The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.

One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”

“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.

In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.

Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.

A Justice Department spokesperson said, “The investigation is ongoing and beyond that we decline to comment.”

    • Zephorah@discuss.online
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      27 days ago

      No. The right has decided and they’re banded together on this, at least among the people in my circles I still talk to.

      “I’m all out of grace for the left.”

      “You fascist, hate filled leftists have crossed the line this time. We’re done.”

      “We’re past dialogue with you people.”

      Catch the running theme? It’s likely what the pundits are pushing as the narrative, I’ve been too busy and too tired to listen in this week, so I don’t know.

      And neither do they. But someone on the perception management team over there seems ready to give marching orders.

      So yeah, as you say, it likely doesn’t matter.

  • y0kai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    27 days ago

    He’s a shadow recruit of George Soros, who is incredibly rich with $7 billion, which is a lot more than Elon Musk’s paltry $429 billion and why he’s so much more effective than poor, sensible, people like Musk at influencing politics and must be stopped. /j

  • fox2263@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    “Yet”

    The investigation will continue until we have completed the manufacturing process.

      • fox2263@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        While the real suspect lives a new life. 👀

        If you believe that sort of thing that is

        • cynar@lemmy.world
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          27 days ago

          Not quite.

          Yet implies they expect to.

          Thus far is more neutral, erring towards not expecting to find anything.

          • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe
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            26 days ago

            “Thus far” means “up to this point in time”.

            It is neutral about anything in the future, yes, because it is avoiding making any commentary on it. But it is NOT “erring towards not expecting to find anything”

            It is explicitly not predicting any outcome positive or negative. No expectation of any kind.

            It states what the communicator believes are the facts to date with ZERO speculation about the future

            • cynar@lemmy.world
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              26 days ago

              It implies the trend is likely to continue. That the searched areas and the unsearched areas are nominally the same.

              E.g. An inspector saying they have found 20 problems, this far, while 50% finished implies they expect to find 40ish overall.

              Finding zero problems thus far implies you are not expecting to find many/any, if the trend continues.

    • 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org
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      27 days ago

      I’m sure they are looking for some sense of organization, a group that they can define and eliminate. That’s not going to happen. Read “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.” This is a leaderless movement where the rhetoric of some inspires others to violence without there being any material connection between the two. It’ll increase and it won’t stop so long as the conditions continue and so long as these don’t morph into an organization with leadership.

      • Jaysyn@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        Exactly. It’s not an organized group. It’s just people that still have their moral compass intact.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
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          27 days ago

          I wouldn’t assume the Kirk shooter has anything particularly “intact”. He seemed to enjoy the right wing meme stuff more and treated the killing more like a shit post that any ideological stand.

          As a target, Charlie Kirk was actually a pretty terrible choice. He has no real power, and even in terms of influence I’d say he was a bit removed from any directly influential circle. He said vile stuff but say least he did actually let others get a fair share of his stage in his engagements. May have just been for the heightened engagement for content, but either way at least he let things play out in ways that the left could enjoy him getting owned by good points to his face, instead of settling for “reaction videos”.

          • Jaysyn@lemmy.world
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            27 days ago

            I’m not talking about him, I don’t see any reason to consider him a member of antifa or the “left” at all. I’ve even read that a subset of groypers have a fetish for femboys. Hell, his Steam username was DonaldTrump according to Kotaku. No progressive I know would want to associate with that scumbag, even ironically.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        27 days ago

        None of these shooters are left wing though. It’s not like the only thing the administration is wrong about is their level of organisation. The premise that there is a left-wing extremism problem is completely false. They’re trying to pin all this violence on completely the wrong people so that they can ramp up their persecution of trans people and anti-fascists.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        It’s not just that he wasn’t actually “organized” with a left wing group, it’s that even as they go fishing they can’t even find credible evidence of significant leftist influence at all.

        He wasn’t organized with anyone, and the only whiff of influence they seem to have found was playing with right wing shit post fodder. They haven’t indicating finding any sort of “militant” influence at all.

        It seems that he just kind of broke on his own, with his gun friendly upbringing escalating that to a supremely high profile assassination out of nowhere.

        Now they can certainly find leftists celebrating Kirk’s death a bit tastelessly much and they are mad as hell about that all on its own but the actual killing seems to be nihilist violent extremism. They have a good reason to be concerned that obviously tensions are tight enough to have these things pop off. Bernie Sanders certainly seems to understand that and put forward an inclusive message about victims on both sides and for at least some unifying response from both sides.

        However the biggest blowhards on the right seen to be doubling down and escalating rhetoric, which is the last thing the situation needs.

  • rafoix@lemmy.zip
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    27 days ago

    lol It’s so obvious that they’re starting this investigation with a “conclusion” and they’re trying really hard to make it fit.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      I’m just shocked that despite that, they seem to actually at some level be admitting the evidence doesn’t fit the narrative. I would have fully expected them to try, fail, then just make something up without ever making a peep that the narrative may have been off.

          • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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            27 days ago

            Lmao did you happen to see the president’s speech right after it happened (not to mention the sentiment of basically his entire cabinet)? Are you honestly saying him and his cabal didn’t already pin this on a particular group of people before looking at any actual evidence or even waiting for there to be any actual evidence?

  • Gaja0@lemmy.zip
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    27 days ago

    Bro he has 2 discord messages in like 4 years and they read like ‘trump might get impeached’ and ‘it looks like trump is in the lead’ on election night.

    Is there some line where it’s acceptable to start murdering oppressors? No one would argue against jews murdering their nazi oppressers, but bisexual murdering homophobic stochastic terrorists? How much must one endure before being permitted to act in favor of their own survival?

    • lowleekun@ani.social
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      27 days ago

      Looking at how the palestinians have been treated and our reaction to their resistance shows people need to endure their complete extermination before the oppressors accept acts of defense.

      The right knows full well that they openly cheer on terror acts from the right but they pretend to value the same ethics. They don’t and we should not give them the benefit of the doubt. We should stand to what we say. It is time to take back the narrative.

      Charlie Kirks killing was by no means a tradgedy and i will refuse to be sorry for such a dick reaping the hate he sowed while innocents are getting bombed with the very weapons we supply.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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    27 days ago

    What leftwing groups or even prominent individuals in the US with any actual following advocate for political assassinations and direct violence against rightwing people they don’t like? Where are all the lefties supposedly making calls to violence and terrorism?

    The media and even a lot of people here will flip a shit about someone like Hasan Piker being so radical and yet if he even remotely said something like “maybe we should just start shooting rightwing media figures” an overwhelmingly massive chunk of Hasan’s audience would tell him to fuck off and cause an uproar because that clashes with the basic foundational ideologies of leftwing movements in the US, they are about obtaining a state of freedom for all, the idea of targeted violence has little salience to a US leftist as we are well aware that 1. senseless violence doesn’t change anything, it will not lead to freedom for all, it just makes it worse. 2. the ruling class in the US will jump at any chance to radically villainize the left, the bulk of the country will blindly follow along in this, thus random senseless acts of violence aren’t just bad because they are evil they actually existentially threaten leftwing movements in the US as a whole, leftists in the US are WELL aware of this…

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      If he had actually gotten connected with any decent left wing group - instead of just being stuck mostly alone in Utah to stew with his (totally understandable) anger at the things Kirk was saying - that group probably would have told him something like “bro, chill, shooting people is only going to make shit worse for everybody we care about, now wash these dishes instead so we can open the soup kitchen on time tonight, we got hungry neighbors”

  • Zephorah@discuss.online
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    27 days ago

    The reality is people are messy. They don’t typically fit into neatly defined boxes and neither do their politics, even when given a forced choice in a duopoly every 4 years.

    What we know so far. He’s from a conservative Christian family and was raised such that he knew how to use that family rifle and make that difficult shot. And he may be gay with a maybe gay or trans partner, it’s all very mysterious. And the reporting on his politics are flip floppy. No neat box there.

    And the engravings, if the article I read today is to be believed, they reference a meme and Helldivers 2? Some inside joke about nuke dropping or something. ??? Was this half LARP for him, hence the disengaged texts afterwards?? Who knows.

    There’s no neat and tidy here, no matter how much the perception management brigade wants it to be so.

  • grte@lemmy.ca
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    27 days ago

    I’m sure the guy who modified a hurricane path map with a sharpie wouldn’t cook up the result he wants on this.

  • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    Here is what we know for sure about the shooter’s politics. His entire childhood, he was raised right wing. He even dressed up as Trump for Halloween a year or two ago.

    Unless he specifically joined a group that promotes violence, there is simply no reason to think that his violence came from anything but his childhood.

    So, even if it was hypothetically true, what MAGA has been saying, that he had recently been dating a trans woman, and his politics had changed, even if that hypothetical was true, it would just mean that his conservative upbringing that glorified violence got a different target.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      He even dressed up as Trump for Halloween a year or two ago.

      Well if you want to dress up as something scary…

    • drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      He started leaning left at some point.

      Look, we need to accept that he was probably a liberal. It changes nothing, no one loses or gains the moral high ground with nazis and everything this administration is doing is shit they planned for. It might even be better this way then the slow trickle that they would have gone with otherwise because that is easy to distract from.

      The first shots where fired every time an lbgtq person was the victim of a hate crime at the hands of one of Kirks followers.

  • blattrules@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    They’ve already spread the message that he is and they’re not known to retract anything, just double down if they’re proven wrong, so they’ve already done their damage. It doesn’t matter what the investigation finds.