Kari Lake’s Plea in the Wake of Charlie Kirk’s Death Makes No Sense

Arizona Republican Kari Lake is warning parents not to send their children to college because they could turn out like Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter—who didn’t actually attend university for more than one semester. 

Speaking at a vigil for the right-wing activist at the Kennedy Center Sunday, Lake, a Trump acolyte serving as a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, claimed that alleged gunman Tyler Robinson had been “brainwashed” into committing political violence. 

“I’m not going to say our side is perfect, but damn it, this is coming from the other side,” Lake claimed. “How does a 22-year-old become so filled with hate? Five years earlier, I was told, he was a Trump supporter. And we sent our kids off to college, and they brainwashed ’em.

“I am making a plea to mothers: Do not send your children into these indoctrination camps,” Lake continued. “Don’t do it, do not do it!” 

But Robinson only attended Utah State University for one semester before taking a leave of absence, according to CNN. He never went back. 

In fact, Robinson was a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College—exactly the kind of trade school that Republicans are hoping more young Americans will attend.

Either Lake didn’t know that, or she didn’t care. “At one point, that 22-year-old was a baby in his mother’s arms,” she went on. “And by all accounts, they did a good job raising him until he was sent off to be brainwashed.”

Lake is among several other MAGA pundits who have blamed Kirk’s death on higher education, as a means of placing responsibility on the left.  

But if Robinson’s alleged bullet-casing manifestos are anything to go on, his radicalization had much more to do with memes from distant corners of the internet and video games than a university he didn’t attend for more than a couple of months.

Lake is just one of many Republicans using Kirk’s death to boost their own political agendas. She has been targeting education for years. During her failed gubernatorial campaign in 2022, she described schools as “factories to churn out deliberately mis-educated progressive activists.” Speaking at Kirk’s vigil, she lamented that Americans were “living through the most horrific brainwashing campaign in the history of mankind.” 

President Donald Trump won’t say whether he’s planning military action in Venezuela.

While speaking to reporters Sunday, Trump was asked whether he had plans to strike mainland Venezuela, amid ratcheting tensions with the South American nation.

“Well, we’ll see what happens,” Trump replied. “Look, Venezuela is sending us their gang members, their drug dealers, and drugs. That’s not acceptable.”

Earlier this month, the United States launched a deadly extrajudicial strike on a vessel the government claimed was smuggling drugs. Trump claimed that the strike was an act of “self defense,” although the boat had reportedly turned around by the time it was fired upon.

The Trump administration further attempted to justify sidestepping laws about executing suspected drug smugglers, recast as so-called “narco terrorists,” by claiming it was part of a broader campaign targeting cartels in Venezuela, raising concerns that further military action was imminent.

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil said Saturday that military personnel from a U.S. Navy destroyer boarded a fishing boat in Venezuelan waters for eight hours on Friday, in a “direct provocation” against the South American country.

In a rare interview with CNN, Gil said that Venezuela was not looking for a fight with the United States. “We are not betting on conflict, nor do we want conflict,” he said.

The National Guard’s time in Washington is nearly up—but the president doesn’t seem willing to let them go.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social late Sunday night, Donald Trump claimed that he was willing to call a national emergency to keep some 800 National Guard members in the nation’s capital. He blamed the potential overreach on an imagined variant of the city’s crime rate that he claimed could explode if federal immigration agents are not given free rein.

“The Federal Government, under my auspices as President of the United States of America, has stepped into the complete criminal mess that was Washington, D.C., our Nation’s Capital,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Because of this, D.C. has gone from one of the most dangerous and murder ridden cities in the U.S.A., and even around the World, to one of the safest—In just a few weeks.”

Trump used made-up crime stats to usher the National Guard into the city last month. In reality, violent crime has been on the decline in Washington since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, according to data from The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent—a figure from the Metropolitan Police Department that was hailed by FBI Director Kash Patel during one of Trump’s press conferences.

But the documented downward trend was not good fodder for Trump’s D.C. takeover. Late last month, the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed.

Whether the troops have actually made the city better is unclear. Crime is down, homeless encampments have been cleared, and hundreds of people accused of being in the country illegally have been detained by ICE, reported CNN. But tourism is also way down, restaurants are suffering, residents have sparked protests raging against the military occupation, and National Guard members have picked up hundreds of bags of trash—apparenly due to a lack of relevant work. But that version of Washington has seemingly not been witnessed by the big man in the White House.

“The ‘place’ is absolutely booming, with restaurants, stores, and businesses packed and, for the first time in decades, virtually NO CRIME,” Trump insisted. “It has been a beautiful thing to watch but, now, under pressure from the Radical Left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent criminal takeover of our Capital for years, has informed the Federal Government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens.

