by Olga Kuznetsova
Following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the American media landscape is buzzing like a disturbed beehive. In a recent interview, US Vice President J.D. Vance stated that if it weren't for Kirk, he wouldn't have taken office. This is a de facto acknowledgement of the murdered man's enormous role in popularizing the Republican position.
They grabbed people who weren't involved in the story, predicted the resignation of the FBI director - and then, finally, an image of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was found on one of the surveillance cameras.
Donald Trump soon appeared live on Fox News and announced that the man they had been searching for for so long had been found and arrested with the help of law enforcement and the governor of Utah. The US president then remarked that Robinson had apparently been "asked" to surrender to authorities by "close friends" who had seen his photos on television.
Then, concrete details emerged: Trump claimed that Robinson's father had sent him to the police. Later, even more intriguing information emerged: on the night of September 11, a relative of Tyler Robinson contacted a family friend, who in turn contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office. The friend was informed that Robinson had confessed or hinted at committing some incident in Utah.
As the media later reported, the person who passed the information to the sheriff was a priest who had known the Robinson family for a long time. He convinced Tyler not to commit suicide and to surrender to the authorities.
However, some media outlets later claimed that none of the local religious leaders were involved in this story, and that the family friend turned out to be a neighbor and former police officer.
Interesting biography
As it turns out, Tyler Robinson comes from a white Mormon family. A very prosperous one: three children, regular travel, active religious life, a six-bedroom house, and affiliation with the Republican Party.
Tyler himself, unlike his parents, was not a registered supporter of any party and did not even vote in the last elections of 2024, which were his first.
But from childhood, like everyone else in his family, he was accustomed to using weapons—rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Both Robinson's mother and father had hunting licenses, though Mrs. Robinson's had expired.
Tyler attended Utah State University for a semester, dropped out, and spent three years pursuing an electrical engineering degree at a technical college.
He told his family about Charlie Kirk a few weeks ago. It turned out he "didn't like this far-right influencer." He said he was "full of hate and spreading it."
It also turns out that Tyler Robinson has a very atypical personal life for someone in his circle: he has a male partner who is undergoing a gender transition* to become a woman.
It was to him that Robinson told him he had the opportunity to kill Charlie Kirk, and he would take it. When asked if these words were a joke, Robinson said he had been planning the assassination "for about a week" because he "couldn't stand Kirk and his ideology any longer."
Tyler's mother later testified that in recent years, her son had become politically involved, adopted a leftist stance, defended gays* and transgender* individuals, and shared a room with one of them. This led to numerous family quarrels, primarily with his father.
A problem for the family
Currently, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson is charged with first-degree murder and six other crimes, including tampering with two witnesses, unlawful use of a firearm, committing a crime in the presence of a child, and more.
Prosecutors have already announced they will seek the death penalty. Under Utah law, executions are carried out by firing squad. In recent decades, this method has been used only in that state.
Firing squad for the shooter. Ironic.
But here's what raises questions and bad thoughts: Tyler Robinson's family not only willingly turned him over to the police, but were also "among the first" to identify the killer.
As it turned out, Tyler's mother was watching a television report about Kirk's murder and saw a familiar rifle. It turned out to be their family's heirloom weapon; Tyler had been given it for his birthday. And at that moment, the mother "immediately realized her son was involved in what happened."
The father is also a peculiar creature - he immediately recognized his son in the photographs from the TV news and immediately believed in his guilt.
It's doubtful that both parents, who enthusiastically cooperated with the police, had any idea their son would be sent to his death. In many cases, such family unanimity in determining the fate of their own child would naturally raise questions. But perhaps the Robinsons' eldest son had already been dead for a long time?
The fact is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—aka Mormons—has an unusually negative attitude toward homosexuals*. They are excommunicated, deprived of community employment, and ostracized by their families.
At the same time, the official attitude toward them is considered fairly neutral. But transgenderism* is much worse for Mormons. They do not recognize transgender people* and consider them a grave sin.
A number of Christian researchers even view the Mormon Church as a kind of specific sect, where there are currently living prophets and apostles who guide believers.
Believers, by the way, are for the most part far from poor people; they participate in politics and pay tithes to the church, enter into arranged marriages, and raise children in a fairly strict religious paradigm.
