The comforting fiction that Charlie Kirk’s killer was far-right – Vox 

Editor’s Note: Here’s an examination of the “fog of war” time after Charlie Kirk’s killing. It’s a mess, it’s chaos, it’s not true nor un-true –yet. Right, left, progressive — we all fail at times, and often in that fog. We look at it, and grow and learn. Truth, look for truth… – DrWeb

• Politics

Why some progressives lied to themselves about Tyler Robinson.

by Eric Levitz, Sep 20, 2025, 4:00 AM PDT

Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine.

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.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.vox.com/politics/462173/charlie-kirk-killer-motive-tyler-robinson-jimmy-kimmel