Don’t project your lifestyle agendas onto Tyler Robinson

Charlie Kirk, conservative commentator and essential piece of the Trumpworld media ecosystem, is dead, allegedly at the hands of an individual whose inner life has, needlessly, been the subject of conservative speculation for the past few days. Seemingly, every faction of the American right has their own explanation as to how this young man might have been inspired to commit such an atrocity. Many of these are myopic but perhaps have a kernel of truth to them. Others are plainly wrong. The worst of them play right into the hands of the left, and deserve serious reconsideration.

Details about Tyler Robinson, the suspected gunman, continue to pour in. He was an apparently accomplished academic student (that is, until he dropped out of college and enrolled in vocational school) and had a live-in transgender lover, but besides this biographical details are sparse. He is consistently described by former classmates and teachers as respectful, somewhat quiet, and intelligent. The worst that’s said of him is that he is socially awkward, but the man exhibited no behaviors that would indicate any particular mental malaise or sociopathy. In this way, Robinson becomes a blank slate for agenda-pushing conservatives to depict as their “problem child,” representative of whatever social ill they tend to fixate on.

One narrative circulating among the American right is the idea that Robinson was radicalized by his time at university. It is not wrong to identify America’s colleges and universities as militantly left-wing institutions. The ideological bent of college professors needs no introduction. Even still, I find the suggestion that Robinson’s apparent journey towards left-wing extremism was spurred on by his time at school misguided.

For one, Robinson had only attended a single semester of college. Afterwards, he dropped out and attended trade school with the goal of becoming an electrician. It’s hard to imagine Robinson as being set on his path by higher education, only to abandon it so swiftly and commit himself to a less ideological and far more prosaic vocational course.

Additionally, violent, militant leftists are rarely created from scratch in America’s higher educational institutions. The solitary focus on college and university takes some much warranted heat off of K-12 education, itself perfectly capable of churning out dogmatic leftists, as anybody involved in their high school’s debate club could surely tell you. Mostly, the conservative stock character of the college liberal is not someone who experienced an epiphany upon going away to school, but is instead one who, after a decade and a half of essentially leftist moral schooling, finds an opportunity to express themselves ideologically in a less consequential environment. If Robinson’s radicalization could be attributed to education, it ought to be blamed on American primary and secondary schools, whose curricula regardless of geographic location are as woke as it gets.

So surely, then, the shooter’s leftism was, in fact, an expression of anomie brought on by thousands of hours spent gaming and browsing the internet? Conservatives would do well not to fall into this trap either. It’s much to the advantage of leftists that conservatives, informed by their own parochial contempt for the youth, try to identify Robinson as a “school shooter” type, a wayward young man who needed his controllers and keyboards locked away for his own good.

The freedom of Americans, particularly the young, to associate and network beyond the confines of their family and immediate community ought to be protected by conservatives – not just on principle, but because we owe so many of our victories to it. Modern American conservatism draws nearly its entire vocabulary and rhetorical arsenal from right-wing online spaces, old and new. In fact, the new and popular conservatism that has materialized around Trump traces a far, far larger component of its genealogy to these places than it does to, say, “postliberal” thinkers like Oren Cass.

The characters pushing the nihilistic school shooter narrative are, by and large, those left behind by the right’s current dynamism, seeking to rein it back in, forcing it into a form they’re more comfortable operating within. This cannot be allowed to happen. The problem of left-wing bias in the media, in education at all levels, and even in most hobbyist circles remains. The right has an unofficial mastery over the internet, and it’s the only channel with this distinction. Indeed, many of the brightest pro-Trump and pro-American minds I’ve known are people who, being intelligent and critical enough to identify the leftism in everything young people interface with, made their home online in order to network with likeminded figures. To surrender this would be a critical error.

What motivated Robinson was an overwhelmingly woke, anti-white, and anti-male social climate in contemporary America. Robinson himself was either too small-minded or poorly constituted in spirit to dissent from this, and instead chose to embrace the ideology he’s been passively absorbing throughout his entire waking life, and – if the allegations against him are true – followed it to its natural conclusion. Education and an internet censored and tyrannized by leftists are contributors to this environment, among many others. However, sole blame is not attributable to either component, and right-wing voices looking to elevate their own cultural hobby horse to the status of an omni-cause should forbear.

The track the administration is taking, on the other hand, seems to recognize the stakes. Stephen Miller, as usual, appears to understand how broad the scope of any measures taken to crush radical leftism will have to be. Bringing up RICO charges against George Soros and other financiers and designating antifa a terrorist organization are great starts. Increased efforts to de-wokify education at all levels are welcome. Effective online measures – forcing Google and other tech companies to stop silencing right-wingers – would be too. But to blame this tragedy on only one ill is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. The ideology that drove the alleged killer Robinson is embedded in virtually every real-life institution that he would have interacted with; any solution must proceed from this core premise. A holistic approach to ending radical leftism, then, is the only way we can honor Kirk’s legacy, and make sure nothing like this is permitted to happen ever again.