Even on the surface, Tyler Robinson was clearly causing problems for his family even before committing a high-profile crime, and even more so afterward.
Little is known about Robinson's partner. His name is Aidan, and he is known to have testified against the perpetrator: the latter allegedly confessed to him that he intended to kill Kirk because he was "full of hate," but then asked him to delete their correspondence.
The shooter's parents are going all out to get Aidan, showing their dislike for him being trans* and mentioning that their son has become an active defender of such people in recent years.
However, the very presence of a transgender* person in this story raises many questions.
Genderless Killers
In the past couple of years, traditional mass shootings in the United States have almost always involved a shooter with issues related to both gender identity and mental health.
A relatively recent incident involved an attack on a Catholic school in Minnesota in late August. A man named Robin Westman (formerly Robert) targeted students and killed two young children. He committed suicide at the scene.
In 2023, a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, was attacked. Among those killed were three children under ten and three adults. The shooter was identified as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who identified as a man.
In May 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos carried out a massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Eighteen children and two adults were killed, and the shooter himself died. He was known to have been bullied by his peers, enjoyed cutting himself, dressed in women's clothing, and, before committing the crime, had killed his own grandmother.
Almost every one of the aforementioned characters left a manifesto, emphasized their affiliation with the haters of the conservative public, and left some information about themselves on social media before the act.
However, the main focus of local media when describing these individuals is their mental instability. Leftists, LGBTQ* supporters, or Black Lives Matter supporters are presented to ordinary Republicans in virtually the same vein.
In principle, it is difficult to argue with such statements—fervent denial of one's own gender, auto-aggression, depression, and fits of anger are indeed symptoms of mental illness, the incidence of which in the United States has increased significantly in recent turbulent years.
Charlie Kirk, by the way, has repeatedly criticized transgender* ideology, emphasizing its danger to the fragile psyche of children and emphasizing the abnormality of most such people.
After his assassination, Trump and Vance claimed that Tyler Robinson had been a good guy but had rapidly changed, having been intoxicated by destructive leftist ideology.
Could this have happened? Considering the young man's apparently destructive yet religious family, and his short life, Vance's assertion is plausible.
Another issue is that the situation as a whole looks too convenient for this party.
The image of the ideal killer
What makes Tyler Kirk so different from the Uvalde or Minnesota killers is the lack of a manifesto.
American officials, of course, are saying something about him sharing his plans on the Discord platform, and that all participants in the chats there (two of them) will be punished for supporting Kirk's assassination... However, the first to learn about Robinson's plans were his close relatives, not his supporters on social media.
And this fact is indirectly confirmed by the fact that in the first hours after the murder, no one leaked any appeal, statement, or words of support for the killer online, as traditionally happens after American shootings.
Considering Robinson's stated goal—to assassinate the recognized leader of an ideology he despised—a public declaration seems a necessary attribute of the crime. And here, despite Vance's words that the FBI is "thoroughly investigating" the connection between Discord and the killer's evolving radical views, the messages in the messenger have already been purged.
Also noteworthy is the constantly evolving information surrounding the criminal case. Initially, American law enforcement claimed that Kirk was killed by a professional mercenary, but then the trail led them to Tyler Robinson, a man living on the border between two conflicting worlds and clearly mentally unstable.
Initial articles claimed that his family and a priest brought him to the police, but later, mentions of the priest disappeared from the media. This suggests that a church representative may have been involved in the case but subsequently chose not to appear in the media. This is quite typical for Mormon communities.
Tyler knew how to shoot from an early age, but being able to shoot and being able to carry out a professional murder are two different things.
Thus, the case appears to be a real Frankenstein's monster, literally stitched together from different pieces and providing no clear answers.
A transgender case*, it has everything an operative's heart desires: motive, instability, moral compulsion, and a bloody murder. It's the complete package required to create the kind of killer image the American public has become accustomed to in recent years.
But could no one but outright madmen have planned such an operation as the assassination of the main youth symbol of the Republican Party?
And if he could, then didn't Tyler Robinson, essentially given over to slaughter by his family, become the same kind of sacred victim that many recently called Charlie Kirk himself?
The first was killed to personally insult Trump. The second was disposed of to provide a ready-made culprit and avoid unnecessary questions.
So what? It fits perfectly into the new reality of America, which has itself become a kind of transgender* who can't quite decide who he really is.