Alan Zendell, September 13, 2025

I wish I could speak to Matt Robinson, the father of the alleged assassin who killed Charlie Kirk. I suggested to a friend, yesterday, that having to turn his son in to law enforcement must have been a hellish decision. My friend responded that not turning him in would be immoral and un-American. I imagine that Matt Robinson was desperately trying to save his son’s life, knowing that if Tyler Robinson didn’t turn himself in, he would almost certainly be killed by law enforcement, or worse, by some revenge-seeking vigilante.

Statements from the accused assassin suggest that he designed and customized his own sniper weapon. By all accounts, Matt Robinson created a family culture that celebrated gun ownership. I wonder if dad knew what his son was doing. Given his son’s proclivity for political rhetoric on social media, how could he not have known his son had gone off the rails? I’m sure that’s what his lawyer will claim. Only a seriously disturbed individual would go to all the trouble Tyler Robinson is alleged to have done to kill Kirk.

If the public and the media allow this event to go down the way President Trump and his hate-mongering Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller are spinning it, we might as well throw in the towel if we care about the future of the United States. Someone has to draw a line  in sand about the lies and the Fascist narrative they’re putting out, daily. Before anyone had any idea who the shooter was, both Trump and Miller were posting on social media that the radical left was responsible, and Elon Musk tweeted on X that the left supports murder.

The truth, we now know, is that Tyler Robinson was even more right-wing and White Supremacist than Charlie Kirk. Robinson had written that Kirk’s platform was not “pro-White enough.” But that didn’t stop Miller from posting a new diatribe claiming that the left, whoever they are, despised everything good, beautiful and righteous, including everyone of faith. Historian Heather Richardson correctly identified Miller’s hate-filled rants as pure totalitarian tactics that right-wing extremists have been using since the days of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief strategist and consigliere, Roy Cohn, who taught Trump everything he knows about skirting the law and the Constitution.

It’s what authoritarian leaders do when they want to overthrow the established order. They lie and distort, hitting us with so many false narratives on every front, they hope the public will either buy into their spin or simply burn out and bury their heads in the sand. Americans have been sitting idly for nearly eight months, as Trump and his lackeys have routinely and consistently violated the rights of Americans, mistreated immigrants and refugees seeking asylum, and fired political rivals from key government positions.

We’ve watched as Trump daily acted to usurp power from Congress and so badly managed the two wars he pledged to end on Day One of his presidency, that Israel’s ongoing genocidal actions have left it without allies, other than the United States, and Trump’s constantly being outplayed by Vladimir Putin has severely weakened NATO. Trump’s latest post on his own social media platform declared that he would only place harsh sanctions on Russia after every other NATO nation took the same action. But there was nothing reasonable in that post. Trump understands perfectly well, that two of his heroes, Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, both NATO members, will never take such an adversarial position against Russia. The only thing Trump intends to accomplish is splitting NATO and challenging the mutual defense clause in Article 5 of its charter.

The one place we can all make a stand is here at home. Trump will attempt to make Charlie Kirk a martyr in his quest to turn America into a Christian, white male-dominated nation in which women and nonwhites have no rights, in other words, dragging America back to the eighteenth century. The idea that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a tool of the Radical Left is thoroughly debunked by the accused’s own writings, but the extremists driving Trump would rather focus on the fact that Tyler Robinson lived with a trans-gender individual, as if that were proof of the Left’s complicity in destroying America.

What may be worse is the response of huge entities like the National Football League and the New York Yankees, who have decided to hold moments of silence in honor of Kirk’s memory. Did any of them feel it necessary to declare silence to honor the school children who were also shot on the day Kirk was, or to honor the victims of the Minnesota legislative murders? Or when Congresswoman Gabi Giffords took a bullet in the head addressing a crowd in Tucson?

Charlie Kirk has been elevated in death to a position he doesn’t deserve. It’s a travesty of justice and common sense, and it’s extremely dangerous to our national identity.