Americanswers…on 5 Live! Who is Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s suspected killer?

0:00Hello, as you may be very well aware, on Mondays we join Matt Charlie on Five Live and answer the questions that you have sent in. And this week we have had an overwhelming response, people wanting to know more about Tyler Robinson, the suspected gunman who has been arrested for the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah last week. So we'll be discussing what we know about him, what we've learned about his potential motives, what clues there are out there, his family background, anything we have gleaned so far that would try to lead us to understand what happened there. But also at the same time, it's worth reflecting on, and we do, the hate, the division, the polarisation that has been sparked by this killing, which is so much more extreme than anything I've witnessed in America before and goes right to the top as well.

0:50It's actually worrying the calls for vengeance and violence that we're seeing in the light of this murder. And of course, we can't help but mention Peter Mandelson, the ex-British ambassador to Washington, so dramatically sacked last week, just before Donald Trump is due to arrive in the UK on a very high profile state visit. We hear for the first time from Keir Starmer since he sacked Peter Mandelson during the episode. and afterwards we are able to talk to somebody who knows exactly what it's like trying to put together a state visit for Donald Trump. Lord Derrick, Kim Derrick, who was the British ambassador in the United States during Donald Trump's first term.

1:32He planned the first state visit and he comes in to give us all the behind the scenes gossip on exactly what it's like putting together an event like this. You'll hear from him soon but first here's me, Justin and Marianna talking to Matt Charlie on 5 Live. Welcome to AmeriCouncers.

2:17We begin, of course, with the big state visit. A huge moment, a huge honour, as our special guest sweeps in from the United States of America. The whole strong carriage just pulling up now. Crowds up to one deep in places. Yeah, there they are. They're very excited, the crowds. Yeah, of course, travelling from America, but still strong ties to the UK too, Scotland especially. Ashley, we are rolling out the red carpet for President of the US Bureau of the BBC. Sarah Smith is here! Thank you, Matt, Charlie. Thank you, thank you. I shall give a regal wave to everybody who cannot see me on the radio airwaves.

2:58This is exciting. Almost as exciting as Marianna being here. I know. It was enough for me to make the pilgrimage over to Millback. We finally worked out what we need to do. We need to get Sarah to come all the way from America, for you to come all the way from Broadcasting House. And Justin's here as well. He's a bit more of a reliable figure in this. Reliable. A steady pair of hands. Because I don't work in the day. You're enjoying daylight hours. Like a vampire. New titles. Did you enjoy the new AmeriCast titles? Was the slide guitar still? Yeah, the music was still there. Oh, was it still there?

3:35As listeners would probably understand, the biggest topic in the AmeriCast inbox by miles over the weekend has been the death of Charlie Kirk and the impact that's having on American politics. Loads and loads of you getting in touch after he was shot in Utah last week. A huge figure in American politics. Controversial amongst some for his right-wing views, but credited by Trump for helping to win his second term. So, let's start with an email from Jason. He says, I'm a 36-year-old dad of three girls here in the UK. This past Wednesday, sitting with my wife, I found myself in tears in a way I haven't for years.

4:10I'm a Christian and politically conservative, but that's not why I enjoyed listening to Charlie Kirk. What drew me in was the way he modelled the kind of political debate I longed to see in the world. Principled, respectful and willing to engage. We also heard from Michelle on Discord, who said, Is anyone else already nauseated by the deification of Charlie Kirk? I don't condone or approve of any death, but hate speech will only create more hate. If anyone needs to dial down the rhetoric, it's the very people who turned it up to 11 in the first place. and an awful lot of similar responses. What is the mood like in America before you left, Sarah?

4:46Completely different from that. So there's two people who disagree with each other about this story, but doing it in a respectful way, which says, of course, they don't condone or approve of anything that's happened, of political violence of any kind, whether you agreed with Charlie Kirk or not. What's happening in America is frankly frightening. Lots of people online, as you might expect, but also on television and in the public square, right up to the president himself, are using dangerous language about this, where they are saying they're blaming the other side, both of them. Donald Trump says if you call people fascists and Nazis, that's rhetoric that basically created the atmosphere that got Charlie Kirk killed.

