What Leaked Messages Reveal About Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Shooter

Friends and family of Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin, say that the national narrative has not aligned with what they know about the 22-year-old from Utah.

Speaking with independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, Robinson’s friends described him as smart, friendly, and largely uninterested in politics—a detail that has made the shooting all the more difficult for them to understand.

“I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part,” one of Robinson’s friends told Klippenstein under the banner of anonymity. “That’s the big thing, he just never really talked politics which is why it’s so frustrating.”

The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have thus far painted Robinson as an antifa (antifascist) agent, while left-wing verticals have portrayed him as a member of the far right. But close confidants say that neither is wholly accurate: Robinson held complicated, bipartisan views.

“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” the friend said.

And although Robinson’s MAGA family have been giving sound bites to the press, there was a lot that Robinson’s family didn’t know about him, according to his friends. Case in point: his bisexuality, and his relationship with his roommate, a transgender person named Lance.

Even Lance was caught off guard by Robinson’s act, according to text messages that the two exchanged after Kirk was shot. The texts were published as part of Robinson’s criminal charges. When pressed as to why he murdered Kirk, Robinson told his partner: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Robinson said he had planned the assassination for a little over a week, and added that the etched engravings on his bullet casings—which refer to a couple of popular video games—were “mostly a big meme” that he thought would be amusing to see discussed on Fox News.

Robinson had a “stone cold poker face” and could be “super hard to read,” another friend told Klippenstein. Those close to Robinson didn’t believe he was hiding anything from them. “As far as we knew he was opened up,” the second friend said.

No one could have envisioned that Robinson, a well-liked straight-A student, would be capable of or even interested in killing Kirk.

“To all of us he just seemed like a simple guy who liked playing games like Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2, loved to fish and loved to camp,” the second friend said. “It really did seem like that’s all he was about.”

Robinson turned himself in to authorities on Friday. He was charged Tuesday with aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, and obstruction of justice, among other charges. Prosecutors announced that they are seeking the death penalty in the case.

404 Media has reported that in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump’s Justice Department deleted a study from its website stating that right-wing violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. This comes as the Trump  administration and Republicans generally blame political violence solely on the left.

The study was available online at least until Friday, according to 404 Media, but can now only be found via a Wayback Machine link. 

The study, published in 2024 and conducted by the National Institute of Justice, is titled, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism.” The first words are: “Militant, nationalistic, violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study noted. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

It’s highly likely that the DOJ took this study down because it doesn’t fit with the narrative the GOP is trying so desperately to push about the left being to blame for the bulk of political violence in this country, willfully ignoring countless examples of that not being the case at all.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun wants state legislators to get moving on approving a new congressional district map, to spare them from President Donald Trump’s wrath. 

Speaking on Fort Wayne’s WOWO radio Monday, Braun floated the idea of lawmakers returning for a special session in November, to scrounge up extra GOP seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

“If we try to drag our feet as a state on it, probably, we’ll have consequences of not working with the Trump administration as tightly as we should,” he said.  

Braun is the only lawmaker in Indiana with the authority to call a special session in November. Special sessions are historically pretty expensive for taxpayers. If Braun doesn’t call a special session, Republicans’ redistricting efforts would have to wait until the next session begins in January 2026. 

Braun said Tuesday that he preferred to start working “earlier rather than later,” or “anytime from early November through the very earliest part” of the next legislative session. 

“All I’m telling you is that we’re going to look at [the current maps], we’re going to poll our legislators, and if it’s there, we’re going to do it,” he continued. “My feeling is it probably will happen,” he said. 

The Trump administration has previously urged Indiana to follow the lead of other states’ redistricting efforts, and deliver Trump one or two additional Republican House seats. In August, Vice President JD Vance visited with more than 55 Republicans at the Indiana state House, pressing them to approve a new map, and Trump met privately with the Republican heads of the Indiana House and Senate in the Oval Office.

