I think most if not all of our readers are under no illusions about who murdered Charlie Kirk last week or why. The evidence has been coming in for days, culminating in the revelation yesterday that Tyler Robinson confessed to the crime in a text to his boyfriend and then said he committed the murder because he was tired of Charlie Kirk’s “hate.”
But you have to give the far left credit. Starting last week, they set their minds on convincing as many people as possible that Kirk’s killer was a Republican and polling shows it worked.
In the poll, a slim majority of respondents, 51%, said they believe Kirk’s killer was motivated by political beliefs. Twenty-one percent said they were fueled by “something other than political beliefs” and 28% said they were not sure…
Twenty-four percent said that, as far as they know, the person who shot Kirk is a Republican, while 21% said the shooter is a Democrat. Fifteen percent said the killer is affiliated with neither major party, and a plurality, 40%, said they’re not sure.
Note that the shooter technically wasn’t registered as a voter with either party but in this case I think the party labels are stand ins for left and right ideology. In other words, the wording here is a little imprecise but I think the meaning is clear. More people think the shooter was right wing than left wing.
You can see the results directly on YouGov’s site. It shows that as of Sunday when the poll was completed, 40% of Republicans believed the shooter was a Democrat while 41% of Democrats believe he was a Republican.
None of this happened by accident. It was a concerted effort by people on the left to convince their audiences that the shooter, Tyler Robinson, was a right-winger. Yesterday I spent some time highlighting a few of the many tweets to large audiences on the left who were spreading this claim. For instance, Keith Olbermann spent most of last Friday morning pushing this. Everything he said here was completely wrong.
This was completely wrong. https://t.co/TCxmNHaaHe
— John Sexton (@verumserum) September 16, 2025
David Shuster claimed the opposite of what both Utah officials and the family had said was true.
This was completely false. https://t.co/GvUWOHatto
— John Sexton (@verumserum) September 16, 2025
Historian Heather Cox Richardson got this completely wrong. If you haven’t heard of her, she has the top newsletter on Substack with something like 2.6 million subscribers.
And don’t forget this person (Heather Cox Richardson) who was completely wrong. https://t.co/SjHd1D1L4Y
— John Sexton (@verumserum) September 16, 2025
And Jemele Hill claimed the murder was a white supremacist gang hit on her Bluesky account.
Oh, can’t leave out Jemele Hill who called this a “white supremacist gang hit.” That was really, really wrong. https://t.co/qdBGlWPuBs
— John Sexton (@verumserum) September 16, 2025
There’s a lot more like this but you get the idea. Lots of people on the left pushed this to their subscribers and followers and clearly, based on the poll results above, it worked. I think Jemele Hill deleted her post. I saw one person not mentioned above apologize for spreading the false claims but the rest of these posts are still up and the people who published them aren’t correcting themselves.
YouGov did published a more recent poll, this one concluded Monday, which showed a change in the numbers. The new poll shows 37% of Americans believed the shooter was left-wing and just 17% believed he was right-wing. Most of that change is probably the result of Republicans, 68% of whom said the shooter was left-wing.
But among Democrats, a plurality of 33% still said the shooter was right-wing and only 10% of Democrats said he was left-wing. You can see the results for yourself here.
Maybe the numbers will continue to improve and reality will settle in. Or maybe not. A couple of big left-wing accounts on X are still denying the evidence presented in the charging document. This person has 1 million followers.
No one is buying these text messages.
No one on the left or the right.We cannot agree on a damn thing anymore.
But we agree on this.If that doesn’t speak volumes, nothing does.
— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) September 17, 2025
And this person has 1.3 million followers.
I don’t believe these text messages were written by Tyler Robinson for a second.
I didn’t know him personally, but I know that no 22 year old writes text messages like this.
This feels like that Steve Buscemi skateboard meme “How do you do, fellow kids?” pic.twitter.com/eSBZzSZGlt
— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) September 17, 2025
So I guess the new hot take is that the text messages are part of a conspiracy theory to frame Tyler Robinson. I don’t know what they’re saying other than that they don’t believe the text messages are real.
Simultaneously, we’ve had an outbreak of another claim, that Tyler Robinson wasn’t motivated by hate for Kirk’s political opinions he was motivated by love. We’ve had one reporter on CNN and one on ABC and one on MSNBC all pushing this idea.
Even when a left-winger murders someone in front of their family, he did it for love. It’s a pretty sick and twisted way to minimize the vile nature of the crime.
So there you have it. Democrats still believe the killer was a Republican and/or that he did it for love. The bottom line for many on the left is that left-wing ideology is never to blame. There is no climate of hate on their side of the aisle.
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