The New Yorker magazine used to be a showcase for great writers. That was many years ago. More recently it has become a cesspool of mediocre writers striving with great urgency to promote their leftist agendas. And the latest such example of a New Yorker writer crawling deep into the sewer came on Wednesday with this smear masquerading as a story by Kyle Chayka, "Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson Came from the Same Warped Online Worlds."
To say that Chayka sickeningly attempted to put Charlie Kirk and his assassin on the same moral plane, as inferred by the story title, is to give him too much credit. As you will see, Chayka not very subtly promotes the depraved notion that Kirk was morally worse than the assassin.
According to an interview that Robinson’s grandmother gave to the Daily Mail, he grew up in a conservative family that staunchly supported Trump. He attended just one semester of college before dropping out. He was registered to vote in Utah but was unaffiliated with a party and did not vote in the 2024 Presidential election. Instead, he seems to have spent time in the corners of the internet where young men can become radicalized toward violence.
...No matter what political ideas Robinson may have harbored, he might ultimately be best understood as a participant in that warped online culture.
What seems to be notably lacking in this description of the assassin is any sense of real condemnation of his heinous action. Now compare that description of the assassin to Chayka's smear job on Charlie Kirk:
On the surface, Charlie Kirk had a very different, more traditional path to online notoriety. He made his first appearance on a Fox channel when he was seventeen years old. He rose to fame through conservative media and built his youth organization, Turning Point USA, into a thriving tool of political influence with its own PAC. Kirk had the ear of the Trump Administration and by all accounts helped to staff its ranks. Ezra Klein made the case, in a recent column, that Kirk was practicing politics the “right way,” by staging debates in which he proselytized his brand of conservatism, particularly on tours of universities. Yet Kirk leveraged a version of the same toxic online dynamics and algorithmic-attention sinkholes that can ensnare people like Robinson.
Chayka is only getting started on sliming the person who comes out looking much worse than the actual assassin in the New Yorker.
The kind of free speech and lively discourse that Kirk espoused involved spreading hateful conspiracy theories and misinformation. He shared (and later deleted) inflated human-trafficking arrest numbers plucked from 8chan, supported Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, told Taylor Swift to “submit to your husband,” and targeted prominent Black women while stoking “great replacement” fears.
Kirk was not simply practicing democratic politics; he was a slick and professionalized counterpart to the online troll, someone who understood that reckless lies promulgated through viral sound bites and incendiary podcast monologues repeated ad nauseum can shape today’s public opinion, whether on college campuses or in the halls of the White House.
Wow! Ostensibly comparing Charlie Kirk with his assassin appears to have just been a cover for Chayka's true motive: to lash out at Kirk.
The Trump Administration has promised to crack down on leftist “terrorist networks,” using Kirk’s death as further justification for the unchecked targeting and silencing of its perceived enemies. A growing number of people, including a Washington Post opinion columnist and professors at Clemson University, have already been fired for publicly criticizing Kirk.
"Criticizing Kirk?" More like smearing Kirk as was repeated in this New Yorker story.
