The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Misinformation in real time

So as someone whose work is primarily concerned with epistemology - how we know things, why we believe them and so on - there is rarely a more frustrating occurrence in the news than a high profile murder. Everyone on the internet becomes Sherlock Holmes the moment that a gun goes off. It sucks complete shit. And no one is immune! People who step in to try and disprove misinformation frequently themselves fall for convenient and emotionally satisfying narratives and probably most upsettingly everyone starts telling on themselves. What people believe and repeat and spread speaks to their motivations, and sorry to say this pals, but most people’s motivations apparently suck complete shit.

Let’s start with the facts as we currently have them. Charlie Kirk was a 31 year old podcaster, author and political speaker who advocated for queer people to be beaten and stoned in the street, for women and children as young as 10 to be forced to carry pregnancies to term even if they were the product of rape, and for America to be a Christian theocracy. He called George Floyd, the black man famously murdered by Minneapolis police “a scumbag”, said that jews and black people were ruining America, and that public health measures were a Democrat plot against Christianity. He drew enormous numbers of young people into supporting Donald Trump and brought the youth wing of the MAGA movement to completely unexpected heights, ensuring that America’s political future without serious intervention will be cruel, selfish and fascist. He built a career on being loudly and smugly wrong and advocating for immense violence to be carried out against groups of people on a daily basis, and the fact that his death overshadowed a school shooting that happened at the same time, deaths of children that he said were “unfortunately necessary” to keep the 2nd amendment is a final fetid cherry on top of his entire legacy of filth and hatred. He was in short, a real piece of shit. A scumbag even. 

On September 10th 2025 Kirk was speaking at one of his regular college campus “prove me wrong” events in which he would encourage teenagers to argue with him about political issues and then use well practiced sophistry to avoid engaging meaningfully with the topic, when a single shot fired from about 200 feet away struck him in the neck. Kirk was taken to hospital and there died. 

The same day authorities began to identify videos showing the shooter on a rooftop nearby and collected impressions of the shooter’s shoes and palms. The next day a hunting rifle matching the ammunition used to kill Kirk was found in a wooded area near the campus and on September 12th the FBI showed in a press conference a video in which someone who is likely the shooter runs across the roof from the point where the shot was fired, climbs down the building and then crosses the road into the wooded area where the gun was found. Shortly after this, Trump appeared on Fox and Friends to say that he was pretty sure they’d caught the assassin and brushed off questions about the existence of right wing extremists.

Immediately following this the FBI held another press conference - sorry to speculate in the middle of a video about misinformation but I have to say this: Trump made them wait so he could get the scoop right? He wanted the numbers so he insisted on breaking the news first. That’s really what it looked like. Anyway, the FBI held another press conference saying that 22 year old Tyler Robinson had been turned into the authorities by his dad who claimed Tyler had confessed to him that he had been the shooter. They also stated that the bullets recovered with the gun had engravings on them. The fired casing read “notices bulge OwO what’s this?”, and the three unfired casings read “bella ciao” “hey fascist, catch! Up arrow, right arrow, thee down arrows” and “if you read this you’re gay lmao”.

So it’s been quite a ride so far, and as I write this Kirk was only shot 4 days ago.

And so, onto all the bullshit.

Within moments of the shooting the first incorrect narrative started to form, as regular and notorious Utah protester George Zinn was apprehended by the police. This was picked up and reported as a suspect in custody, but according to later reports this misinformation was largely down to the actions of Zinn himself, who witnesses claim started saying that he had shot Kirk almost immediately after the shot was fired.

After it was clarified that Zinn was not responsible and he was released, the manhunt began in earnest. In the few hours after with no information to latch onto, the online right started priming their audience for the narrative that the shooter would turn out to be transgender and a radical leftist.

On September 11th (Happy 9/11 everyone) the FBI released blurry footage stills of a person of interest to social media, asking the public for help, which prompted AI obsessed right wingers on Twitter to generate Bladerunner style zoom-and-enhanced potential portraits of the shooter. They asked their computer to hallucinate them a suspect.

Even with such a blurry image, there are certain elements that absolutely any human being would infer from this that the machine instead fucks up. That T-shirt for example - it’s pretty reasonable to guess the design is an American flag with an eagle over it, but AI thinks it is an abstract expressionist painting of the stars and stripes with alternately a gun, or just some shapes, or my personal favourite, outline of a guy flipping off the flag.

From the circulation of these pretend pictures, the right wing started finding trans women that they think look like what the AI thinks looks the blurry still of the guy who the FBI thinks might be the guy. Here for example Karen Lovejoy posts to twitter that she thinks the enhanced picture of the suspect wearing a Kandinsky painting is an absolute dead ringer for some trans woman who has said she doesn’t like Charlie Kirk before.

