Silence by the Bullet

Also: Ben Shapiro's Permission Structure Hypothesis

Death of Marat by Jacques Louis David

“This article was updated on 12 September 2025 to remove quotes after the verified source who attended high school with Tyler Robinson said after publication that they could not accurately remember details of their relationship.”
- Editor’s note at The Guardian

When I first heard Charlie Kirk was shot Wednesday afternoon, my exact reaction was, “Oh my goodness.” I was surprised. If you put together a list of likely political assassination targets, I would not have put him towards the top of the list.

My son would call shortly after. “Did you hear Charlie Kirk was shot?” My son had seen the video and filled me in on the details. Kirk was shot in the neck. He didn’t think Kirk would live. They arrested the shooter.

On that last point, I cautioned my son. It’s early. We may not know anything, and the “facts” were likely to change. They did. No shooter was apprehended until Friday morning.

As Bill Maher would later say to Ben Shapiro, after getting some details about the shooter wrong himself, “It’s two days out, we don’t know shit, Ben. We don’t know shit. They never do. The internet is undefeated in getting it wrong to begin with.”

Maher’s right. In the initial hours after a terrible event, it’s shocking how much misinformation makes it to the public. It’s understandable. Witnesses are unreliable, and they want to say something that the media wants to hear.

After a person attempted to run over participants in the Waukesha Christmas Parade in 2021, there was all sorts of speculation about the murderer, Darrell Brooks, his motives, and what actually happened. Some of the people at the parade even thought a gunfight took place after a police officer attempted to shoot the vehicle in a failed effort to stop it. Brooks was actually arrested peacefully at a nearby home where he was attempting to evade police.

Most of the television talking heads have an agenda, and people hear motivated speculation, such as Shapiro claiming the shooter, Tyler Robinson, was most likely a “trans-Antifa-Marxist” (Ben was 0 for 3), as facts. Maher said the shooter lived at home with his parents, which was also untrue.

They couldn’t get it right two days after the FBI falsely claimed the shooter had been arrested - twice. The reality is that the FBI had no idea where to find the shooter and it was a family member of the shooter that turned him in.

If the government didn’t know anything, and leading talking heads were getting facts wrong, then imagine all of the speculation on the Internet, much of it motivated by political belief, and you can throw that into the trash, too.

As of now, late Saturday afternoon, we still don’t know the shooter’s motive. As I pointed out to my son, it could be anything from someone who knows Kirk with a personal dispute to someone just trying to be famous. As David Frum pointed out, rarely do these assassins in America have a coherent political agenda. John Hinckley tried killing President Ronald Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster. President James Garfield was shot by a person looking for a political appointment. A follower of Charles Manson attempted to kill President Gerald Ford.

It’s been over a year since Thomas Crooks attempted to kill President Donald Trump during a speech in eerily similar circumstances, a sniper on a roof top. Perhaps Robinson was attempting to engage in a copy-cat crime. But we still aren’t sure of Crooks’ motivation for shooting at Trump and, since Crooks was killed at the scene, we may never know. There is speculation that Crooks would have tried to kill President Joe Biden if he had the chance, but Trump came to campaign in his area first.

The suspect in the other assassination attempt on Trump last year is currently attempting to defend himself in his trial, acting as his own legal counsel. It’s unlikely a coherent political philosophy will be uncovered in the process.

There is a report that Robinson disagreed with Kirk’s politics. Does that mean from the right or the left?

If Robinson turns out to be Kirk’s killer, he came from a Republican home, was raised around guns, and was non-partisan in his registration. He didn’t vote in the last election. He was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead of being a product of leftist indoctrination in college, he attended only one semester, Robinson was learning to be an electrician, a trade.

The slogans Robinson allegedly wrote on the ammo appear to be products of video games. On one of the shell casings, Robinson allegedly wrote, “If you can read this, you are gay LMAO.” Not exactly woke language.

As Time Magazine is reporting:

But days after the shooting, authorities have yet to discover a coherent motive for the killing of Kirk—the founder of Turning Point USA and a popular figure on the American right—and experts on extremism are similarly baffled by the possible motivations.

Robinson's alleged decision to leave messages to be interpreted in his wake is common for perpetrators of political violence. What makes this case unique, however, is how obscure the messages were; they contain references to memes and in-jokes that could only be understood by a niche community of online gamers.

Those messages, and the scant information about his past that has emerged so far, have given both sides of the political spectrum enough room to claim him for the other side.

We may have to wait for Robinson’s trial to figure out his motive, and we may not even know after that. We’re expecting a 22-year-old to have a coherent political philosophy that would allow one of the political parties to point fingers at the other in a desperate attempt to silence opposition. What we’re likely to get instead is a bunch of statements from the assassin that showed he had no understanding of the full political consequences for his actions.

But… that’s just speculation on my part. We would all be better off just waiting and seeing what’s actually learned about Kirk’s killer and his motivations. If it turns out that Robinson’s motive was to silence Kirk’s beliefs, he may have contributed instead to chilling all political speech as public venues and political organizations look to increasing security to prevent the next assassination.

Worse, many of Kirk’s allies are intent on using his death as a weapon against the president’s political opponents. Both Trump and his henchman Stephen Miller are promising to use the full force of the government, including RICO lawsuits, to go after political opponents.

Instead of taking a step back to recognize that both Republicans and Democrats have been the victims and the perpetrators of recent political violence, Republicans leapt to point at Democrats and claimed the left is embracing violence. Political amnesia suddenly strikes on the right when the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (D) is mentioned, or the attempted murder of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D), or the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D).

