Do Republicans Know They’re Lying?

Charlie Kirk's murder has become the Right's latest Reichstag Fire -- a false pretext for silencing political opponents.

1. Republican Epistemology

We don’t yet know a lot about Tyler Robinson, the young man who killed Charlie Kirk, but we do know that, as yet, there is not a shred of evidence that he is a left-wing activist radicalized by a vast conspiracy of America-hating foundations, publications, and professors. If the text messages released by the police are authentic, Robinson’s motives are at once left-leaning (complaining of Kirk’s “hatred”) and extremely online (making use of gamer tropes and memes). But by all accounts he acted alone, responding to things Kirk said about gay and trans people.

And yet, as I write these words, the United States government is promising to attack left-leaning nonprofit foundations, create blacklists of people deemed to have criticized Kirk or celebrated his murder, and prosecute “hate speech” against political figures like Kirk (though presumably not against ones like Barack Obama or Joe Biden). The goalposts of authoritarianism continue to march rightward.

Do Republicans know that this is based on a lie? Can we even know what they know?

For years, I’ve been interested in Republican Epistemology — what we can know about what Republicans know. By “Republicans” here, I mean the politicians, advisors, and media figures who set the messaging for the movement, not the rank and file who are the audience for that messaging. I often wonder: What are they thinking?

This is hardly the first time that Trump and his minions have said obviously false things, after all. Some of these lies are ridiculous (crowd sizes, hair weaves), but many are profound. There’s the Big Lie about the 2020 election, of course, which is demonstrably false but which led to a violent mob attacking the Capitol building (some of whom were bussed to D.C. by Charlie Kirk’s organization) and to a conspiracy theory now believed by almost a third of Americans. Or the lies about immigrant crime, even though the crime rate among migrants is lower than that among native-born citizens. And the lies about trans people, amplified in recent days. And so on.

These aren’t matters of interpretation or spin. When Republicans say that the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ law helps working people, that is, to some degree, open to debate. To me, massive tax cuts that disproportionately favor billionaires, accompanied by cuts in essential services, do not help working people. But there is at least a theory (however discredited) that lower taxes on the rich spur more job creation.

Even climate denial is supported by a pile of junk science, fake think tanks, and fossil-fuel-sponsored conferences, books, and movies that deny the actual scientific consensus on global warming. Do some Republicans know that they’re endangering the ecological balance of the planet? Maybe; I don’t know.

But when Donald Trump says on national television that Kilmar Abrego Garcia has ‘MS 15’ tattooed on his fingers, when those figures were clearly photoshopped in next to an array of other symbols, that is a different kind of lie. When he says that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats, that is a different kind of lie. When, years ago, Trump modified a poster of the National Weather Service’s hurricane forecast using a sharpie, that was also a different kind of lie.

These lies are vranyo: lies not meant to be believed. They are instances of a kind of fascist nihilism, gleefully delighting in the Leader’s ability to say whatever he wants, to shape facts in his own image. His followers will choose, consciously or not, to believe him, and his opponents can simply be criticized (or worse) for lying.

So what about Robinson? Is the claim that he was radicalized by some left-wing conspiracy meant to be believed? Or is it simply vranyo, a transparently false excuse for a crackdown on political opponents?

2. Extremely Online

Here’s what appears to be true, based on the evidence we have in front of us, knowing that it’s still early, that there is likely to be much more evidence yet to come, and that almost everything everyone has said about Robinson has turned out to be at least partly incorrect.

Robinson is apparently not a right-wing Groyper (a neo-Nazi follower of Nick Fuentes) or otherwise conservative. He is not a left-wing activist. He appears to be a very-post-2020 creature of the internet, combining basically left-wing political views (at least on LGBTQ+ topics, based on the text messages) with neither-left-nor-right online culture.

For example, the bullet casings recovered by police contain inscriptions that are well-known in online subcultures: an insult originally derived from the Furries subculture (if you don’t know what those are, I’m not going to tell you); an anti-fascist lyric that is also popular on the Far Right; a well-known (among gamers) reference to the game Helldivers 2; and a simple bit of adolescent trolling (“if you read this, you are gay”).

