Enlightened Centrism's Specter

Before I broach this topic, I must perform a little social ritual. Hail Charlie Kirk! I ask this saint of free speech, wherever he is, to intercede on my behalf while speaking my mind. This isn’t about him, but about his alleged assassin: the 22 year-old Tyler Robinson whose alleged motives have eluded political identification and thus disturbed partisan media (liberal and conservative), to the extent that both sides are starting to reach for the new “nihilistic violent extremist” label despite this alleged act being anything but apolitical. So, how do we understand it?

Robinson’s alleged crime is the third in a series over the past year which have challenged the liberal–conservative dichotomy (which we know is bunk, but they don’t). First, Luigi Mangione: the alleged assassin of health insurance firm CEO Brian Thompson, a software engineer and philosophy bro who didn’t like Biden or Trump but seemed to be interested in AOC, RFK, and Ted Kaczynski. The “far-left”, anti-corporate dimension of his alleged act was entangled with anti-woke conservatism and Silicon Valley futurism, which made him impossible for the media industry to narrate satisfyingly as antifa supersoldier or stochastic stormtrooper. Second, Robin Westman: the Minneapolis school shooter who was decried as a fascist terrorist by liberals and a mentally ill ‘trans’ by conservatives, and who in the end turned out to sort of be both—although in his diary, he expressed regret at transitioning because (according to his diary) he knew he wasn’t a woman despite also not feeling like a man. I’m going to count Westman as ‘socially trans’ because he continued to present as such and, in that capacity, he registers as a terminally online trans fascist (a real type of person that exists and with whom he likely associated; compare with Aiden Hale in 2023, an FTM fascist who also shot up a Catholic school). These alleged acts are noteworthy because they’re exceptional: most extremist mass shootings are committed by straightforwardly fascist white boys, and the majority of murders in general are driven by motives considered petty (including, unfortunately, sexist domestic abuse).

Let’s look at Tyler Robinson’s profile: 22 year-old male from a conservative Mormon family; liked outdoorsy activities, video games, and guns (despite his grandmother not knowing, apparently); and associated mostly with other online gamers in apolitical Discord servers. He was also bisexual and romantically involved with his MTF trans roommate, for whom (according to his mother) he became “more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented”, which has been narrated as him becoming more liberal or left-leaning in general. He despised Kirk, telling his roommate to whom he allegedly confessed about killing Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” According to those alleged messages, he shot Kirk using a rifle that once belonged to his grandfather, and engraved his bullet casings with edgy online memes and antifascist slogans (whose sincerity or irony was heavily debated). After he allegedly did this, he confessed in person to his father who convinced him to talk to a youth pastor who turned him in. The trans roommate, instead of deleting her message history with Robinson as he had asked her to do, also submitted them to the police. Doesn’t this sound like one big Utah moment?

The staggered release of information on this case led to liberal and conservative media constructing totally different narratives of the assassination, each accusing the other of fixating on incomplete or misleading information. Conservative heads first accused the shooter of being trans, and then the bullets’ engravings expressing transgender ideology, and finally of being brainwashed into killing Charlie Kirk by the (at-the-time) dubious trans roommate. This is both a boy-cries-wolf situation and also almost certainly the result of the Kash-led FBI selectively leaking information to control the narrative before realizing that it was inconvenient to them (due to the trans roommate cooperating with police and seemingly expressing shock—to put it mildly—at Robinson’s alleged act). Liberals however overplayed their hand and cast Robinson as a groyper to the right of Charlie Kirk, with his antifascist engravings being ironic memes originating from that fascist gamer subculture, denying any possible complexity in Robinson’s character. Now we have all the information we could want about this guy and his alleged motive, yet everyone’s gone quiet.

Assuming that the information we have is true—I'm not going to say whether or not I think it is—then I think we should have a pretty good idea of who Tyler Robinson is and why he would have allegedly shot Charlie Kirk. I made a (socially contingent, historically specific) graph to represent what's become my own understanding of ideological positions relative to each other. Each major term identifies the other two terms as its antithesis: fascists see liberals and communists as progressives (woke), liberals see fascists and communists as authoritarians, and communists see liberals and fascists as capitalists (meaning here, a supporter and enabler of capitalism). The intersection at which a term is situated serves as a constellation by which we can approximate as a caricature the political position of that term: liberals are progressive capitalists, fascists are capitalist authoritarians, and communists are authoritarian progressives. The two political parties in the United States correspond roughly to the bottom two sub-triangles, and their shared point is where one might find blue dogs and libertarians. I want to emphasize that this is not an objective or quantitative taxonomy: this is me trying to reconstruct each identity relative to their Other and see what happens when these perceptions interact.

Let's situate our strange shooters. We can approximate that each of them came up in conservative contexts somewhere in the lower-right triangle, but that their position there was problematized: Mangione by experiencing the exploitative nature of the healthcare industry, and Robinson by dating and thus sympathizing with his trans-female roommate. Those experiences shifted them, for one reason or another, away from the capitalist vertex or towards the progressive vertex. That does not mean, however, that they shifted away from the authoritarian vertex (referring here to the violent exertion of one's will over another, following Engels). Jesus once said it is easier for camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Likewise, it is very unlikely that a liberal becomes an outright conservative or vice versa. Rather than passing through the thin point at which the liberal and conservative sub-triangles meet, they're more likely to enter the forsaken middle sub-triangle that neither party dare touch. They tend to be more progressive than the most progressive conservatives, more authoritarian than the most authoritarian liberals, and flirt with violent anti-establishment action more than either party is able due to their own limitations (being either too anti-authoritarian or too anti-progressive). In other words, the greatest perceived existential threat to the establishment isn't Berniecrats or Columbine copycats, but the enlightened centrist who isn't scared of guns. Or as I texted my partner and a couple of friends when the transcripts between Robinson and his roommate came out:

maybe the powers don’t want republican boys to fuck tbitches bc without the liberal pussification function they become violently woke

This is not an endorsement or glorification of either Mangione or Robinson. They were driven by personal grievances, and the world we live in now is on a worse path because of their actions. As for Westman and Hale, who I brought up in the context of shootings which complicate the grand political narratives of both liberal and conservative media, I don't know how to characterize them and I don't really care to situate them within the triangle—maybe they felt like outcasts from conservative culture but, you know, it's hard to give a shit when they shoot children. This all is just my view that the media is both playing games and doesn't know what they're dealing with. Beware the enlightened centrist!

Stay safe, love your enemies, pray for peace.