And here’s George Papadopolous, a man with 1.2 million twitter followers who received a Trump pardon for lying to the FBI, sharing it again with no indication that the suspect image had been altered or AI generated. This is just one example of many attempts to prove that the suspect is trans that was circulating within 24 hours of the shooting.

On the same day, Steven Crowder, a man so insecure he has to wear gun holsters to podcast, released a screenshot of what he alleged to be a memo from the ATF leaked to him by an ATF agent. The document claimed that the ammunition found in the gun used to assassinate Kirk had “pro-trans” and “antifascist” messaging engraved onto it. The Wall Street Journal and British newspaper the Telegraph reported on this repeating the claim to their audiences.

I’m just adding this because it’s funny - Steven Crowder also updated his twitter bio the DAY AFTER Kirk was shot from number 2 conservative podcast to number 1. Steven, I’m not sure Charlie was even cold yet that is just astonishingly callous and I’m saying that when I fucking hated the guy.

The next day a source from the ATF spoke to Reuters confirming that markings on the ammunition were currently under investigation, and an ATF agent speaking to the New York Times said that the claim about transgender and antifascist ideology was put out too hastily and may not be true. Following this, the WSJ has amended their article slightly but not officially retracted it, and the Telegraph included in their piece that the agent who spoke to the NYT had urged caution, but kept the headline “Charlie Kirk killer’s ammunition ‘engraved with pro-trans messages’“ the same.

This is irresponsible reporting which will put people in danger, and the problem with it is that until any further statements were made about the engravings, it was entirely unclear whether it was true. The strongest position for the left to argue from in response to this is that whoever killed Charlie Kirk, trans people are under constant attack in America and other countries and people like Kirk are responsible for immense violence. The material response is to organise to protect trans people and other marginalised communities from the violence that the right wing is aching to do and sees a justification to do in the killing. From the violence the right is already doing.

Instead of arguing this, the claims were met with a flat denial. Here we hit into misinformation affecting the other side of the Kirk assassination fiasco - misinformation on the left.

Someone on 4chan, truly a reliable source if ever I’ve seen one, found out that TRN is in the headstamp of some ammunition and concluded confidently and loudly that the investigators must have mistaken this for pro-trans engravings. TRN is the manufacturer’s mark for Turan, a Turkish company, and the ammunition reportedly used to kill Kirk was a 30-06 round, which Turan does not make. Still, this became a viral post for leftists and liberals across several social media sites almost instantly. This one is annoying to me because it has the cadence of an untrue thing that people would like to believe, y’know? Like when you hear that the etymology of a word is actually an acronym for a funny phrase - it’s not that it never happens but it’s not true as often as people like to claim.

It feels like people sharing this story around wanted to say that no leftist motivation could have been behind the assassination. I find this a bit peculiar. It seems to come from a fear that it would somehow legitimise the fascists’ desire to punish trans people or leftists as a group for the assassination, which hopefully is self-evidently untrue.

After the actual contents of the engravings was made public this story died off mostly, and as nice as it would be to believe this is because leftists are better at correcting misinformation in actuality it’s almost definitely because the spectacle was beaten out by a greater spectacle. It was funny. Notices bulge OwO what’s this.

In the day after the FBI press conference, somewhere on the online right someone found a picture of someone who looks like Robinson wearing a Salt Lake City DSA T-shirt. Investigators clarified publicly that they knew the identity of the person in the photo, which they were keeping private for the person’s safety, but that they were not Tyler Robinson. This of course had little to no chilling effect on the use of the image.

With Robinson in custody, the police began interviewing his relatives and others who knew him, which itself produced more back and forth over whether he was a leftist or a good republican boy or a Groyper Nick Fuentes fan. One person interviewed claimed that Tyler Robinson’s roommate who may be transfem was actually a romantic partner. At time of writing it is not clear if this is true.

The context around the shooting itself has exacerbated a lot of the dynamics of social information and misinformation. The FBI is arguably the most incompetent it has ever been, being currently led by Kash Patel, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who started a foundation to defend participants in the January 6th capitol riot, and Dan Bongino, a some-time employee of Alex Jones on InfoWars deeply, deeply involved in the development of “crisis actor” theories around the Sandy Hook shootings and the subsequent stalking and harassment of grieving parents of murdered children. The FBI is doing uh, not good.