To really understand these references, I highly recommend Ryan Broderick’s newsletter, Garbage Day, and podcast, Panic World, which go into this stuff in detail, drawing on Broderick’s fifteen years of reporting on the dark corners of the Internet. As Broderick said in the episode about Robinson, the vast majority of people over thirty have no idea what any of this means. If you think it’s about a spectrum from right to left, you’re wrong.

Here’s Broderick with a short summary:

Of course, this reality pleases no one. Liberals were hoping and praying that, paraphrasing Utah Governor Spencer Cox, he was “not one of us.” There was some evidence that Robinson was a creature of the Right: one photo shows him in a Halloween costume as a tracksuited European, squatting like a meme of Pepe the Frog, now a symbol of the Groyper movement.

There was also hope on the Left that Robinson was part of accelerationist, chaos-anarchist online subcultures like Com and 764, which seek to bring about the fall of society through real-world and online acts of chaotic violence. (Think Fight Club but extremely online.) Which he may yet turn out to be: there are ideologies in these communities, but they range from left-wing anti-capitalism to right-wing anti-elitism and everything in between; often they horseshoe together. Also, nothing these people say can be taken at face value; everything is ironic, sarcastic, for the lulz. The whole conceit of seriousness is part of what’s being attacked.

But if the text messages are authentic (their diction is so bizarre, formal, and specific that some have questioned them — here, read for yourself), it appears he committed this heinous act in opposition to Kirk’s many extreme statements about queer people.

One thing there’s no evidence for, however, is that Robinson is part of a giant left-wing octopus that poses a clear and present danger to America. One claim is that Robinson was radicalized in college — but he only attended one semester at Utah State University before enrolling in Dixie Technical College, near his hometown, where he was in the third year of an electrical apprenticeship program. Neither of these institutions are liberal bastions of indoctrination.

There have also been insinuations that Robinson was part of Antifa, whatever that means, but there’s no evidence for that, Antifa is not an organization, it's not clear what 'part of' means, and whatever it is seems to barely exist anymore.

The unfortunate reality, if the texts are legit, is that Robinson is a mishmash of left, quasi-right, and neither-left-nor-right. Unfortunate, that is, if you want to blame the Other Side for all that is evil in the world.

3. Der Neue Reichstag

On February 27, 1933, a Dutch anarchist named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the German parliament building, the Reichstag. It is now generally understood that van der Lubbe acted alone and was not a communist (though some historians disagree with this view). Yet the Nazis accused the German Communist party of setting the blaze, and the next day President von Hindenburg approved an emergency decree called "The Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State." On the false pretext that the Communists were plotting to overthrow the state, the decree declared a state of emergency and suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including restraints on police investigations. The police were authorized to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without charges, dissolve political organizations, and suppress publications, and the central government was authorized to overrule state and local laws.

Does any of this sound familiar?

AI image from Briefings for Britain

Obviously, we are not living in Nazi Germany — I don’t mean to engage in the kind of hyperbole that I’m criticizing in this essay. But then again, neither were Germans in February of 1933; at that point, the Nazi party held only a plurality in parliament and Hitler had only been chancellor for a month. He was not yet a full-on dictator. And the pattern is similar: someone does something bad, an emergency is declared, and the entire Left is blamed, justifying a crackdown on civil liberties and a targeting of liberal institutions. This is how authoritarians operate: with a veneer of legality, in a fog of supposed national emergency.

We’ve even seen a similar pattern quite recently: one attack on a young, priapic DOGE aide justifies calling in the National Guard to Washington, D.C. Isolated instances of antisemitism on college campuses justify withholding billions of dollars of funding for scientific research. And so on.

Here’s a statement from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, replaying the Reichstag Fire script while on the Charlie Kirk show guest-hosted by Vice President JD Vance:

We are gonna channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot & dismantle these terrorist networks … the organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again. For the American people, it will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

That is chilling stuff; I appreciate the efforts of some progressives to say “don’t worry, they can’t do this; they’re just trying to scare you,” but I dunno, the entire might of the federal government, military, DOJ, FBI, abetted by an obedient Congress and pliant Supreme Court — feels like it could do some real damage.

