The madcap Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland demands that jurors deliver the “Sentence first, then the verdict” during the trial of Knave of Hearts, putting the punishment before the finding of guilt or innocence. In the rabbit hole of American politics, we have witnessed officials announcing the motive behind the killing of Charlie Kirk before any evidence was gathered or any suspect named.
President Trump blamed the “radical left” for the murder on Wednesday, September 10, the same day Mr. Kirk was shot in Utah. Photos were soon released of a “person of interest” wearing a baseball hat and dark glasses. Within hours, still without anyone accused of the crime, the President doubled down, declaring that “we need to beat the hell out of the radical left lunatics” he blamed for the assassination.
This baseless narrative has been amplified by others in the MAGA movement. Once a suspect was in custody, the governor of Utah proclaimed without any substantiation that Tyler Robinson (the son of gun-owning Republicans) had been “radicalized” in college with “leftist ideology.” Presidential advisor Stephen Miller tripled down by ranting–again with no evidence–that Robinson was the product of “an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.”
Whatever actual evidence is ultimately discovered on Tyler Robinson’s media posts, in his conversations with friends and family, in his interrogations with law enforcement (and he is now refusing to cooperate), it will be hard for officials loyal to President Trump to back away from this narrative that pins culpability on a wide swath of their political enemies.
Whoever Tyler Robinson turns out to be, liberal, conservative, or apolitical (he is registered to vote but has never been to the polls and is not aligned with either party), he will be made to fit Mr. Trump’s preconceived profile.
Meanwhile, journalists at Vanity Fair and Newsweek have pointed at other possible motives, including suggestions that the suspect was part of a far-right fringe calling themselves Groypers, led by white supremacist and Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes, a sworn enemy of Charlie Kirk whom he considered too moderate. Engravings on bullet casings found at the crime scene suggest a young man deeply immersed in an online gaming culture full of ironies and double entendres, where even apparently self-explanatory phrases like “Hey fascist, catch!” are not necessarily what they appear. Again, however, the evidence is too thin to draw any definite conclusions.
In normal times, we could wait for the facts to come out. What I fear now is that the whole story may never be known. By shouting “Sentence first, then the verdict!” our Dear Leader, like the Red Queen, has tainted the normal process of investigation that precedes assigning motive, much less determining guilt. By declaring war on the left, he is also waging a war against the impartial weighing of facts that underpins our judicial system. The first casualty of this war, like all wars, will be the truth.