5:27Others are going further and saying that everybody from Antifa, anti-fascist protesters to the whole of the left, to the whole of the Democratic Party, There needs to be a legal crackdown on now because they're dangerous. But it's not just the right who are sounding vengeful. On the left, there has been some appalling behaviour where people have been celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk because they didn't agree with his views, laughing about the fact that he supported gun rights and said you had to tolerate a few deaths a year in order to be able to have guns in the Second Amendment and also blaming the right in a way that I have...

6:02Of course, we talk about polarised politics all the time. I have never seen it to the point where the rights say anyone who disagrees with them has created a climate of violence. And the left are responding to that, frankly, by behaving about as badly as you could possibly imagine in those circumstances. And if this doesn't result in other kinds of violent incidents, please God not another death, I will be very surprised. And how much of this is being fuelled online, Marianna? it's really interesting because so much of i mean if you if you look at the timeline here so um the shooting happens charlie kirk is killed you've then got this which we were chatting about on the last episode of the podcast you've got this really extreme division that's becoming even more entrenched where you've got people on the right accusing people of the left of stoking hatred and contributing to this violence and you've got people on the left accusing the right of having stoked that violence in the first place and this back and forth that's occurring in everyone's echo chambers.

6:58Then we get this new information that comes out. So we find out that Tyler Robinson, 22 from Utah, is the person who has been arrested and charged with this. And investigators say his dad turned him in or got him to kind of agree to come in. And they thanked the family for their courage here. And you've had everybody then poring over whatever details they can possibly find about Tyler Robinson. And I know we're going to go into a little bit more detail about perhaps the translation that's required of some of the details that we know about this. Well, in fact, let's bring in Judy, because we've got Judy on the line.

7:34Hi, Judy. Hello. What is your question, which I think leads nicely from what Marianna was saying? Right, you are. My question is what I thought about yesterday, and that is, it's about the reporting of the shooting of Charlie Kirk by Tyler Robinson. I've read a number of Occupy Democrats posts and there I read that Tyler was not, as far as we know, a Democrat but his family are all Republicans This wasn't reported on the news People have assumed Tyler was a Democrat, I think It seems Republicans, and Trump especially are unjustifiably using the shooting as an excuse to whip up hostility against Democrats That's before it's known who exactly Tyler Robinson is.

8:25And the scrawls on the bullet casing suggest he may be a follower of Nick Fuentes. We just don't know. OK, that's it, really. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a really good question. I think it's probably the question that everybody is asking. And what you've identified there, Judy, I think, is the way that everybody is taking the bits of this that fit their narrative and fitting it to their narrative. and being like, right, so... And then overlooking the bits of stuff. Yeah, yeah, so it must be the case that he hated fascism or it must be the case that he was associated with people on the alt-right or it must be whatever thing is useful.

9:00I think there are, as human beings in general, but particularly on the internet, we don't like to sit with any amount of uncertainty and at the moment there are some kind of unanswered questions here. If I just try and explain in as quick a way as I can because it's actually really complicated, even from my point of view, and I spend too much time on social media, but compared to me, these people spend way too much time on social media. I think the only conclusion that we can draw about Tyler Robinson from the engravings, if he was the one responsible for them on the bullet cases, is that he was incredibly online.

9:32And by incredibly online, I don't mean that he spent all his time on X or TikTok or any of the mainstream platforms, but that he was frequenting corners of the internet, like message boards, places where people use... So there are certain phrases on the bullet cases. For example, this notices, bulges, oh, well, what's this? That connects to this community called the furry community. And I can already see Justin's like, oh, do I know this? Which is kind of about like cutesy animals, like anthropomorphic kind of animal characters. But he could have been trolling that community or not. Then there's various references to fascism, like the second one that says, hey, fascist catch.