“If I allowed this to happen, CRIME would come roaring back,” Trump emphasized. “To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., DON’T WORRY, I AM WITH YOU, AND WON’T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN.

“I’ll call a National Emergency, and Federalize, if necessary!!!” he added.

Keeping the National Guard in Washington is not free—the crime crackdown is costing the country at least $1 million per day, according to early estimates.

As details began to surface about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, MAGA partisans online scapegoated the higher education system, which they claimed must have radicalized the alleged gunman.

Robinson was enrolled in an electrical apprenticeship through Dixie Technical College, and attended Utah State University for a single semester in 2021, according to the Utah System of Higher Education.

Nonetheless, some far-right influencers on Friday defaulted to the right-wing trope that universities are hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination.

Upon reports of Robinson’s connection to Utah State, for example, some users began posting purported evidence of left-wing influence at the school he attended only briefly—and which notably has a reputation for being among the most conservative in the country, per numerous online rankings.

“I’d like to know the names of the professors who radicalized this young man,” posted right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza on X. “I wonder if they too could be charged with abetting this political assassination.”

“Higher ed is a scam,” tweeted Katie Miller, a prominent MAGA figure and wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, in response to a post alleging Robinson was “brainwashed” at college.

“From a regular middle class family. Good grades. Went off to college. Became an extremist Antifa kiIIer,” wrote a popular right-wing X account with the display name “End Wokeness.”

“Tyler Robinson didn’t just ‘snap.’ He was manufactured,” a user with another sizable MAGA account posted. “Classrooms became factories. Professors became engineers. And out the other side comes another radical, programmed to hate.”

Pro-Trump commentator Joey Mannarino asserted that Robinson “was radicalized at college because colleges are liberal indoctrination centers.”

The baseless claims recall how, in the immediate wake of Wednesday’s shooting, even before anything was known about the suspected gunman—and despite widespread Democratic condemnations—MAGA Republicans sought to blame the entire left for Kirk’s death.

Ghislaine Maxwell has spent years attempting to distance herself from Jeffrey Epstein. 

Although she’s currently serving 20 years in the clink for recruiting and grooming women for Epstein’s sexual abuse, the well-connected British socialite has insisted that she too was a victim. Framing herself as a onetime girlfriend of the deceased child sex trafficker, Maxwell has tried to reposition her public image as his clueless former property manager, insisting that their relationship had corroded by 2008.

But 18,000 never-before-seen emails between the pair via one of Epstein’s personal Yahoo accounts tell a different tale, revealing that Maxwell was intimately intertwined in his vast sex-trafficking network, according to a sprawling new Bloomberg investigation. In 2008 alone, the criminal accomplices were sending at least two messages per day to one another.

The typo-ridden emails include a spreadsheet cataloging gifts to Epstein’s associates and victims—organized by Maxwell—as well as suggestions from the Oxford-educated media heiress on how Epstein could nurture his ties with the rich and powerful. The emails also document the couple debating consequential details relating to Epstein’s first brush with the law in 2004, when he fielded Maxwell’s opinion regarding his potential criminal charges.

“Question,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell on May 23, 2008. “Which one do you prefer … lewd and lscivious conduct … or procuring minors for prostituion.”

“I suppose Lewd and lecivious conduct … I would prefer lewd and lecivious conduct w/ a prositute if possible,” Maxwell replied.

All in all, the duo shared at least 650 messages, though there are indications that many emails in the larger trove—either between Epstein and Maxwell, or Epstein and others—were deleted, according to Bloomberg.

The breadth of their communications indicates a much closer connection between Maxwell and Epstein than either had publicly admitted. The emails show that after police raided Epstein’s home in 2005, Maxwell wrote him detailed instructions for a shared fertility procedure: “You can do the sample at home,” she wrote, noting that it “has to be within 90 mins of my procedure” and that “all the ejaculate must be collected.”

Their correspondence also reveals their attempts to strategize against their own whistleblowers: women who had raised allegations of sex abuse before Epstein’s crimes drew national attention. In one exchange, Maxwell said she planned to discredit one of the victims by spreading compromising information about her.

The larger cache of messages also paints a disturbingly vivid portrait of Epstein’s misconduct.   

“Details of his life, by turns mundane and chilling, emerge from the cache: He purchased more than 600 items on Amazon, including an FBI agent costume, teeth whitener, a leather bullwhip, a pair of size 12 Crocs, a prostate massager, girls school uniforms and a box of Nabisco Nilla Mini Wafers,” the article reads.

Read the entire article here.