If you’re a left-winger taking your cues from JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDad_Defiant! then you probably don’t care much about the truth anyway. Those feeds on X don’t exist to inform anyone so much as to rally the troops around the common enemy.
But highly credentialed historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has degrees from Harvard and teaches history at Boston University, is supposed to be someone who cares about the truth. She is currently (and for some time now) the number one writer on Substack with about 2.7 million subscribers.
But as I pointed out here, the death or Charlie Kirk was a clarifying moment where Richardson completely blew away any facade of neutrality. Instead of telling her readers the truth, she told them a lie promulgated by partisan Democrats and then never corrected the record.
Today, two authors have written a piece for Pirate Wires looking in detail at Richardson’s output, specifically as it relates to political violence. Together, the two of them read over 100 of her daily essays so they have a pretty firm basis on which to describe her work.
In July 2024, Trump was nicked in the ear by would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks. In June, two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota and their spouses were shot by Vance Boelter (one couple survived; one didn’t). After both shootings, Richardson posed the same argument. MAGA had normalized violence, “a hallmark of authoritarian leaders,” to cement power “because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections,” she wrote in July. And these gun nut Republican shooters were listening.
“Trump has encouraged violence and cozied up to brutal dictators, while MAGA has fetishized guns,” she wrote in June. “When he celebrates violence, unhinged people listen.”
This is the “climate of hate” argument aka stochastic terrorism, which the left loves to trot out any time some act of political violence can be blamed on the right. But like nearly all Democrats, Richardson decided not to let inconvenient facts get in the way of her story. When Charlie Kirk was killed she completely ignored evidence in favor of BS being floated by the Lincoln Project.
September rolled around, and Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk. This is the big moment, where Richardson could either incorporate some inconvenient facts into her narrative, risking that clean package of opinions — or lie. And she lied, or at least she made an error that is hard to wrap our minds around.
Richardson shares her list of sources at the end of each Substack post. Which is how we know that she established (falsely) that Robinson was right-wing based only on social media accounts like Kellyanne Conway’s ex-husband speculating that he was a “Groyper,” a far-right group led by Nick Fuentes who felt that Kirk wasn’t “pro-white enough,” she wrote on September 12. The anti-fascist messages he wrote on the bullet casings were just niche video game references¹, according to Richardson. It wasn’t worth mentioning the accounts by his family members, by officials in Utah, and by Robinson himself — all of which were readily available in Richardson’s linked sources — that he shot Kirk because he’d had enough of his “hatred.”
That all set up Richardson, quite nicely, to make the same old case. MAGA’s rage was mere deflection from its dirty deeds. And MAGA’s rage was itself an act of violence.
As many people on the right, myself included, have pointed out. The murder of Charlie Kirk was shocking but it was still the act of one person. What was almost equally shocking was the embrace of this act of political violence by tens of thousands of left-wingers on social media. For many of them it was a cause for celebration. And that brought with it the knowledge that, if they’d celebrate his death, they’d celebrate the death of nearly anyone on the right.
Here again, Heather Cox Richardson treated this as a one-way argument.
When Luigi Mangione assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Richardson wrote about the celebrations on social media at length. It was a “cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded.” Apparently something happened to Richardson’s ability to look at the internet since then, because on September 13, far from grappling with “those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media,” as she put it, Richardson wrote that Republicans were attacking these folks to create a narrative and “mobilize violence” against their enemies, “a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt” — because they’re losing. Fearful of getting pushed out in 2026 — with Trump’s declining approval and unmet promises — MAGA is embracing right-wing violence and disinformation to achieve what Trump cannot, she said…
The thousands of people who reacted with a laugh emoji to UnitedHealth’s Facebook status about being “deeply saddened and shocked” mattered. The thousands of people who liked and shared posts like “Breaking: Charlie Kirk loses gun debate” — with enough frequency that Bluesky issued a warning telling users to stop — didn’t.
She’s resorting to another favored left-wing mode of argument: If the left does something bad, the real story is the right’s reaction. She’s basically claiming that Republicans were seizing on celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s death. But the celebrations themselves don’t interest her. And neither does the political violence unless it bolsters her case against MAGA.
When the victim was a Democrat, the act was “horrific.” When the victim was corporate and powerful, it was a moral protest… The through-line is obviously that violence is only allowed to mean something politically when it can be assigned to the right’s authoritarian power grabs and “rhetoric.”
Which means: violence is abstract. Violence isn’t violence at all, just something that can happen to the people you agree with.
Of course we all make mistakes but this was a big one and Richardson never went back to correct it. On the contrary, she brushed off the evidence and then made herself the victim.
In an interview with the anti-Trump Bulwark podcast, Richardson said “we just don’t know” about Robinson’s motive. Richardson objected to podcast host Jonathan V. Last’s statement that the evidence so far suggests Robinson was upset over Kirk’s statements on transgender issues.
“But you even can’t say that,” said Richardson. “Anyone who studies history will tell you that sometimes the things that seem like they fit pretty clear patterns simply don’t.”
“It certainly looks one way, but it could be somebody he cut off in traffic for all you know,” she added.
And she complained that conservatives who criticized her article were acting “in bad faith” and engaging in a “perverted attack on participation of the public sphere.”
“Yesterday was a complete nightmare in my life,” she said.
Richardson’s claims about her own writing (as made on the Bulwark podcast) are misleading. Here’s what she claimed she said.
I had one sentence in which I referred back to what I had said the day before and said, although there is this big machine out there saying he’s on the left, it appears he’s on the right. I used the word appears…I used the word appears because we simply didn’t know. That’s it. I got nothing else because we don’t know.
Nearly everything she said is a lie. The only true part is that she did use the word “appears” once but only after saying flatly in the previous sentence, “in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left.” She didn’t say he didn’t appear to be on the left she said he “was not” on the left. She then went on to argue the right didn’t know these facts because they were living in a fictional world. Here’s a screenshot of what she wrote.
Heather Cox Richardson, the most popular individual political Substack writer, is spreading utter misinformation about Tyler Robinson to her followers. This piece got over 7,000 likes. She goes on to accuse right-wingers of “using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world.” pic.twitter.com/JAcWvwOfyn
— dylan (@narrenhut) September 15, 2025
In summary: He’s not on the left. He “appears” to be a Groyper. Right-wingers are living in a fictional world.
In fact, it was Richardson living in a fictional world. If she’d been paying attention to anything besides leftist tweets, she’d have known that well before her false claims were published. It was already clear a full day earlier that there was no evidence Tyler Robinson was a Groyper and that investigators suspected his motive had to do with his trans boyfriend.
An actual historian might wrestle with getting this so completely wrong and drawing such firm conclusions from a false narrative spun up by progressive hacks online. But not only did Richardson not take a step back, she brushes the whole thing off as unknowable, i.e. maybe Charlie Cox cut off Tyler Robinson in traffic. She says things like that and then attacks her critics for not engaging with the substance of her remarks.
Richardson should be embarrassed but of course she’ll keep playing dumb all the way to the bank.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
