Charlie Kirk assassin was living with trans roommate

[ThatZanyFatball]

May have been lovers, and sounds like he knew ahead of time that it was going to happen.

Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson lived with transgender partner: source

They probably were on edge because the previous alert in Salt Lake City was a viable device. Two men were arrested and other paraphernalia seized.

www.cbsnews.com/news/salt-lake-city-fox-13-vehicle-targeted-incendiary-device/

I think films and music influence far more.

I doubt that, largely because in films and music the viewer/listener is an observer of someone else’s story, whereas in games the player becomes the (usually main) character.

Plus the repetition of game play and the dopamine reward of completing a challenging task or level is much more addictive than listening to music or watching a film.

Of course, the type of game matters too - something like Tetris is going to affect the brain very differently than a first person shooter.

I found with my own son that some games made him frustrated and that could erupt into anger. We eventually limited him to world building games and slow moving fantasy adventures where you go round collecting magic items and talking to elves (and he never played online as that wasn’t much of a thing for console players in his teen years). Thankfully he always preferred going outside with his skateboard anyway, so it wasn’t too difficult to limit the influence of games.

Ultimately, the biggest influence on adolescents is always their peers, regardless of the time period they grew up in or what tech/media is available to them.

I want to say as well about games - JKR wrote well about fandoms in Ink Black Heart, but there's a lot more that could be said. I'm interested in how some fandoms are notoriously toxic and some very much aren't. A lot of that probably has to do with the demographics.

Great point, though, about gaming being more immersive, the Main Character syndrome, the repetition, the dopamine hits. I'm not a gamer and don't know the tribes, but even from my very superficial knowledge, it's hard to think of a TV or movie fandom that's quite as deranged as the Sonic fandom.

I wouldn't agree with that at all. The younger people I know mainly seem to listen to music via gaming and don't watch many films. Maybe in earlier times?

My experience of fandoms is it's definitely subject matter and definitely demographics. And they can change significantly based on key individuals who dominate the group. Male dominated groups behave very differently to female ones, but both can be completely obsessive and competitive in different ways to the point of unhealthy. They easily spiral out of control and unless you are aware of it, it's not hard to get sucked up into it and lose touch with what is otherwise regarded as normal. Especially if it's your entire social circle. It's definitely stronger the younger you are and starts to fade at about age 25 (more out of having done it all before rather than because life gets in the way tbh).

I've been there and got many t-shirts with various communities and made a lot of friends doing it. The internal group politics can be crazy - and I think this is something that's out looked - there's definitely power struggles within these groups. Proving yourself to the group i would very much argue is usually more important that making a point outside the group. Outsiders don't get this.

In terms of music, film, gaming etc the interesting thing is I do think it used to be about film and music. Now I think gaming is eclipsing them and there's the right of the political fandom itself where you get political activist groups. Politics has almost overtaken music as a pass time for many in the younger generation. We will never see a super group again after the current ones have gone. It's an age that's past it's peak.

I think we have to be careful with the idea of the "video games made him do it". His obsession was around Helldivers 2, a sci-fi shooter, quite removed from reality. In all instances gamers don't get caught up in the virtual reality of the games, but rather break the games down into systems, remembering button-combos, stats for moves etc.

But gaming culture which seems to be online with all the memes seems to have played quite a part in it.

I think he's had a heady mix of all these messages online, the trans victimhood, the excessive messaging that people who state biologically reality etc are literal Nazis etc, has led to this violent outcome.

More of the issue I take with gaming is if these people are spending all day on them, instead of being in education or employment. The isolation and lack of real-world interactions leads to the disconnect.

Absolutely! It’s definitely never as simple as a game (or a film or a rock star) being a singular negative influence, it’s more a perfect storm of multiple influences coming together in a person who has also has both the means and the physical ability to commit the act plus either the naivety to believe they will get away with it or the willingness to die while doing it (the suicide-by-cop effect).
I doubt many of them have a realistic sense of the soul crushing monotony of spending decades in prison but perhaps the lack of an ability to conceptualise long passages of time is just an intrinsic part of being a young person!

