The Revolutionary Normie, or When the Normie Began to Hate

a guest post about Tyler Robinson

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I. The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

The assassination of Charlie Kirk took place, and within twenty-four hours, the NY Times ran an editorial piece with a headline stating that social media had fallen into “well-worn grooves” since his death.¹ I smirked. What is this hipster nonsense? I thought to myself. Are they really making a vinyl record reference? And how can you as a journalist strike a world-weary pose immediately after the assassination of a political pundit, a rather uncommon situation? I imagined the writers looking at their phones, scrolling through Twitter, and rolling their eyes to each other.

“Ugh, it’s all so typical.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Are they really still saying that?”

“Ugh, this is so 2019,” and so on.

But about a day passed, and I realized that, well, the headline was basically right. The same stuff happened as usual whenever a shooting takes place: fake photos circulated, fake information proliferated, people fantasized about the CIA, others fantasized about Mossad, some mourned, others celebrated, and of course, everyone scrambled to partake in the most common of these post-shooting rituals: they instantly tried to place all of the blame on the political ideology they hate the most — because, of course, there’s nothing more effective than showing the public that the other side is the side of nasty and wicked brutes while your side is the side of gentle little lambs who would never hurt a flea.

But despite all the scrambling, what we know about the event and the alleged shooter Tyler Robinson’s motivations are about as straightforward as the act of violence itself: he probably killed Charlie Kirk because he doesn’t like Charlie Kirk, and given that Kirk was conservative, it thus seems likely that the killer belongs to some species of the left. Simple. But beyond the use of Occam’s Razor, we also know that prior to the event, he told a family member that Charlie Kirk was “full of hate” and “spreading hate.” His mother later told investigators that he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

Additionally, on various bullet casings, he wrote some of the following messages:

• “Notices bulges, OwO what’s this,” an online reference perhaps indicating he was part of the furry subculture, but primarily dumb internet humor

• “If you read this you are gay LMAO,” some more dumb internet humor

• “Hey fascist! Catch!” followed by some arrows pointing in different directions. Though the text was apparently Robinson’s own invention, the arrows are a reference to a button combination for a major attack used in the satirical anti-fascist computer game Helldivers 2

• And some lyrics to an Italian folk song called “Bella Ciao,” which was co-opted by Italian post-war antifascist movements, was used in an anti-ICE manifesto by an Antifa gunman, and, most pertinently, was popularized by the computer game Far Cry 6.

So from what we can glean, it seems a safe bet that Robinson was somewhere on the left-liberal spectrum, hated fascism, saw Charlie Kirk as a fascist, and used the internet a whole lot.

Now, here’s a question. Just how steeped in left-wing ideology was he? From everything we know, the answer seems to be: not all that much, though there is the small chance that he might turn out to be more deeply entrenched in left-wing thought than the known facts indicate.

Part of the problem in determining the answer is that the fervent belief in trans-rights, the hatred of “fascists,” and the willingness to label Charlie Kirk one, is a trait shared by basically everyone on the left ranging from your MSNBC-addicted wine-sipping suburban mother-in-law to the most drug-addled, train-hopping, abandoned-warehouse-squatting, facial-tattoo-having anarcho-communist Antifa member that you could imagine.

Ideologically the shooter was probably somewhere within that range—probably closer to the MSNBC mom, if we’re being honest, but on the left side of politics all the same. The fact that anyone is trying to assert that Robinson was one of Kirk’s “fellow conservatives” or “MAGA” or even a “groyper” is mind-boggling, but again, these are the “well-worn grooves” of social media and the broader media complex that uses it for its primary pool of research.

II. The Revolutionary Normie

What really strikes me about the alleged killer most of all, though, is just how bland and middle-class of a life he seems to have led.

He was raised Mormon, he got into a college on a prestigious scholarship after getting a 4.0 GPA in high school, he dropped out after a semester, he was registered to vote as an independent, and he was getting ready to be an electrician. Although he had moved in with a transitioning person (allegedly his romantic partner) around the same time that he started “becoming more political,” as an undisclosed family member put it, his early life suggests the path of a rather well-adjusted normie—a guy who wasn’t particularly all that weird, damaged, broken, or extreme, and in fact someone with a fairly conventional upbringing who had a mainstream range of opinions and interests. A friend described him to reporter Ken Kippenstein as “fairly typical of a young man his age from Utah: someone who loved the outdoors, was a gamer, and into guns.” And the pictures of him with his family seem to tell us the same story, revealing all of the classic middle-American trappings you’d expected from a normie household.

Tyler Robinson’s graduation photo

Commenting on the above photo, one Twitter user put it this way:

“Hobby lobby floppsy-doodle font wall art, millennial grey everything, Kirkland water bottle (with a commemorative graduation koozie) Yeah, I could see how this would drive someone insane.”

Robinson is not the only one in recent years whose turn towards violence doesn’t quite fit the expected profile. That is, he’s not the only one whose behavior suggests a motivation stemming more from middle class ennui than deep-seated revolutionary conviction.

Luigi Mangione, another recent high-profile killer, grew up in an affluent community in Maryland, he attended an all-boys private prep school, and he graduated cum laude from UPenn in 2020. After he shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, everyone was awaiting some kind of grand revelation about who the killer was and what his profound message might be, particularly because of the cryptic message he wrote on the 9mm shell casings for his gun: “delay, deny, and depose,” a possible reference to the book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It (2010) by Jay Feinman.

But once Mangione got caught and his unique backstory was revealed, it wasn’t exactly matched by an equally impressive or even coherent vision. His manifesto was brief and uninspiring, his actual beliefs seemed to be a jumble, and his reading choices (he had a Goodreads account) mostly comprised bestsellers that you’d see on end-of-the-year lists from normie newspapers and blogs: popular science and social commentary books by authors like Richard Dawkins and Yuval Harari along with self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck [sic].

He did read the Unabomber’s manifesto, but books like this were rather rare for him. If you were to categorize Mangione as anything politically, perhaps he could qualify as some kind of wayward tech-libertarian-turned-luddite, but even that would be giving him too much credit. The most likely situation is that even though he did read books, he didn’t really have all that much of an intellectual inner life.