And let’s be clear about how inaccurate all this is. On the same show this week, Vance said that “while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left.” Now, I’m not sure what Vance meant by ‘lunatics’ but if we’re talking about incidents of violence and murder, Vance is extremely wrong:

Incidentally, the Department of Justice has reportedly removed from its website the National Institute for Justice study that generated these statistics. So here’s similar data from the Cato Institute:

And here’s some from the ADL:

So does Vance know he’s lying? Or does he think he’s telling the truth? If my own and tens of thousands of other lives weren’t hanging in the balance right now, these questions would just be fascinating.

4. Epistemic Nihilisms

Unsurprisingly, I think the epistemological answer is both/and. Vance, Miller et al. know there is no vast left-wing conspiracy and know that they are willfully using the Kirk assassination as a pretext for a nationwide crackdown. But they also have long believed that “the Left” is out to destroy America, and if this particular pretext isn’t totally true, the overall situation is. It’s a lie that points to a bigger truth.

The epistemology of Donald Trump is a bit different. As has been exhaustively documented, this man lies all the time; in his first term in office, he made 30,573 false or misleading statements, and that was before the Big Lie. Maybe the little lies are even more telling: pretending to be his own publicist, even using a fake voice; printing fake copies of Time magazine with himself on the cover; even the combover, which journalist Michael Wolff finally explained in his 2018 book. This preceded his political career: there’s the fake university, the fake foundation, the fake ‘ownership’ of properties to which he’d only licensed his name. But as I’ve written about before, Trump’s unique ability to seem like he’s telling the truth while in fact lying all the time is perhaps the key to his success as a con man president.

Some people say that this rapid-fire nonstop deceit is a political tactic, learned from Roy Cohn and memorialized by Steve Bannon’s exhortation to “flood the zone with shit.” Maybe so. Or maybe Trump has been lying to everyone for seventy years and has a sociopathic (even psychopathic) inability to distinguish between objective truth and subjective desire.

But for people other than Trump, I think it’s become impossible to distinguish when someone believes what they’re saying, or believes that what they’re saying may or may not be true but points to a larger truth, or is simply lying. At some point, the swirl of cognitive dissonance, audience capture, and communal truth engulf individual psychology. MAGA is a kind of messianic religious faith.

I’ll close with a dark, final irony in all this, which is that if Tyler Robinson was swimming in a sea of extremely online nihilism, so are his MAGA opponents turning our civil society into a Putinesque carnival of nihilism in which vranyo is just as good as the truth. (I’m reminded here of M Gessen’s writings first of Putin’s and then of Trump’s successful campaigns to utterly separate fact from fantasy, history from conspiracy.) . In the service of whatever higher values they claim to hold — God, family, country, whatever — they are willing to ignore their own souls, which, in quiet moments, surely know better. They knowingly spread lies about progressives in order to defeat us. They hold up Kirk as an icon of free speech, and in the next moment call for firings of anyone who dared to criticize him. This, too, is nihilism.

In both cases, the online nihilists and the Machiavellian ones, great pain lies below their acts of verbal and physical violence. Online kids fear they have no lives; conservative nationalists fear they have no country. In both cases, the stakes are too high for the truth.

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Thanks subscribers for your support! I’m gratified that my last two posts (on Charlie Kirk’s religious faith and Bari Weiss’s journalistic strategy) have found a wide audience. I’d love to increase subscriber revenue so I can do this work more — please consider upgrading to paid if you’ve not done so yet.

Here are some things I’ve been reading this past week:

• As noted in the text, Garbage Day has been doing great work in the wake of the Kirk shooting. This and this are great analysis, much more detail than I could offer in the space above. In many ways, this really was the Internet’s first assassination, crafted by and for online culture.

• In the Eerily Prophetic Statements department, check out Don Shewey’s quotation of Liesl Schillinger’s summary of Stendhal’s advice to elites wishing to suck up to autocrats.

• The NatCon conference is now old news, but John Ganz did an excellent analysis of the blood-and-soil nationalism espoused by some of its speakers.

• I loved this NY Times video on the wellness-to-conspiracy/RFK/wacko pipeline.

• Finally, on the spiritual side of the house, I loved this new, devotionally juicy cover of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord by kirtan performer Anadi with electronic psychedelic spiritual wizard East Forest :

Let that devotion carry you through your day.