10:11but it has these keyboard symbols, which are actually from gamers, we're quick to point out, from this video game, which is called Helldivers 2, which is kind of like a satire of fascism, sort of. And then there's this Chau Bella song. So all you can really tell is that he was putting all these references in, which people could use how they choose to, but that a lot of it kind of looks like trolling, like trolling in its raw sense, which is not sending people online abuse. It's like winding everyone up. Don't we have to take a step back? I mean, he was messed up. He was a messed up young kid. I mean, the politics of it, whether he's a Democrat, a registered Republican or registered Democrat...

10:51But this is the problem, but people don't like that. It's like people who have got a political agenda for whatever reason here, maybe they're just very distressed by it or maybe they genuinely have another motive. They're going to take this stuff, and the problem is you then get the fringes of the internet spilling into the real world, and people struggling to decipher it. But he had gone to a terrible place, and the terrible place is social media, and that's where he had gone. and all of these things that he was referring to that you've just explained to us are part of it. He was also brought up, it would seem, within the Mormon faith.

11:20He was, according to Spencer Cox, the governor. He was living romantically with someone who was transgender or wanted to be transgender. That would be something that would be outside the bounds of normal behavior in the Mormon church. There are all sorts of issues then about how he would have felt about his life and about his family and about his faith or former faith. I mean, there are a lot of really messed up people. And I think, you know, the answer to the question, I think in a sense you're quite right. But I don't think I don't even make any assumptions at all about a kind of political manifesto.

11:56But what you can say is that there's an atmosphere of violence stoked by both sides. And this isn't the kind of BBC both sides is. It genuinely is, as Sarah was explaining, stoked by both sides, that plays on the minds of these damaged individuals and makes them do what they do. And if you were going to extrapolate this at all, and we don't extrapolate things, but if you were going to kind of analyse what this could tell us, I think one of the only takeaways, other than that he spent a lot of time online, is that if you were a troll looking to troll in that pure sense, the idea that we now, as BBC presenters, are sitting here in a Five Live studio explaining any of these memes, like the last one that said, if you read this, you are gay LMAO, laughing my arse off.

12:36It's like pure trolling in that sense. Again, we might never know. But also, the big difference between the US and the UK is that in the UK, if there was a case like this and someone had been charged, no-one would talk about it because there's contempt of court laws. You definitely wouldn't have the Prime Minister... You wouldn't have senior politicians and public figures going, oh, I think you probably did it for this reason. I mean, even that press conference on Friday was wild, the amount of detail that the police and the governor were going into. Yeah, and we almost certainly wouldn't already know what was written on the bullet cases, for instance, if we were covering this here.

13:13And there will be commentary all the way through this trial as and when it ever comes to court, which I fear and suspect will not help. Now, Governor Spencer Cox, the Utah governor, who has been speaking out quite a lot because that's where it happened, I'd not come across him before. He is a very impressive man who has done a terrific job of saying, could everybody please calm down? The violence can metastasize as hate can through the community and that we're living in dangerous times and we need to cool it. But the response from Republicans, I mean, and Donald Trump hasn't sounded very approving of him either.

13:47And from just below Donald Trump, he's getting a world of hate now for daring to say that killing your political opponents isn't a good idea. It's a bit off topic, but I do wonder if Cox, I mean, if he wants to, I don't know anything about him. He's quite young. He's only 50 or so, I think. And he said, you know, there is a difference between speech and violence. And we ought to know that there is a difference. Violence is violence. We know what violence is. Speech is not violence. So he's got kind of tough messages for everyone across the board. He's expressed them calmly, cogently. Does he run?

14:18Does he run for the nomination? The problem is, though, as well, and, you know, the comments he made, which received quite a lot of praise, but also criticism online, again, they feed into this very fragmented echo chamber world of social media algorithms where people are constantly being promoted to stuff that is provocative, that is rage bait, that makes you angry and upset. That is how, that's the design of the sites. And so I really think that we can't overlook, not that anger and violence, as we've talked about before, haven't existed for many, many, many, many centuries, but just the role that social media is playing in, even that, which I think if you watched it, lots of people would have turned around and said, oh, that seems quite a reasonable viewpoint to have.