In Texas, Republican state legislators passed a new congressional map that could help the GOP gain five more seats in the House of Representatives—launching a mirrored initiative in California for the Democrats. Earlier this month, Trump personally bullied Missouri lawmakers to approve a freshly gerrymandered map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City. Republican lawmakers in Kansas, Ohio, and Florida are also considering taking up redistricting efforts in their states, as well as Democrats in Illinois and Maryland. 

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday seemed to throw a sidelong barb at Attorney General Pam Bondi for foolishly suggesting the existence of a “hate speech” exception to free speech.

As the far right wages an ongoing crusade against people accused of mocking slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Bondi said on a Monday podcast that “hate speech” is not free speech. The Department of Justice, she vowed, will “target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

The sentiment was widely criticized, including by MAGA commentators, for undermining the First Amendment. Bondi attempted to walk back her statement on Tuesday.

During a Tuesday morning panel at New York Law School, Sotomayor seemingly took aim at Bondi but did not mention the attorney general by name.

“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed,” the liberal justice reportedly said. “If any student who becomes a lawyer hasn’t been taught civics, then that law school has failed,” she added. “Because it is for that system that you’re working as a lawyer.”

Sotomayor also raised concerns about people’s awareness, or lack thereof, of constraints on the power of the executive branch—evidently referencing Donald Trump, without mentioning him by name, either.

“Do we understand what the difference is between a king and a president?” Sotomayor said (a distinction that was blurred by the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling on presidential immunity in United States v. Trump, as she warned in her dissent at the time). “I think if people understood these things from the beginning, they would be more informed as to what would be important in a democracy.”

FBI Director Kash Patel is apparently not making child sex predators a priority at the bureau.

Patel finished his latest—and potentially last—hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee kicking and screaming Tuesday, raising his voice to Senator Adam Schiff after the lawmaker questioned the recent transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison in Texas.

Schiff pointed out that the facility was “not suitable for a sex offender” and that Maxwell’s transfer had been arranged after she provided testimony to federal authorities, including members of the FBI.

“Who made that decision and why?” asked Schiff.

Patel responded hastily: “The Bureau of Prisons.”

“The Bureau of Prisons decided on their own—without any consultation from [Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche or anyone else—that they were going to suddenly after this interview, completely unrelated to this interview, completely unrelated to anything she said, move her to a prison not suitable for a sex offender?” pressed Schiff. “Do you want the American people to believe that? Do you think they’re stupid?”

“No, I think the American people believe the truth, that I’m not in the weeds on the everyday movements of inmates,” Patel said, referring to the longtime associate and girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein, who on her own stands as one of the most notorious child sex offenders of the century. “What I am doing is protecting this country, providing historic reform and combating the weaponization of intelligence by the likes of you, and we have countlessly proven you to be a liar in Russiagate, in January 6.”

That’s when Patel turned up the temperature.

“You are the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate,” Patel yelled, calling Schiff’s political career a “charade.”

“You are a disgrace to this institution and an utter coward,” he told Schiff. “You are a political buffoon, at best.”

Schiff, however, was willing to throw it back.

“You can make an internet troll the FBI director, but [you] will always be nothing more than an internet troll,” Schiff said as the pair spoke over one another.

The exchange concluded with a final word from Patel, though his dismissive attitude toward the topic of Maxwell’s incarceration didn’t paint a pretty picture for the podcaster’s apparently hyperpartisan priorities.

“All you care about is a child sex predator that was prosecuted by a prior administration,” Patel said. “And the Obama Justice Department and the Biden Justice Department did squat. And what did President Trump do? Bring new charges, courageously.”

Patel’s disinterest in catching child predators stretches far beyond a quick beef in the annals of Congress. Instead, there appears to be a top-down transformation at the agency influenced by Patel’s personal ideology: Just about every agent on the FBI’s Baltimore domestic terrorism squad was directed to refocus their attention on detaining immigrants, forcing agents to pause investigations into violent child predators and pedophilia networks, MSNBC reported Tuesday.