass murderers into heroes is not particularly new, but I should say it is still particularly shocking. And in the social media age, it can happen in a hurry. If Luigi Mangione is a hero, then I think we know we have crossed a moral line that on the other side of there is simply no recovery.

Speaking of the murder of Brian Thompson, Theodore Dalrymple, very, very insightful cultural commentator writing at City Journal said this, “Few murders could have been more premeditated than that of Thompson if the evidence against the suspect is confirmed, bearing in mind that no one is guilty until proven so in a court of law, the killer came to New York with the express purpose of carrying out the crime. Executing it required advanced knowledge of the victim’s movements, which must have involved some research. This was no impulsive act, no rush of blood to the head as so many murders are. On the contrary, it was cold-blooded and calculated.” 

He then goes on to say, “Nonetheless, Luigi Mangione was turned by some into a cultural hero. And yes, it was disproportionately female, at least in terms of the visible support, and it was disproportionately on the Left where specifically Luigi Mangione, having killed the healthcare executive, was supposed to be on the right side of morality and history.” Dalrymple also cited an article that appeared in The Independent Florida Alligator. That is a student newspaper, at the University of Florida.

This is shortly after Mangione’s arrest. Here’s what he cites from that newspaper, “Hundreds of UF students, University of Florida students, gathered at the Plaza of the Americas on Thursday afternoon for a Luigi Mangione look-alike contest, showcasing Generation Z’s unique ability to transform somber news into a source of shared humor and entertainment.”

I’ll just say something out loud here, that is not a laudatory statement for a generation, any generation, no matter what you want to call it, Generation Z or anything else. This is a sign of a very deep, deep, deep moral sickness, and it’s the kind of indication that ought to have our attention. This goes back to the Mangione murder. You just have to wonder how long will it be before something similar like that takes place when you consider Tyler Robinson. And let’s just say we hope not.

There is much more here for our consideration. And again, I think it’s very interesting that this continues to be such a matter of national attention. It deserves to be, it should be, but I think it’s going to be very interesting to see, once the initial shock is over, what kinds of comments actually are said, what kinds of narratives are woven and put out for public consumption. But I’m saying this on the Monday of the week after this assassination of Charlie Kirk, and much more is going to happen this week.

And I can just tell you, we need to be observing what happens. We need to be observing what is said. We need to be observing exactly what charges are brought tomorrow and how that is framed. And I think sadly enough that we also need to observe some of the response to all of this, which is something of a diagnostic test for the moral state of our culture. We know enough already to be very, very concerned.