BY ED FELIEN
At first I thought, like everyone else, it must have been someone from the left who killed Charlie Kirk.
Kirk had said things like: Black women shouldn’t be political leaders because they don’t have the “brain processing power”; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake”; Islam is a “sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”; gay and transgender people should be “stoned to death”; women should submit to their husbands according to the “biblical model”; Israel is justified in its genocidal war in Gaza because “Palestine does not exist”; and, at the same time, “Jewish people” control colleges, non-profits and the media in the U S.
I thought there couldn’t be anyone or any group farther right than Charlie Kirk. Then I learned about the Groypers and the Groyper Wars. Groypers take their meme (the image and name they call themselves) from a cartoon character, Pepe the frog—a masculinist caricature who enjoys urinating and saying, “It feels good, man!”
They are unashamedly white Christian Nationalists, and they believe Charlie Kirk was too liberal. The originator and leader of the group is Nick Fuentes. In 2019 he ordered his followers to go to Question and Answer events held by conservatives, and he especially targeted Kirk. Groypers would heckle crowd-goers and scream homophobic and anti-Semitic questions and insults.
Fuentes and the Groypers were banned from Turning Point USA events and from the Conservative Political Action Conference. Fuentes set up his own America First Political Action Conference in 2020 featuring speakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Tyler Robinson in a groyper pose. Was he a part of the movement?
In August of 2024, Fuentes declared a Second Groyper War to pressure Trump to move further right. He replied to one of Trump’s tweets on X with an__anti-immigration rant. He asked his supporters to like and re-tweet the post. He got 52,000 responses in support.
Was Tyler Robinson part of this movement?
His family thought he was turning left-wing because of his criticism of Trump and Kirk, but they probably believed any criticism of Trump or Kirk would have to come from the left.
Tyler was an ardent gamer and a big fan of Call of Duty—a military game where you got big points for killing your enemies. His father was a Sheriff, and the family loved playing with guns. His mother once posted a photo of his brother on Facebook, describing him as a “gun toting, cowboy loving brilliant kid.” The kid was holding a scoped rifle.
On Halloween in 2018, at the beginning of the Groyper movement, Tyler’s mother posted a photo of Tyler with the caption: “Happy 
Halloween! Handing out Candy alone because these weirdos ditched me! Tyler is some guy from a meme.” The track suit seems the same as the one worn by Pepe in a common image.
After shooting Kirk, Tyler went home and confessed his crime to his father. His father wanted him to turn himself in. Tyler didn’t want to. The dad called in a neighbor Deputy Sheriff and a Mormon Youth Minister, and the minister convinced Tyler to turn himself in to the authorities.
None of these instances are conclusive evidence of a Groyper or right-wing ideology, but they hardly seem the actions of a crazed leftist.
Certainly, Nick Fuentes is concerned: “My followers and I are currently being framed for the murder of Charlie Kirk by the mainstream media based on literally zero evidence,” and “To all of my followers: if you take up arms, I disavow you. I disown you in the strongest possible terms.”
I thought that summed up a reasonable explanation.
I was so pleased with my analysis, I shared it with my wife.
She said, “It sounds like a domestic.”
I thought to myself, “Where did she get that idea?”
She and another woman started the first women’s studies program in Minnesota at Minneapolis Community College forty years ago. Nearly nine out of ten murders of women are a result of a domestic argument.
But I couldn’t see the connection.
Then the text messages between Tyler and his transitioning to female roommate/lover became public. The roommate asks him why he did it. Tyler replied, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Charlie Kirk had quoted Leviticus when he said, those who “lay with another man shall be stoned to death.”
He had also said that transgender people should be “dealt with the way we did in the 1950s and 60s”—which meant a lobotomy, shock treatment or involuntary institutionalization.
Tyler was defending his lover in much the same way the cowboy hero defends the honor of the woman he loved.
Tyler Robinson’s rage against Charlie Kirk and his Old Testament pronouncements echoed the rage Robin Westman felt against the Catholic Church in his horrendous murder of children praying at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis two weeks earlier.
We can continue to condemn these troubled young men to eternal damnation, and they will spring from hell like tormented demons and seek vengeance, or we can try to love and comfort them. The fruits of love will be better for all of us than a harvest of fear and hatred.