Have you read the wealth of data on it collated from literally decades of studies? It's been studied extensively. The University of Oxford, The Guardian, and the Centre for Educational Neuroscience are amongst those that have studied it in depth and the conclusion was 'there is no scientific evidence to support a causal link between playing violent video games and committing acts of real-world violence'.

Some studies noted a small increase in aggressive feelings after playing violent games but the unanimous verdict was that this doesn't translate to real world violence. They also stated the belief that 'focusing on the alleged link between games and violence distracts from the real societal issues that contribute to violence, such as media literacy, mental health support, and parenting.'

It's more likely that games provide a release IMO.

Are you familiar with 'drill' music? It's strongly associated with inner city gang violence, stabbings, etc. The police have banned it before now and tried to use lyrics as evidence in homicide cases. Much of it is about taunting 'the opps' (opposition) and year on year many drill mc's are murdered.

There's no doubt a bit of a chicken and egg scenario but I think it's safe to say it's not just an incidental byproduct of crimes/lifestyle that would exist anyway. It actively fuels stabbings and shootings due to the way gangs use it to publicly insult their rivals, who then feel pressured to react to save face/not be seen as weak. This is the reason police have banned some drill videos from YouTube and the reason why many of the performers wear balaclavas ('no face no case').

Some random lyrics:

"I chinged man's face then he fell to the floor. Coulda left him but I chopped him more. Bro didn't like him so I chopped him, chopped him. Didn't even know what I chopped him for".

"Dont need to piss on a mans grave im the reason theres worms in a mans face."

"If she's holding your wap, then she can get wacked too. Or she can get grabbed. Locked in a dark room, fed nothing but cat food."

“I see the USA takin’ the piss out of knifes, Ever cornered a man and tore out his flesh while you look in his eyes?”

“I release my stress on flesh. I carve out wounds in backs and chests.”

"My man had a closed casket, His face is still on the raq that’s ments."

"i wanna dig up lzz's grave open his coffin and spit in his face."

Just a random selection from a quick Google. Some are even worse and joking about the victim's mum crying on TV etc. I find this stuff way more disturbing than any games because most of it is talking about real events. You can find reddit threads where people are explaining the murders being referenced. Teenagers are the main audience that listen to this stuff.

Yes, I’m very familiar with Drill music.

But as I said, it’s peers that are the main influence on adolescents. So a middle class white kid in a nice part of Surrey can listen to Drill via internet streaming without ever carrying a knife or being involved in violent crime, whereas the kids who are growing up on the same sorts of London council estates as the Drill artists themselves grew up on, whose brothers and cousins are already involved in gang activity, are far more likely to be involved in crime, including the crimes described in Drill music.

Gang related violence is of course incredibly concerning but it’s not quite the same sort of violence as we are discussing here and has different drivers and underlying causes, which was exactly the sort of clarification Charlie Kirk was trying to make at the moment he was fatally shot.

there is no scientific evidence to support a causal link between playing violent video games and committing acts of real-world violence'.

It’s useful to remember that the tobacco industry relied on the “no causal link” for decades to deny that smoking caused lung cancer - even disputing Richard Doll’s very clear statistical evidence - until the actual mechanism for the damage was found.

I disagree. Games can induce more dependency and more anger. They’re addictive and wholly involving. Many also allow you to chat to friends, so you’re not only receiving the negative effects of the game yourself, you’re chatting with others receiving the same, which can reinforce the effects and further strengthen the ‘reality’ of the game world.

Trans rights could've easily attached itself to either left or right wing politics and for a considerable time it did.

Unfortunately traditional left-wing parties and supporters are reluctant to distance themselves (seeing them as continual underdogs), so we end up being in a bizarre situation where you are more likely to support right-wing politics on basis that they stand up to the trans insanity.

Traditional left-wingers in America still won't accept that they need to stop allowing trans activists spouting their nonsense and violence. They need to call out anyone who says "Protect trans youth" with images of knives and guns. It's this that feeds into Robinson's social media feed that breeds murderous ideas.

I'm not sure that there are many traditional left wingers in America except for Noam Chomsky, who has always been politically marginal, and who is 96 years old.