When talking about conspiracy beliefs and how they develop it is always helpful to look at authorised knowledge and stigmatised knowledge. Neither kind of knowledge is inherently true or false, but authorised knowledge is backed up by widespread public belief, institutions such as academia, the state and investigative journalism, and ideally some sort of actual accessible and reproducible knowledge structure like sources, or experiments. But not always, right? Sometimes states ask us to believe in things that they can’t prove, like trickledown economics or the existence of Greenland. Stigmatised knowledge by contrast is everything else, from homeopathy to Stanley Kubrick’s Moon Landing film, but crucially, where some authorised knowledge in the mainstream is false, some stigmatised knowledge that exists only on the periphery of the informational world is true. The Watergate scandal is a great example of something that the state wanted to be secret until it was proven, moving from stigmatised to authorised knowledge through immense research and struggle. Nixon’s election rigging scheme remained true the whole time. For another example, the Iran-Contra affair went from conspiracy theory to matter of public record through extensive investigation and some insider disclosure, but the CIA flooding black neighbourhoods with crack cocaine remains widely considered a conspiracy theory even though it is part of the same story. That isn’t to say it’s true or untrue, just that it isn’t authorised knowledge.

The FBI heads being replaced by conspiracy theorists and most of the competent investigators being fired or quitting is really just a microcosm of a wider phenomenon, both caused by and causing the perpetuation of the social trend that it can be taken as a metonym for: the collapse of the mainstream, the disappearance of a distinct “authorised knowledge”. By building so much of their political project on conspiracy belief and the support of conspiracy theorists and bigots, the Trump administration made their victory a guaranteed cataclysm in the realm of human knowledge, because to enforce their beliefs and to hide everything that they find unflattering or inconvenient, they have had to turn the mainstream itself completely inside out.

So you have Steven Crowder alleging that an ATF agent sent him a memo that the bullets had “antifascist and pro-trans messages inscribed on them” and an ATF agent leaking information to a far right conspiracy theorist bigot is not a ridiculous claim because that’s the kind of people who are in charge of the FBI. Those are the kind of people in the government. That’s the kind of person that the President of the United States is. A fascist.

At the same time, it feels believable to many people that these goons would look at a manufacturing mark that says TRN and conclude it was a pro-trans message engraved on the bullet by the shooter.

At the same time the incompetence of the investigators, their willingness to share every new detail they find and their online-ness in general has also created a ripple in the already conspiracy riddled right wing informational ecosystem, leaving new gaps in knowledge by just dropping each new report or piece of evidence as they arrive, each new development itself giving an incomplete picture from which new stories evolve. 

There is a certain obvious sense in the idea that once the facts are out, what people speculated before that point becomes moot, but I still find myself fascinated by the speculations. It has become far less important in our current politics what facts actually turn out to be than what people can be made to believe they are in the first instant after a story breaks, as these beliefs sink into the collective unconscious, the half-remembered reality that is comforting and takes emotionally difficult direct confrontation to root out. 

And to be clear, the right has not simply absorbed this narrative passively in a half-remembered way. All the largest right wing social media accounts are giving nonstop fuel to the narrative that a transgender terror cell planned the assassination. The people living in this unreality are motivated by cruel and morally abhorrent aims and they are achieving those aims while we point and laugh at how silly they are. The fascist is dumb. Har har har. 

Remember that time they thought the bullet said “trans” on it? The fascist is so dumb. Har har har. It just said TRN because that’s the manufacturer.

When you see people so intensely using motivated reasoning it is incredibly naked what the motivations are. The right wing want to construct a reality where Robinson was driven by transgender antifa ideology so that they can punish the people they don’t like for a thing they’re mad about. They started making up a trans person to get mad at the moment the gun went off and have projected that shape onto various people since.

The motivations of leftists and liberals discussing this have also been laid bare by the things we have chosen to believe. From the moment Robinson’s identity was made known, people have been speculating that he’s a kind of online nazi meme pervert called a Groyper, and although it may still turn out to be true, this seemed borne out of a need not to believe that Charlie Kirk was shot by someone who didn’t like him because he was a fascist.

Political violence of this kind, direct physical violence, tends to come in waves and be directed towards groups or types of people. Solo actors who choose extreme violence like this rarely have a wholly coherent worldview, because most people don’t really have a coherent ideologically consistent worldview. This is why at time of writing the discourse around his politics has completely stalled out with the right insisting that him potentially having a trans roommate means this was the work of an elite trans terror cell and the left insisting if he was into online meme culture online he was definitely a nazi meme pervert. Guys, he chose to assassinate a podcaster, he was always most likely to be someone absolutely terminally online.

The interesting question here really is whether we’re starting to see a wave of political violence against elites and against the far-right regime. The high profile nature of attacks like this necessarily create a discourse around the person killed, and the flat refusal of most on the left to entertain the idea that the shooting was an action taken against Kirk’s fascist beliefs and career because it leaves us unable to talk about what it would mean if that were the case.

