Charlie Kirk's killer was not a card-carrying Democrat

MAGA Republicans are making the usual knee-jerk reactions and assertions that the shooter of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk was a Democrat, with many of them calling for bloody revenge and even the "end of democracy". I mean, it stands to reason right? Kirk was a rabid and extremely contentious right-winger; his killer must therefore be a rabid leftie, no?

Well, just as the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last year was not perpetrated by a disgruntled Democrat, neither was Kirk's more successful assassin an extreme-left firebrand Democrat. 

22-year old Utah resident Tyler Robinson is not Democrat, or even particularly politically active. His last voter registration was back in 2021, and public records show his political agitation to be "none". He also comes from a conservative family, although one family member asserted that "Robinson had become more political in recent years". But, still, this is a not a rabid extreme-left partisan we are talking about. 

This, of course, was not enough to stop Donald Trump from doubling down on the partisan rhetoric: "We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them". The next day: "The radicals on the left are the problem, and they're vicious and they're horrible and they're politically savvy." This, of course, is the Trump approach to bridging divides, and calming potentially violent escalation.

And just so we know who we are talking about here, Charlie Kirk was a highly controversial figure with some pretty extreme right-wing views. 

• He was strongly anti-gay and -trans rights, and encouraged students to report university profs who embraced "gender ideology". 
• He was a strong supporter of gun rights and against gun control, and once publicly opined, "I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment" (pretty ironic, in retrospect). 
• He strongly opposed diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and affirmative action, and believed the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a huge mistake and that Martin Luther King was an "awful" person. 
• Despite supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, he was vocally anti-Jew, believed in the "replacement theory" conspiracy, and thought that all Jews were  involved in anti-white activities.
• He was anti-Muslim even more than anti-Jew, calling Islam an existential threat to America.
• He was a climate change denier, arguing that there is no scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and that it is not important anyway.
• Just about the only thing Kirk was not against was free speech, although he was less supportive of free speech for leftists.

So, this is the person who Donald Trump called "Great, even Legendary". Maybe the views recently espoused by a University of Toronto prof about Kirk are extreme, but, make no mistake, he was not a nice guy, and it's no surprise he made a whole boatload of enemies in his short time in the glare of American media. 

The backlash has already begun, though, even here in Canada. A Manitoba cabinet minister was called out by the Conservative opposition and forced to publicly apologize for calling Kirk racist, sexist and transphobic, and a "white nationalist mouthpiece". That is not virulent and offensive in the way that the UoT prof's comments were, that is just stating facts, and Kirk - a noted proponent of free speech - will have had much worse than that to his face.