Some leftists are still clinging to the myth that a right-winger shot and killed Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk, a claim repeated by late-night “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel without any serious consequence.
During a panel discussion on Tuesday on CNN, commentator Tiffany Cross repeated a debunked assertion that a conservative killed Kirk on Sept. 10.
“Let’s also not forget Charlie Kirk was murdered, ” legal analyst Elie Honig said during a discussion about political violence.
“Not by a left-wing extremist,” Cross jumped in to say. “That person espoused very right-wing extremism,” she said.
“The right attacks the right,” Cross also said.
“Those were right-wing people,” she said shortly after, repeating her assertion that a conservative killed Kirk.
“That person” is presumably in reference to Tyler Robinson, who is currently being tried in Utah for the assassination of Kirk.
Evidence suggests Robinson allegedly killed Kirk because of his criticism of gender ideology. Robinson reportedly had a transgender roommate whom he was dating. While he is innocent until proven guilty, there are no other suspected killers of Kirk, so Cross must be referencing him.
Some initial reports suggested Robinson may have been conservative because his parents were Republicans. But those claims have been laid to rest by now, as Robbie Soave points out in Reason.
“The notion that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer, had right-wing motivations has apparently remained appealing for leftists, ever since the progressive Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson helped to mainstream this idea in the immediate aftermath of the shocking murder,” Soave wrote.
“Nevertheless, it is absolutely false,” Soave noted. “While Robinson did indeed come from a Republican family, his own motivation for committing the assassination was that he disliked the things Kirk had said about transgender people.”
A producer for the “Charlie Kirk Show” and a longtime employee of Turning Point USA suggested Cross feels free to throw around baseless facts because Jimmy Kimmel did not face any consequences for making the same assertions.
“We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said on his show in September last year. He was pulled from the air for a few days but otherwise did not face any consequences.
And that is the problem, according to Andrew Kolvet, Kirk’s friend and a TPUSA employee.
“This is why the Jimmy Kimmel lie matters. He *nearly* lost his show for lying that it was MAGA that murdered Charlie,” Kolvet wrote, responding to the CNN clip.
“Nearly, but not ultimately,” he wrote.
“That Kimmel faced essentially zero consequences is one reason why leftists still believe the lie and parrot it on CNN.”
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