“The Kirk narrative doesn’t hold.”

To whom goes the good?

The Doppelgänger. (CCTV, F.B.I. release, 12 September/ Wikimedia Commons.)

18 SEPTEMBER—So many questions since a sniper with demonstrated skill assassinated Charlie Kirk in broad daylight on Sept. 10—this as he addressed a crowd of several thousand no less. We have only our questions as of now, and history suggests these may be all we ever have as to the who and why of this very public crime. But we damn well better get on with the business of posing them: Questions, the right ones, have a power all their own.

Charlie Kirk’s murder abruptly confronts us with all manner of realities we must now recognize as crises. Where to begin? With the disintegration of what may remain of any shared identity and purpose among Americans? With the force of ideology, with the invisibility of power? There is also the suddenly visible extent of the Zionist state’s direct influence at the highest levels of the American government. How much is left out or simply falsified when officials—state officials in Utah, local police, the F.B.I.—give accounts of politically momentous events and when media reproduce these accounts with no hint of questioning their veracity? We have to ask this, too.

We find ourselves, to consider these matters together, plunging well beyond the apple-pie authoritarianism that threatened a few years ago. No apple pie this time.

Let us start with Tyler Robinson. Who is the 22–year-old formally charged on Tuesday with murdering Kirk with a single shot fired from a .30–06 Mauser at considerable range? Who—the much larger question for its implications—was Charlie Kirk, the 31–year-old wunderkind of America’s conservative movement? At this point we have no certain answers in either case. We have, instead, what appear to be fraudulent narratives that are under construction even as we speak.

Tyler Robinson, by all accounts, was an upright student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah, until Sept. 10. Churchgoing, “very considerate, quiet, respectful”—these the descriptions of a neighbor in Washington, the Utah suburb where Robinson’s family lives. “He was a good kid,” Kristen Schwiermann added when she spoke to NBC News the day after Robinson was detained as a suspect. His grandmother called him “squeaky clean.”

In the same report NBC noted, “Robinson's evolution from standout student to the subject of an FBI manhunt is not clear.” This is to put the point too mildly.

On Sept. 11 the F.B.I., acknowledging it has no certainty on this point, released two blurry photographs that showed someone in a stairwell supposedly located at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was assassinated the previous day. A friend of Robinson’s saw them and remarked in a messaging platform called Discord that Robinson resembled the man in the photos. Robinson replied immediately, according to a widely circulated New York Times report, that “his ‘Doppelganger’ was trying to ‘get me in trouble.’” Somebody else on Discord then wrote, “Tyler killed Charlie!!!!”—this “apparently in jest,” as The Times rightfully reported.

The thought that this was anything other than a humorous exchange among friends is patently ridiculous, in my read. But on matters proceeded. Robinson was detained at his parents’ home later that day. Initial reports had it that he turned himself in peaceably; we now read he is not cooperating.

The air has since been thick with innuendo. So far as one can make out, Robinson seems to be of mildly progressive political persuasions and, naturally enough, did not like Kirk. We read that he favors the sort of gender politics Kirk stood against. There are reports he, Robinson, has been romantically involved with a roommate who is transitioning from male to female. There are other reports that bullet casings found at the scene have, Luigi Mangione-style, inscriptions on them making reference to video games with various anti-fascist and gender-related messages. O.K., but strictly for the sake of argument. None of this comes close even to suggesting a motive.

“We’re trying to figure it out,” Spencer “We got him!” Cox, Utah’s conservative governor, admitted on “Meet the Press” last Sunday—this as he explained how a clean-as–Gene college student, in a feat of exceptional marksmanship, turned into an assassin with deadly aim after he was “deeply indoctrinated in leftist ideology.”

How and when did that happen, we are compelled to ask. There seems to be no record of any such conversion. Here is Cox elaborating his case:

Friends have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.

Deep and dark places and going deep, just as friends have confirmed. Kind of. I’m sorry, Governor. You managed to cast doubt on the official story even before it was written. This starts to come over like “Invaders from Mars,” that 1953 Cold war classic, wherein plain-vanilla suburbanites fall into a pit and aliens from outer space turn them into enemies of the state by putting mind-control buttons in the backs of their necks.

Brilliant, if you go on for that sort of thing. And I suppose some people do.

On Wednesday The Times published an account purporting to show a persuasive trail of evidence indicating Robinson’s guilt. This thing is based more or less entirely on the court documents wherein Robinson is now charged and holds together with spit and baling wire. There is too much blur in it, and too much that does not make sense.

Robinson’s parents saw the photographs, or one of them, about which he had joked with friends, and saw the same resemblance. So they asked their son to come over from his apartment in St. George. They then called a family friend, who arrived and “began trying to negotiate Mr. Robinson’s surrender,” as The Times reported this. Why these events? Why are they not adequately explained? Were the parents convinced of Robinson’s guilt, or did they think it wise to clear his name by cooperating with the authorities? We do not know. The court documents indicate Robinson “implied”—this from The Times’s report—he was the assassin. What in hell does this mean?