Their tin ear was on display at Kash Patel's Senate hearing the other day. Amy Klobuchar is one of the few Senate Democrats who can still speak the vernacular of the New Deal Democrat, and might have been a better VP for Biden than Harris was.

But stick Kash Patel in front of her, and Klobuchar, knowing that Charlie Kirk was a friend of Patel, can barely squeeze out a passive-aggressive "sorry for your loss" before wanging on about how right wing extremism is the main threat and left wing extremism is definitely not a thing. Even Klobuchar, who's one of the smarter Democrats, really can't read the room.

Don't get me started on Cory Booker, whose addiction to ham acting is such that, if politics doesn't work out for him, he could have a career in Christian movies.

Klippenstein had a 25 minute chat with Ana Kasparian at The Young Turks about his investigation. There was plenty of food for thought:

Interesting, will take a look later!

in the links to a post about Hope not Hate the other day I ended up reading a recent government report into the Prevent programme. It talked about how the programme was not intended to tackle “hate crime” or educate people more generally but monitor and tackle credible terrorist threats, and the focus on the “far right” being demanded was disproportionate as the main terrorist threat in the U.K. was radical Islamism and had been since the programme was set up. It also said that there was concerning training material from partners which whitewashed “Antifa” and other leftist groups which the guy felt needed more focus along with the right.

I’ve actually done Prevent training myself (2016, public sector org) and the focus was almost entirely presented as the far right and that was the example used.

This article is depressing

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/18/why-the-oxford-unions-charlie-kirk-scandal-matters/

I think George Abaraonye's SM comments were atrocious. Especially considering he'd actually met Charlie Kirk. The behaviour described in the article is almost more worrying. I suspect it's a little one sided, Abaraonye says he has received racist abuse, but there should be real consequences for threats of violence regardless of whether the perpetrator would consider themselves left or right wing.

And while I'm dreaming I'll have some Dorset apple cake. I realise consequences are restricted to those who believe sex is real and that sometimes it matters.

Somebody, I forget who, mentioned in a podcast the other day about far left terrorism in the States in the 1970s, which actually was a serious problem. But there's quite a list of Weather Underground leaders who, once they'd served their prison sentence, went on to get teaching jobs at elite universities - Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin and others. It's basically impossible to imagine a right wing terrorist emerging from prison and becoming a law professor.

The same asymmetry works here too. I know I could bore for Britain on this, but... Nigel Farage, whatever you think of him, has denounced Tommy Robinson for years, but people still talk as if they're best mates. Meanwhile any number of Labour MPs and union leaders will speak on SWP platforms and they're never pulled up on it. Not to mention politicians hanging around TRA events with very violent language. I feel that the centre left indulges the far left because their self-image says that extremism and political violence is something the other tribe do.

Possibly related to all of this is the row surrounding Hasan Piker. He might be the no.1 streamer from the progressive Left in the world. He streams on the Twitch platform and pulls in a few million dollars a year, enough to have a private jet and mansions lifestyle.

One problem with Piker is he has a habit of calling for the murder of those having a political alignment opposed of his own, and because the CEO of Twitch likes his output, he's been doing this with impunity for years:

https://x.com/Osint613/status/1967179980904829031

Piker was about to have a debate with Charlie Kirk and seemingly in a spell of self-preservation awareness, has spoken of his shock at Kirk's murder.

Let's not forget that Prevent was absolutely useless with what happened in Southport, and the fact that they couldn't label the killer as either Islamist or far-right, so didn't bother.

We're seeing (like with Kirk's killer) boys who have spent so much time online that their politics is all over the place, but clearly influenced by the violent rhetoric (from groups like TRAs) that certain political wings refuse to denounce.

ConcernedFarther · 15/09/2025 16:24

I think it's so funny how the left advocate for society without guns, then when they lose the argument around extreme ideologies and socialist/ communist views they're the first to pick one up, their last resort is to shut down the conversation by pulling a trigger, it's always the left who turn out the most aggressive.

This is exactly the sort of wildly inaccurate, counter factual drivel seen in the Daily Mail comments.

Incredibly depressing thread. 😔

I agree, I just thought it was interesting.