Rather than “wave the bloody shirt,” and claim the left is out to kill the political right, or vice-versa, Republicans might try, and Democrats might also try, to use civility to bring this nation back to where all sides can peacefully disagree while participating in the political process. As Winston Churchill actually said, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Civility would certainly be better than a low-intensity civil war.

Kirk’s method of motivating activists on college campuses was to actively engage in debate with people who disagreed with him. Often, they were unknowing props, walking strawmen, to be used in his constant self-promotion in social media. But it was the peaceful exchange of ideas, not the brutal suppression of speech through violence. This is the type of activism in which he was engaged when he was brutally murdered.

It would be ironic if Kirk’s death, which occurred while exercising his First Amendment rights, was used to smear his political opponents in an attempt to deny them their First Amendment rights.

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While appearing on Bill Maher’s show, Ben Shapiro attempted to make the point that there is more of “permission structure” on the left allowing for activists to resort to violence. “The point is there are permission structures that have been created in certain areas of our politics. And in particular, there is one on the left that is, again, very far radical left trans-Antifa-Marxist, and then there are two that are semi on the right: white supremacists and radical Muslims, depending on how you decide you are going to actually categorize those things,” Shapiro told Maher. Notice Shapiro, even in a sentence pretending to concede moral equivalence, sanitizes the right by excluding those groups and not acknowledging any other sources of “permission” for violence. After describing the persecution complexes of those particular groups, he adds, “I don’t think that those permission structures are evenly distributed across the political spectrum.”

Let’s put Shapiro’s hypothesis to the test.

I can’t imagine more permission being given for political violence than the president’s decision to pardon even the most violent of the rioters from the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the government. Perhaps when Republicans went silent, or even offered statements of support, as armed rightwing activists occupied the state capitol in Michigan. Or every time the president threatened a heckler at one of his rallies with violence. Or when the president said he would pardon police officers accused of using too much force, or when he actually pardoned soldiers accused of war crimes. Perhaps when the president’s son jokes about the husband of the Democratic Speaker of the House getting attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, maybe that contributes to a “permission structure” of political violence.

Republicans, too, can point to acts of political violence, from the attack on Republicans attending a Congressional softball game practice, in which Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was seriously wounded, to the violent attack on Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) by an angry neighbor, to the 2012 attack on the Family Research Council.

There is also a long history and culture of violence on the left: from violent anarchists, including the assassination of President William McKinley, to the New Left and the Weather Underground during the 1960s and 1970s.

We can put weights on the scale as far back as Shapiro wants to go, or as much into the present as Shapiro wants to go. Antifa? Meet the Proud Boys. Maybe Shapiro is correct about which way the scale tips historically, but there is certainly not a dearth of violent tendencies on the right.

Instead of attempting to use Kirk’s murder to score political points, Shapiro should be focusing on helping Republicans rid themselves of the paranoia that leads to the mass persecution complex he described.

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I haven’t really talked about Charlie Kirk’s politics or role as a political organizer. It’s not really necessary given the circumstances of his death. We would be having quite a different discussion if Kirk dropped over dead with a heart attack. But the focus, correctly I think, has been on how he died even if we’re still not 100% sure why, and the implications of his assassination.

I don’t think I can get away with this completely since someone can easily search my social media accounts to find past comments by me about Kirk. No, I wasn’t a fan, to put it mildly. I won’t retract my criticisms, any more than I would expect someone who has been critical of me (and there have been a few) to suddenly write kind things about me after I pass.

That said, no matter my opinion of Kirk’s politics or his general ignorance, speaking his beliefs is not a reason for the death penalty. Something that has been lost in this political tribal age of “they” and “them” is the very idea that we are talking about individual human beings.

The Founding Fathers may have been hypocritical on this point, but they saw in each of us the intrinsic rights endowed by Creator, not by the permission of our government or even each other. To deny someone their right to life, simply for exercising their right to free speech, is to give to the killer a power we once recognized that was limited to God.

Whether it is a state action to deny someone their life and/or their liberty for exercising the right of free speech, or the action of a lawless individual, we’re obligated by the divine grant of our own rights to condemn the taking of someone else’s. That obligation does not end at the political divide.

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Shortly after siding with the Democrats on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to end the challenge by President Donald Trump to the 2020 presidential election, state Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn received extra security because of threats to him and his family. He told the newspapers that he was even concerned about letting his children play in the yard.

Kirk’s assassination, and the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman earlier this year, are reminders that nobody at any level of politics is exempt from the real threat of violence.

Every time I hear of an act of political violence, successful or not, and then I hear of the increase of threats towards public officials at all levels, I think the best of us will be lost as public servants. The only ones that will remain are those whose ambitions exceed their virtues.

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Imagine Charlie Kirk’s widow and his two young children witnessing his murder on a stage at a college in Utah. There was probably no thought by any of them that morning that the young father and husband was not coming home ever again.

No tribute by the president nor any other political figure will ever be a substitute for a father and husband in the Kirk family. No political disagreement is worth the pain Kirk’s death will cause.

We should all pray for Kirk’s family. May Charlie Kirk rest in peace, and may his family find some solace in their Christian faith.

James Wigderson is a writer living in the city of Waukesha with his wife, the Lovely Doreen, and three rescue dogs. He is the former editor/owner of RightWisconsin and a former columnist for the Waukesha Freeman. After the rise of Donald Trump, Wigderson became a critic of the New Right, Trumpism, and the Republican Party.