There is the matter of the rifle. Robinson père also saw a photograph of the rifle the assassin used and said that it looked like the Mauser Robinson got from his grandfather. He, the father, then asked his son to send a photo of the rifle that came down to him. This simply does not add up. How and when did Robinson’s father see a photo of the supposed murder weapon and where was Robinson at the time of these events? If the father had seen a photo of the weapon, why would be ask Robinson to send a photo of the rifle he got as a gift. One Mauser Model 98 looks like any other.

Etc.

The charging documents filed in a District Court Tuesday go long on an extensive thread of text messages that supposedly passed between Robinson and the roommate-lover. Apart from various anomalies and mismatches—Robinson says he is still in Orem, where Utah Valley is located, when official accounts have him turning himself in at his parents’ house 350 miles away, for instance—this material is simply too artificial to be believed. It reads like an account of motive and method such as a prosecutor might neatly present to a jury.

There are no time-stamps on these text messages reproduced in the charging sheet. It especially galls me that CNN, which relied solely on the court document, assembled some of the texts in a graphic to make them look like an authentic thread—hard evidence instead of what they are, an alleged exchange of notes. This is disgraceful even by CNN’s gutter-journalism standards. No time-stamps on these either, of course.

It is no one’s place to insist Tyler Robinson is the innocent victim of an official frame-up. It is absolutely imperative to insist that he is innocent until proven otherwise, that the case presented publicly—beginning with Governor Cox’s first statements, running through mainstream media, and now in court documents—reeks. And as we do our insisting we must remind ourselves of the FBI’s long, long record of framing innocent people, often by way of highly elaborate falsifications, in the cause of political repression and to preserve its undeserved reputation as a law-enforcement agency.

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Governor Cox has it that Tyler Robinson acted alone. President Trump and his adjutants say—I may as well quote The Times again—“the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives.” Here is Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, speaking excitedly on Fox News Sept. 12:

There is a domestic terrorist movement in this country. When you see these organized doxxing campaigns, where the left calls people enemies of the republic, says they’re fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil, and then prints their addresses, what do you think they are trying to do? They are trying to inspire someone to murder them. That is their objective. That is their intent.

Questions, questions. Is Robinson the lone gunman, the Lee Harvey Oswald of the case? Or does he belong to some dangerous movement on a murder spree? What is this left Miller and his employer talk of incessantly—given, I must add, no authentic left any longer survives in America? We do not know even this much. But these questions lead to the obvious conclusion—obvious to me, in any case—that the official account of the Kirk assassination is still under construction and good old American paranoia and ideological imperatives mix to make the mortar that will bind its bricks together.

This seems even truer in Kirk’s case than in Robinson’s.

Charlie Kirk was a true-blue conservative and ranked very high among President Trump’s most prominent and influential allies. He was handy enough in the cause of this or that propaganda op. His movement, Turning Point USA, had received millions of dollars in support over the years from Zionist donors—Israel’s American cutouts, as some commentators have it. He stood for freedom, truth, Judeo–Christian values, and the Zionist cause and against, among very much else, liberal censorship and wokery of all kinds. This is the Charlie Kirk the narrative- builders speak of now that Kirk is dead. It is the Kirk you can read about in any mainstream publication you may come across.

It was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu who got this script going. In a bit of timing many have questioned, the Israeli prime minister went on “X” with prayers for Kirk within a matter of minutes of his death. Two hours later he posted this:

Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. A lion-hearted friend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo–Christian civilization. I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not take place. We lost an incredible human being. His boundless pride in America and his valiant belief in free speech will leave a lasting impact. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk

A day later Bill Ackman, the Zionist billionaire, followed Netanyahu on “X” to boast of his close friendship with Kirk. “I feel incredibly privileged to have spent a day and shared a meal with @charliekirk11 this summer,” Ackman wrote. “He was a giant of a man.”

On Sept. 15 J.D. Vance sat behind Kirk’s desk as host of “the Charlie Kirk Show.” Here is Stephen Miller, speaking to the vice-president on that occasion:

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. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

Kirk as a martyr to the right-wing and Zionist causes: To term this shocking hypocrisy is wholly inadequate. As Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil reported in The Grayzone Sept. 12, by mid-summer Kirk had turned on Netanyahu, if not Israel, and was vigorously critical of the Trump regime’s relations with “the Jewish state.” Here is a snippet from the Blumenthal–Parampil report. It is based on a source who was close to Kirk and well-connected in the White House:

In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.

