Why did Tyler Robinson do it?
It’s an understandable question, the answer to which all major news outlets reporting on Charlie Kirk’s assassination were searching for in the days after his death. Of course, in any murder case, the issue on everyone’s mind is always the motive. What fervent rationale drove someone to commit such a deliberate and permanent act of hatred against another human being?
The thing is, we never got a clear answer. Sure, we got play-by-plays, diagrams, details about the crime and about Robinson’s personal life. However, all these facts painted an incohesive picture. Though they were heavily speculated on, no one seemed to know his true political beliefs. He wasn’t registered to any political party and had never voted in an election. The alleged messages he carved on the bullets, though on the surface seemed political, were actually obscure references to video games that “were mostly a big meme.” Robinson was undeniably angry with Kirk’s hateful views and, by nature of his target, this was a political act. However, it didn’t seem like politics had ever been a defining part of his life. So, how did this young man go from aspiring electrician to political assassin?
The United States has a rich and prevalent history of political violence. Dating back to the founding of our country, Americans revolted with pitchforks and rifles, not neat-and-tidy documents and bureaucracy. And our history of political assasination runs deep as well. Times of polarization, close elections and divided populace often bring out the worst urges within troubled individuals.
A political assassin’s goals are those of a killer, but they often have the framework of an activist for a twisted cause. These kinds of ideas can also be the reason for political violence on a larger scale; they are what movements are formed around, for better or for worse. In the time after the American Civil War, thousands of black men and women were lynched due to pro-slavery sentiment in the South. On the other end of the spectrum, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, violent uprisings erupted in more than 125 cities. Shared visions for the future—as well as what is seen as a rejection of those visions—by a community of people can often be the cause of this turn to violence.
Political assassins take ideas held by communities such as political parties or radical groups and turn them into a single moment of concentrated violence. When you think of examples of these assassins throughout our history, you think of men like John Wilkes Booth, an anti-abolitionist who had hated Lincoln his entire life and had been plotting to either kidnap or kill him for much of the Civil War. You think of ambitious men with undeniably political motivations, who want to enact change, to lay the foundation for their vision of America’s future.
What you don’t think of, are men devoid of a grand purpose. This is something that Robinson has in common with another attempted assassin from last year: Thomas Crooks.
Knowledge of Crooks’ attempt on Donald Trump’s life was widespread, but unlike with Robinson, who was apprehended, his mystery ended with a bullet to the head. And the world, too wrapped up discussing Trump’s response to the attempted assassination to be curious about a dead man’s motives, largely forgot him.
Crooks, like Robinson, didn’t seem to have a grand, political motivation or ideology. His search history reveals that he was looking for an opportunity to commit an attack that would garner the public’s focus, whether through the number of casualties or the killing of a public figure. Trump’s rally just happened to fit the bill.
Rather than assigning to these men activism-centered political motivations, it seems the more accurate comparison would be to another phenomenon of today’s America: the school shooter.
The hallmarks of the school shooter often include loneliness and social isolation or rejection. Like with Robinson, this isolation can cause a turn towards the internet in order to find other avenues of support. As for motivation, shooters often want revenge on their peers for bullying or social rejection. However, some individuals, like Crooks, have no coherent ideology or motivation for their actions, lashing out in search of notoriety. Understanding a shooter’s actions is about understanding an ideology of last resort; the vicious cry for attention of an individual consumed by an inner void. Likewise, analyzing Robinson and Crooks’ acts through this lens reveals a more cohesive narrative.
As exemplified by these men, today’s assassins have negligible connections to the kinds of networks that drove the actions of people and movements in America’s past. Instead of political parties or radical groups, they have Discord channels and video games, where they learn rhetoric divorced from coherent ideology—a jumbled, nihilistic attempt to explain an incomprehensible world.
Even so, this doesn’t negate the political consequences of their actions. None of this is stopping the Trump administration from pushing for an attack against liberal institutions in Kirk’s name. There is no doubt the obscurity around Robinson’s motivations will continue to be used as a tool to justify these crackdowns.
Still, defining these men’s actions through a partisan lens will only be to society’s detriment. When we try to see our politics neatly staring back at us in these acts, we fail to realize that the act itself is often the message. So long as the focus remains on placing blame, the despondency that feeds this cycle of violence will only continue to taint American life.