FishFace

That most people who would describe themselves as being on the left in America, are solidly right wing.

In the conversation about the political alignment and possible motivations of the killer, this is not a useful perspective.

When Trump and his cronies try to stoke political violence by blaming it on "antifa" and "the left" or "the woke mob" or whatever they're saying these days, it doesn't matter if, by your rarefied and educated judgement, the people they're talking about are actually on the right.

When Lemmy and Reddit and Tumblr and wherever else argue over where Robinson falls on the political scale they're not doing it according to some objective scale, but according to the relative scale of the current American Overton Window, because politics in the USA is two parties, and if you can blame a murder definitively on The Other Team then that's a point for Your Team.

If you don't want to engage in that, then join me in condemning what other people in this thread are clearly doing. Don't defend people saying that Robinson was right wing by saying "I wouldn't trust his own mother or, for that matter, Robinson himself, to tell me his political leanings." That's absurd.

Did he make a lot of new friends and hang out with people who actually were leftist. (Openly anarchist, socialist, even ML would be acceptable and damning) Was he ever publicly known to possess or talk about a literature written by Marx, Engels, or other similar figures? Did he suddenly start talking often in favor of workers’ rights? The left doesn’t have a monopoly on social safety nets. But we can’t even point to him speaking positively about them. Was he in an anarchist reading group?

This isn't really a different point from above, but a fair bar, a relevant bar would be: did he broadly approve of Biden?

Biden is a long way from Marx, but he's the "left" that's relevant. If it had turned out that Robinson voted for Biden, I'm sure you understand that describing him here, in this thread as a "right wing killer" or "right winger MAGA" would be straight up bullshit.

You’re not wrong that caution is advised. Caution is advised to never repeat the words of a fascist or any other authoritarian. Or give them credence that they might be factual or in good faith.

Woe betide he who fails to check the political affiliation of his chosen weather presenter lest he accidentally believe the fascist propaganda that there is a fourty percent chance of rain.

It was what, something close to 3x as likely for such murders to have no clear political motivation. And close to 7x more likely for them to be right wing.

Right, but this is all probabilistic, not definitive. The person I replied to was defending the labelling of the killer as right wing - which was done in a definitive way. And the offered defence was not definitive.

Oh, is she someone known for being educated on that subject. Or just another right wing maga indoctrinate, repeating the propaganda they’ve been told. Left and Right are about economics. Not lgbtetc. You can and many are quietly pro lgbt for themselves, while hypocritically being right wing.

I wonder then what you would take, at this stage, of evidence that the killer was left wing, if not the testimony of his mother?

This is the crux of my point: a bunch of people here, including you, have an incredibly high bar to believe that he's left wing and, it seems, a pretty low bar to believe that he's right wing. Now, it's not that your point here is way off or anything - parents can get things wrong, there are nuances to what side of the political divide you end up on (I wouldn't say "left vs right is about economics" because in the US as in many countries economic and social issues end up being bound up together) and these are sound reasons to be cautious about such a conclusion.

But that caution applies at least as much to claims that he's a right winger. You don't seem as confident in that as the person above did, which is good - but then, I was replying to them.

Yes, yes, yes, and also trying to scare European countries into not supporting Ukraine, either out of fear for further angering Russia, or fear that they need their equipment closer to home.

Solved his issue the maga way.

It sounds like you're pretty sure that anyone who carries out a political assassination is right-wing by default, so maybe you don't have the most open mind on this.

His mother described him as moving to the left and becoming pro-LGBT rights.

It seems to me that the most likely motivation - such as we can judge it at this early stage - is that the killer became uncomfortable with the hatred of trans people shown by Charlie Kirk (and much of the American right).

If that's the case then saying "it was a right wing MAGA" is wrong and misleading. There might also be a component where a right-wing upbringing makes you more likely to kill even if you subsequently become left leaning on things, but that's not what people in this thread are saying.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/charlie-kirk-shooting-prosecutor-utah

His mother said he became concerned with LGBT rights and "radicalised and isolated".

So no, they don't say he was a "liberal outcast" but interpreting that as "he was in a MAGA family and there's no other evidence around" is clearly horseshit.

The simple answer to the question is that we don't know the shooter's views.

Its interesting how people are dogpiling this person in the name of “freedom of speech”…because they don’t like what he said?

To be clear, they don't like that he's threatening to ban people from somewhere over speech. That is, first of all, not mere speech - that's an action they're threatening to take.

Second, it's not some kind of gotcha or contradiction that some speech might be disapproved of in the defence of free speech. You might espouse the principle of peacefulness, yet no-one would suggest that responding violently in self-defence was in contradiction to that. Being in favour of free speech doesn't mean being in favour of all speech; many and varying exceptions are made, for example for hate speech, threatening speech or indeed speech which has the effect of restricting or chilling the speech of others. And we're not talking about a violent or legal response here but rather dogpiling - and while that does chill speech in general, it's not on the same level so deservedly has a lower bar.

Pointing out the hypocrisy is not supposed to suddenly convince the actual fascists that they're wrong, it's to convince the people they've duped into following them that they're both wrong and evil.

So now he cares about such principles...

How about this (not OP): most things people attribute to planned obsolescence are not planned obsolescence.

SSL operates after name resolution. It's one way that information about your browsing habits is not protected by application-layer encryption; the domains you're visiting are available to your DNS server.