Those who had so recently benefacted Kirk turned against him as he turned against them when he finally grew disgusted by their undue influence. He thereafter faced incessant pressure—such that he came to fear for his life—from Israel’s most powerful American allies, many of whom had donated millions to Turning Point USA. In a separate piece published Sept. 15, Blumenthal reports on an early August meeting Ackman arranged with Kirk and various American Zionists in the Hamptons, the fashionable east end of Long Island. Kirk was so viciously attacked for his betrayals that he came away feeling “frightened.”

So much for that day and that meal Ackman was privileged to spend with Kirk a month before he was assassinated.

The Grayzone’s reports blow to smithereens the orthodox narrative of Charlie Kirk and the meaning of his murder. Apart from the close-in account of Kirk’s political turn, we have now had a stunningly revelatory look at just how directly Netanyahu has habitually imposed his will on the Trump White House. These pieces are Pulitzer-worthy for what they reveal, although Blumenthal and Parampil will never see a Pulitzer, as mainstream media, busily defending the parallel universe they assist in constructing, continue resolutely to ignore their work.

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Charlie Kirk’s assassin could have got his or her work done a hundred different ways. Kirk could have been run off the road, or bombed in one or another manner, or shot while driving home one evening, no one there to see it, just a corpse slumped over a steering wheel. But as Thomas Karat, a psychologist with long experience in behavior analysis, wrote in a lengthy essay published Sept. 13, Kirk’s assassination was not about turning him into a dead body. It was about vastly more.

Here is Karat in a 23–minute video he published along with the Substack essay:

The bullet isn’t the story. The story will come after. Because assassinations aren’t just about killing a man. They are about who gets to write the script the minute the body hits the ground.

And so we return to our questions and our questions and our questions. Was Kirk’s murder about the generation of what Karat calls “social tension,” as this kind of violence was often meant to serve during the Cold War decades? Was it about defending a cause against a former insider with enough influence to threaten it? Was it possibly meant, as some suggest, as a warning to those who turn coats?

We arrive, then, at the most important question of all. Cui bono, to whom goes the good? It is but a week since Kirk was murdered, and I have already heard this question more times than I can count. There are answers to this—I have two, not difficult to figure—but within these answers we find more questions that have no answers.

There is, first, the Trump regime. I have already quoted Trump’s lieutenants and goons—is Stephen Miller anything more than a goon with a jumped-up title?—sufficiently to suggest that a major attack on left-wing terrorist groups, whoever these may prove to be, is in the offing. As there are no left-wing terrorist groups to attack, this is likely to prove a not-well-defined campaign against American liberalism altogether, the limits and legality of which we cannot yet know.

I have a difficult time imagining the president or anyone near him had a hand in Kirk’s assassination. In my read these are no more than disgraceful opportunists tipping the murder of an increasingly pointed critic upside down so that he comes out a martyr, a patron saint of rightist repression. Trump has already proposed a Charlie Kirk Act, which would, if this goes anywhere, revive and recast a Cold War statute to control the press and broadcasters in the name of “accountability.”

I have less difficulty imagining the Israelis had a hand in Kirk’s assassination, even if I am limited to imaginings. Netanyahu’s instant professions of sorrow, and then the effusive praise: As Thomas Karat points out persuasively, official statements of this kind are customarily deliberated, written, and vetted over a period of hours before they go public. Twenty minutes after the fact? The question raised is obvious.

Beyond this, an inexplicable detail, there is the Israelis’ record of assassinations, one that, by the evidence extending far back in history, knows no limits. There is, too, the Israelis’ well-reported anxiety about the radical decline in support for the Zionist cause, notably among the young conservatives who flocked to Kirk. The motive could not be clearer.

Netanyahu—who doth protest far too much, as I read him—went on American television last weekend to say any suggestion of Israeli involvement is “just insane.” Well, there is no evidence Kirk’s murder was another in the long line of Mossad jobs, but we ought to remind ourselves as we think this through it is very far from insane to consider the question.

Political violence in the United States occurs in cycles, Edward Luce, a Financial Times columnist, astutely remarked in a long piece the other day. Luce, a longtime student of American politics, cited the four assassinations of the 1960s—the two Kennedys, King, Malcolm X—as a case in point. “But there is a crucial difference between then and now,” he observed. “The killings of King and Kennedy were not accompanied by high-level incitement to revenge.” This time, he points out, we have Republicans in Congress shouting across the aisle, “Y’all caused this. You fucking own this,” and other such niceties.

The social fabric in America has been fraying for years of course. But Luce is right to suggest the Kirk assassination has tipped us into a new and dark time. We are a nation of homeless wanderers now, it seems to me, no longer capable of finding our way to even a glimmer of unity or light. When I take a step back from the questions I propose in this commentary, it seems to me a measure of the trouble we are in that we have to pose any of them. How far down to the bottom? Is this the question all the others leave us to ask?

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This is an updated version of an essay that appeared in ScheerPost. Additional research by Cara Marianna.

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