On Thursday night and Friday morning, for several hours before 22-year-old cisgender white male Tyler Robinson was identified as the the man who shot Charlie Kirk, the worst parts of the internet did what they do best in these situations — they misidentified the shooter.
Simply put, the Right has decided in its wisdom that all mass shooters are trans people, so they can tar them as mentally ill threats to society; the Department of Justice has even floated taking all guns away … only from trans people. Domestic abusers can keep their weapons, because the Second Amendment is holy.
So when somebody is murdered in the street, these keyboard detectives wouldn’t dream of looking for the type of person who statistically does more than half of these crimes — a straight white man — but a trans person instead.
Keyboard detectives on those worst parts of the internet, 4Chan and X-the-site formerly-known-as-Twitter, misidentified the shooter as five entirely different people, several of whom they also misidentified as one another, putting their lives in danger. All of their names started trending on Xitter as legions of basement-dwelling sleazebags posted their digital murderboards comparing their “suspects’” ears, birthmarks, etc. and congratulating one another on their incredible detective work.
It wasn’t confined to social media, either. While US media steered clear, “articles” by foreign media fingered three main “suspects.”
The most egregious attacks were against a trans woman and musician from Utah who bore absolutely no resemblance to Robinson whatsoever. (Robinson’s picture had been released the day before.) Hundreds of tweets not only suggested that she might be the shooter or insisted that she was for sure the shooter, but that the FBI had identified her as the shooter.
Their primary piece of evidence — aside from the fact that she was trans, of course — was that her band had written a song presciently titled “Charlie Kirk Is Dead At 31” this year … and that they deleted it from their Soundcloud after he was shot, figuring that that was exactly what someone who knew ahead of time that he was going to be shot and also did not want to get caught would do.
Because on top of being monsters, they are also terrible detectives.
Another person misidentified as the shooter (and also misidentified as the previously mentioned trans woman) was a cisgender (cisgender just means “not trans”) Oklahoma man who had debated Kirk at one time and who, incredibly, also looked nothing like Tyler Robinson whatsoever. That man had to come forward on his own Tiktok to tell people to cut that shit out.
He wrote:
Hey, it’s me. Stone. Yes, I did debate Charlie Kirk, no, I didn’t kill him. Don’t even own a gun in fact; I’m not a sniveling coward afraid of immigrants. I live, work, and go to school in Oklahoma and NOW I have to go to the police tomorrow to have them validate my alibi and make a statement because you stupid internet “detectives” think yall done solved the case and post all my shit all over the internet. Wasn’t me. Go look somewhere else.
Still another suspect, who was misidentified as both of those other people, was a nonbinary Utah Valley University who also looked nothing like Tyler Robinson but had tweeted “Charlie Kirk is coming to my school and I really hope someone evaporates him literally” and “Let’s just say something big will happen tomorrow.” Which to be fair is a very stupid thing to put on the internet, and you shouldn’t do that!
Most of the “news” articles about these three were of the clickbaity “Who is _____ and why are they trending?” variety — mostly on India-based English-language sites like the Hindustan Times and India Times. However, one Israeli site went so far as to actually demand that the FBI question the cisgender man who was accused.
The site claimed that because he had suffered an “embarrassing defeat” in a “debate” against Charlie Kirk, and had lost his mother and brother in the past two years, that he was “raising suspicions among many on social media at this moment.”
If you look in the corner of the JFEED screencap, you will note that there is an article titled “Tyler Robinson Was Just Arrested For Charlie Kirk’s Murder” … featuring a picture of a young man who is, once again, clearly not Tyler Robinson. It is, however, a guy from the Salt Lake City Democratic Socialists of America who was misidentified by some as being the shooter before Tyler Robinson was caught, and then subsequently misidentified by social media users and some other foreign news sites as actually being Tyler Robinson. In fact, if you do a Google Lens search on the picture being shared of him, the Google AI thing identifies him as Tyler Robinson.
As you can imagine, many Xitter users were thrilled to bits to claim that Robinson was a member of the DSA, and eagerly shared videos of an entirely different Salt Lake City DSA member giving a speech on Labor Day in front of a Pride Flag.
Also, after Tyler Robinson was arrested, noted Twitter user and Elon Musk favorite “Catturd” went ahead and posted an image of the previously mentioned trans woman wearing a mask and a vest with a trans flag and a pride flag on them, and still not being Tyler Robinson.
“What are those flags?” he asked, insinuating that the person in the photo was Tyler Robinson.
Naturally, many of those who shared the memes are expressing deep contrition for having cruelly fucked with these people’s lives. Kidding! They are doing the exact opposite of that and saying it’s actually fine that they put people in danger because they don’t like the kind of people they are. There are also those saying they still believe the people they misidentified as the shooter actually were the shooter (and possibly all the same person) and Tyler Robinson is a patsy who may also be some of those other people.
These incredible detectives were not the only ones out there “misidentifying” the shooter. Many on the Right — including the President of the United States and multiple elected officials — spent the past several days claiming that the entire Left, including the milquetoastiest of moderates, is to blame for Charlie Kirk’s death. Why? Because we called him a Nazi and a fascist simply for espousing views curiously similar to those espoused by Nazis and fascists. They have been hysterically calling us violent despite the fact that they are the ones with the vibrant history of political violence and conveniently ignoring the fact that one of their own did a mass shooting in Colorado scant hours after Kirk’s shooting … as well as the legions of other examples of right-wing political violence.
As a result of their rhetoric, multiple HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) had to go on lockdown this week because of bomb threats. Which is, to be fair, a very apropos way to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy.
Right-wing podcast host Joey Mannarino was among many who called for declaring the Democratic Party a domestic terrorist organization and detaining all transgender people.
Congresswoman Nancy Mace, notably, had a bit of a breakdown about how the shooter was “a tr*nny, or pro-tr*nny,” suggesting that she, herself could be next, just because she wants to “protect women.” (Narrator: “She does not want to protect women.”)
She was ready for civil war! But once the shooter was identified as a white cisgender male who etched Groyper memes on his bullets? It was time for thoughts and prayers.
She did not, in case you are wondering, apologize to the trans people and allies she falsely accused. So far, it’s been nothing but crickets from those who, literally just yesterday, were talking about how they must destroy us all.
We still don’t know the full picture of Robinson’s politics and motivations, but evidence that he is actually a far-right “Groyper” — basically, a neo-Nazi-ish, irony-poisoned nihilist follower of Nick Fuentes, those guys you used to see posting the “Pepe the Frog” memes and who had an intense longrunning beef with Charlie Kirk specifically — has been piling up. If this turns out to be the case, the Right is going to decide that his politics don’t matter and that he’s simply mentally ill, and they will never, ever talk about him again. Or they’ll talk about their new ballrooms. But we cannot just let this go. The narrative must be that (elected) Democrats initially tried to be ever-so-gracious about the death of their favorite hatemonger (and they did), and conservatives went batshit, falsely accusing random Americans, putting their information online and endangering their lives; calling for civil war against us us all; calling for people to be detained; trying to paint trans people as violent and dangerous in order to justify detaining them … and all before anyone even knew who he was or why he did what he did.
Why must that be the narrative? Because it’s the goddamned truth.
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