There is a deep human impulse to whittle reality down into familiar and self-flattering fairy tales.
We all gravitate toward information that validates our preconceptions and vindicates our in-groups. It is cognitively taxing to revise one’s model of the world. And it is emotionally uncomfortable to recognize fault in our allies or merit in our adversaries. So, we are all tempted to sand the jagged edges off events until they fit into ideologically convenient frames.
If this impulse is universal, however, liberals (such as myself) like to believe that we are less vulnerable to it. After all, we are the side that favors scientific inquiry over religious fundamentalism, universalism over ethnocentrism, and critical accounts of American history over jingoistic ones.
Conservatives, by contrast, often recoil at moral complexity. And their leadership is unbound by any sense of fealty to the truth. Or so the progressive historian Heather Cox Richardson suggested, in a recent Substack post.
In Richardson’s account, McCarthyism taught the American right the political utility of shameless lies. By crafting mendacious and simplistic “us” versus “them” narratives — and repeating them ceaselessly — conservatives found that they could “construct a fictional world,” which many voters would unknowingly come to inhabit. Liberals in the “reality-based community” — to use a phrase made famous by the George W. Bush administration — might feel compelled to align their claims with discernible facts. But the American right, feels no such obligation.
As an example of conservatives’ mendacity, Richardson cites the Trump administration’s attempt to pin Charlie Kirk’s assassination on the left. And not without reason: The White House’s brazenly dishonest propaganda about that tragedy does much to support Richardson’s portrait of the right.
And yet, shortly after decrying the GOP’s privileging of “narrative” over “facts,” Richardson wrote the following:
[I]n fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical. Rather than grappling with reality, right-wing figures are using Kirk’s murder to prop up their fictional world.
Richardson’s post in fact deftly illustrates the hazards of tribalistic thinking and epistemic immodesty, just not quite in the manner that it intended.
When Richardson published her column on September 13, there was no sound basis for asserting that Robinson was “not someone on the left,” much less that he was a far-right extremist who’d killed Kirk for being inadequately reactionary. And charging documents released Tuesday indicate that Richardson’s narrative was false.
Nevertheless, that narrative was briefly pervasive within social media’s left-wing corners. In fact, the idea that Robinson was a proven reactionary became so widespread among liberals that ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (apparently) felt safe paying it lip service on Monday.
Even after Tuesday’s revelations, a few left-wing influencers continued promoting the idea that Robinson opposed Kirk from the right, explaining away evidence to the contrary with conspiracy theories.
The left’s embrace of comforting fictions about Kirk’s assassination is understandable. But it is also irresponsible and politically self-defeating. To truly inhabit the “reality-based community,” progressives must not merely spotlight the right’s fantasies, but stand more watchful guard against our own.
What we know about Tyler Robinson’s motive
On Tuesday, authorities in Utah filed charges against Tyler Robinson for aggravated murder. Three pieces of evidence in the indictment suggest that Robinson objected to Kirk’s politics from the left:
- Robinson’s mother told investigators that her son “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left — becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” His mother also said that he had begun “to date his roommate, a biological male who was transitioning genders.”
- Robinson had texted a confession to his roommate after the shooting, referring to the roommate as “my love” and saying of Kirk, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
- Robinson’s parents told investigators that he had explained his crime to them in similar terms, saying that Kirk “spreads too much hate.”
The indictment is not the last word on Robinson’s motivations (or, for that matter, his guilt). But nothing in the assembled evidence supports the narrative that Robinson was far-right.
How many progressives came to believe that Robinson was a “groyper”
It isn’t hard to understand why progressives found it plausible that Robinson was a reactionary extremist. The alleged killer engraved his bullet casings with references to a bizarre array of memes, including one that mocks so-called furries (adults who dress up in animal costumes during sexual encounters), and another that informed observers, “If you read this, you are gay LMAO.”
These etchings recalled the nihilistic, anti-LGBT trolling often found on the extremely online right. And Charlie Kirk had his reactionary enemies: The white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes’s fandom — a community known as “groypers” — had declared a war on Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, for failing to uphold Fuentes’s explicitly racist vision of America First.
From the beginning, there were reasons to doubt that Robinson was a rightist. Most obviously, Kirk earned far more enmity from the left than the right. And one of Robinson’s bullet casings read, “Hey, fascist! Catch” (though, this could be dismissed as an arbitrary video game reference).
The moment we deem ourselves immune to ideological chauvinism and unreason, we become more vulnerable to both.
Given this initial collection of facts, progressives had cause for entertaining the idea that Robinson was a white nationalist, but none for asserting it as an established fact.
If the “groyper” theory lacked a solid factual basis, however, it offered considerable psychological appeal. It is uncomfortable to accept that you share a worldview — or even, a few strong moral convictions — with perpetrators of terrible crimes. To avoid such discomfort, people often latch onto improbable narratives. To absolve MAGA of January 6’s mayhem, many conservatives embraced the theory that the riot was orchestrated by antifa (and/or the FBI). To avoid grappling with atrocities committed in the name of a cause they supported, some on the far-left decided that the October 7 attacks were a false-flag operation. To deny Israel’s inhuman crimes against the people of Gaza, its defenders tell themselves stories that attribute all culpability for the Jewish state’s violence to its enemies.
I think some progressives’ misplaced confidence in Robinson’s conservatism was rooted in a similar impulse (which is not to say that hasty assumptions about a killer’s motives are morally comparable to apologetics for genocidal violence). And the psychic appeal of the “groyper” theory enabled it to become common sense among substantial portion of progressives, such that the writers of Jimmy Kimmel Live! evidently felt comfortable insinuating that Robinson was a conservative.
Trump wants to have a fight about Robinson’s motive
In the wake of Tuesday’s indictment, many progressives have abandoned the notion that Kirk was killed for being insufficiently racist (on Wednesday, Richardson retreated to the claim that Robinson’s motive “remains unclear”).
But a few on the left have tried to salvage the “groyper” theory, in part by questioning the authenticity of Robinson’s text exchanges with his roommate.
Such conspiracism is not just intellectually bankrupt, but politically self-defeating.
The Trump administration wants to use Kirk’s killing as an excuse for cracking down on progressive dissent. Its argument for that assault on free expression includes one apparent truth (that Kirk’s killer shared some of the left’s objections to his work) and a whole host of claims that are either blatantly false or wholly unproven (that Robinson was affiliated with progressive organizations, that political violence in America comes exclusively from the left, that the Federal Communications Commission has the legal authority to police the offhanded remarks of comedians).
It is therefore in the administration’s interest to focus public debate on Robinson’s apparent motive. That is the subject they want to fight about — which is why they tried to get Jimmy Kimmel fired for his misguided intervention into that argument.
Progressives must not get baited into a losing fight. We don’t need to deny the facts about Kirk’s killing to refute the administration’s broader narrative about that tragedy. Whatever Robinson’s motive, the left is responsible for a small minority of political violence in the United States in recent decades. And there is no evidence that Kirk’s alleged killer belonged to any organized progressive group, much less that his violence was directly abetted by the liberal foundations that the Trump administration has promised to destroy. On every point that actually has bearing on the policy response to Kirk’s death, the facts are on progressives’ side. We should focus on those realities.
More broadly, liberals must strive to avoid further lapses of epistemic humility in the future. In my view, the broad left is correct to believe that it has more respect for empirical truth — and comfort with moral ambiguity — than the right does. But this advantage is strictly relative. And the moment we deem ourselves immune to ideological chauvinism and unreason, we become more vulnerable to both.