When this kind of discourse is happening it is frustrating to see the left freeze in place. Statistically, most shooters in America for a long time have been very far right, but to be perfectly honest since it happened I’ve been operating under the assumption that someone shot Charlie Kirk because he was a son of a bitch. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were leftist messages on the bullets, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter was left wing, because the most obvious motivation for the assassination is against the evil things that Kirk said and did. In insisting that the shooter must not be a leftist everyone is entirely unprepared for the possibility that they are. For years the American right wing has used every outbreak of political violence to push toward their goals and publicly shamed and denigrated every victim of political violence who was more marginalised or more left wing than Adolf Hitler.

In response to the assassination the left have been saying “it wasn’t a left wing shooter” “they’re going to use this as an excuse to persecute the left” and of course “har har the fascist is so dumb”. In the response to the assassination the right wing has been saying “Kill trans people. Kill trans people. Kill trans people. Kill trans people.” 

Misinformation is a strange term, right? We usually use it to mean individual claims and give what could fall into personal taste or opinion a bit of a pass, but from one point of view, the single biggest peddlers of misinformation since Kirk’s death have been the liberal establishment eulogising him as if he were some broad church moderate centrist who brought people together.

In the wake of the shooting it is unclear if the right wing attempts to springboard off it into a full scale anti-trans anti-leftist purge of the US will really get anywhere politically, and so instead the right has gleefully embraced cancel culture, using posts celebrating Kirk’s death as a basis to get people harassed or fired from their jobs. This sits at the intersection of the right wing desire to punish and the social media war over the narrative, an epistemic retribution whereby they try to make it impermissible to speak ill of Kirk at all.

We have been witnessing the canonisation of Charlie Kirk as a new conservative saint.

The policing of speech around his death has been used to punish in real material terms the people who have celebrated an end to the vile filth that was his career. 

Gretchen Felker-Martin, well known trans author was fired from DC Comics where she was in the process of writing a Red Hood book because in response to the news she posted “Thoughts and prayers nazi bitch” and “hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk.” This is obscene. Trans people in the US are trapped in the country by anti-trans border policing as the state attempts repeatedly to take away their healthcare, their basic rights to access public life and every shred of dignity they have, and Charlie Kirk bore a share of the responsibility for that. You may personally find it ugly to see anyone celebrating anyone’s death, but we live in ugly times because of people like him and at least some of the people most directly threatened by his politics are going to show that they are happy about this.
Elon Musk, clearly scared absolutely shitless by the concept of someone killing a fascist for being a fascist and then everyone being happy about it, has been using his wealth and his platform in service of the free speech purge. He has posted multiple lists of people’s full names and jobs in attempts to have people fired en masse for celebrating Kirk’s death.

To pretend he was a person worth mourning is to legitimise his hatred, and when MAGA people do that it makes sense, he was their boy, but when liberals do it they don’t seem to realise just how much damage they are doing. This wasn’t someone who was open to civil debate on controversial topics, this was someone who demanded that everyone treat him in a civil manner while he says fundamentally uncivil things about other human beings. This was someone who said that queer people were an abomination to god, someone who sent his followers to harass the daughter of George Floyd, whose murder he played the video of over and over again on his show, cracking jokes the whole time. If you are someone giving credence to the idea that it is wrong to express happiness at his death, consider how you would feel about me if I started playing the video of the assassination here over and over again and if I directed my followers to harass his wife and children. If I insisted that he didn’t actually die from an assassination but that the shooting was a bizarre coincidence and he actually suffered a fentanyl overdose. And now imagine that his wife and children aren’t millionaires surrounded by all the power and protection of the MAGA administration, that he hadn’t spent his life spewing evil, that there weren’t families being ripped apart by armed thugs as part of a political project he helped build.

This is an ambitious push for informational dominance by the Trump administration, because this isn’t just trying to change the content of the information shared but the structure of the information altogether. Hating Charlie Kirk couldn’t get you fired on September 9th. Free speech to these people has never meant a right to express different opinions, it has always been about their right to have their hateful, insecure and petty demands for the world taken seriously and enforced with boots and bullets. Now it means the right to incite endless violence upon minorities and face no consequences and the state-backed right to have people think of you as a reasonable moderate, protection from other people feeling happy that you are no longer a stain on our world. It is vital that we communicate to all the people trying their hardest to make it illegal to be glad the world is one fascist lighter, because their motivations are obvious. They want to know that however they live their lives they will be remembered positively. 

No.