Update: Putting this up top because the person who spoke to the Guardian and described Tyler Robinson as "pretty far left on everything" has suddenly retracted those statements, saying he can't remember. There is now an Editor's Note at the top of the Guardian story.
Editor’s note: 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.
So the Guardian is not saying the person was falsely ID'd. This is someone who went to school with Robinson, but after publication he changed his story.
End update.
As David pointed out earlier, there are a bunch of alternative theories floating around about what motivated Charlie Kirk's killer. One that is popping up a lot today is the claim that Tyler Robinson was actually a conservative.
Where are people coming up with this? Well, it appears his family was pretty conservative. They lived in a conservative part of a heavily red state. Both parents were registered Republicans.
Lacking much more than that, some people are just making up their own evidence, such as this Photoshopped image of the shooter in a Trump shirt. It's totally fake but it seems to have gotten lots of attention.
An account with 5 million followers on X posts a fake photo of suspect Tyler Robinson wearing a Trump shirt and quietly follows up in a thread with the real photo.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 12, 2025
The fake photo (which hasn't been deleted) gets 400k impressions in an hour, and the real one gets 50k.
There… pic.twitter.com/wbckhT0Rqw
There are also claims circulating that he donated to Donald Trump's campaign. Those are also false.
They want you to think a Trump supporter killed one of Trump’s closest friends.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 12, 2025
That in itself is insane.
Robinson was registered to vote but was unaffiliated. There is no evidence he ever donated to Trump.
Screenshots of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records circulating on X Friday showed that a “Tyler Robinson” from St. George, Utah, contributed $224.48 to Trump’s re-election campaign. The posts asserted this was the same individual responsible for Kirk’s killing.
However, property records and addresses show the donor residing at a different address than the alleged killer, making them just two individuals who share a name and live in the same area.
So what we're left with is that this person had a conservative family. Of course that doesn't really prove anything about the shooter. There are lots of people whose politics are radically different from there parents. And that seems to be the case with this shooter, who expressed his disapproval for Kirk prior to the shooting.
[Utah Gov. Spencer] Cox told reporters that a family member of Robinson who was interrogated by investigators said Robinson had “become more political in recent years”.
The family member, Cox said, recounted how Robinson had gone over for dinner and mentioned that Kirk was scheduled to speak at UVU. The family member recalled Robinson talking about not liking Kirk and his viewpoints.
I'm interrupting here because there's another bunch of claims going around that Robinson was on the far right, i.e. a fan of Nick Fuentes who has made a point of sending his fans to public events featuring Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro to criticize them. So some people are basically claiming Robinson is a Groyper, not a leftist. But today the Guardian reports a high school friend described Robinson as "far left on everything."
In a phone interview Friday, one of Robinson’s high school friends – who asked to remain anonymous – said that Robinson was “pretty left on everything” and was “the only member of his family that was, like, really leftist”.
“The rest of his family was very hard Republican – like gun-loving, everything,” the friend said. “He was really the only one that was on the left.”
The friend said he was stunned when he saw the news on Friday that Robinson was the suspect in the Kirk case. “I knew he had strong political views,” the friend remarked, “but I never thought it would even go near that far.”
There's also another bunch of people who spent the last couple of days on X trying to insinuate that Israel was behind Kirk's shooting. I saw a bunch of these posts relating to a secret plane leaving an airfield near the school paired with claims that Kirk feared he would be killed if he changed his tune on support for Israel. As usual, none of those people will admit they were wrong.
Are the people who made a lot of engagement-farming money saying the killing of Charlie Kirk was an Israeli operation going to apologize now that we learn it was allegedly a 22-year-old local who simply hid a rifle in his trouser leg and then just walked away after the shooting?
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 12, 2025
There is a lot of copium flowing today. No one wants to be associated with Tyler Robinson. There's no telling what we'll learn tomorrow but at this moment it seems pretty clear what his politics were and that those beliefs were a motivator behind his terrible actions this week.
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