14:57Like, everyone just needs to calm down a bit. Even online, it was being picked and poured over again and then further fuelling that division that existed because it's kind of like these in-out groups, like you're in teams, and if your team has decided something and you have to stick with your team no matter what, even when it starts to become unreasonable or just way too heated. And then before you know it, you've gone down such a sort of rabbit hole of... Everything, yeah, exactly. We've had quite a lot of questions as well about guns in America. following the shooting of Charlie Kirk. In part, so, email from Kate in Swansea says, in your last episode, you all sounded scandalised by the Democrat Congresswoman, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, because of what she said after Kirk's killing.

15:38So, after the last week, she said, every single day there were people in this building, as in Congress, to continue to vote against doing anything. They vote against universal background checks. They continue to support legislation and also remove any way to block the mentally ill, to block extremists, to block people with histories and records of domestic violence from getting guns in their hands. So are we going to do something about this or not? So Kate's email says, if we heard the move correctly and you were slash are scandalised, we're wondering why. To us, Mr. Cazio-Cortez's calls for action on US gun laws seems totally understandable following the deaths by guns of children of Mr Kirk in the space of a week.

16:12I also want to bring in a clip here because on Friday night on Newsnight, I spoke to another Conservative podcast host, Dave Rubin, who was a friend of Charlie Kirk's, and I asked him if the death of his friend Charlie Kirk had made him think again at all about access to guns. No, absolutely not. And I think that in your country a lot more, there would be a better respect for free speech, quite frankly, and there would be more people who would feel safe if they had more access to guns and felt that they could defend themselves. There are weapons that will kill people, but infringing on our Second Amendment rights, which I know that there's a gut impulse to do right now would be the worst thing and certainly not something Charlie would be for.

16:54Interesting point, not something Charlie would be for. And there is this clip that's been doing the rounds enormously where he is on stage at a different event, Charlie Kirk himself saying, look, 50 ,000 people a year get killed in automobile accidents and we don't talk about banning cars. Some people get killed every year by guns. We shouldn't therefore be talking about banning guns and he says there will always be a certain number of gun deaths and that is acceptable in order for us to be able to exercise our Second Amendment rights and have guns ourselves. That was his view of course it's not one that's widely shared in the United Kingdom but I mean your guess there was a different room.

17:31Absolutely right. It's not what Charlie would have wanted to be talking about. I think it was me that was sounding scandalised about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and what she said. I'll back you up. Because she went on. I was less scandalised of the group. She said, completely fair point to say, you know, we're always trying to get restrictions on guns, on background checks and trying to block the mentally ill from getting guns and Republicans generally vote against it. What she went on to say was anybody who has voted against these restrictions is personally to blame for what had happened to Charlie Kirk.

18:04And that's the kind of finger pointing and demonising that is not helping take the heat out of this situation. That is exactly the sort of thing that the left do not need to be doing in response to the accusations that were coming from the White House. That's what I was scandalised about. And my point was that if you want to run for president, which I think we agree she probably does, in 28, you think of, you know, Reagan at his best, Clinton at his best, you think certainly of Obama when he talked about race. You deliver difficult messages to your own side, and if you assume in this your own side is people who want gun reform, and actually a majority of Americans, you could argue, want gun reform.

18:39So it's, you know, it's a perfectly legitimate case to make. But there is a moment and what that statement was lacking was any understanding that a young man with two little kids and a wife had been shot who was doing nothing more than speaking at a university. And I think that that's the difficulty for her when it comes to running for president and for pulling in some support, not just from her own side, but from the other side, too, which at least in the old days is something a president used to do. Although, of course, you know, you could argue you don't need to do anymore. That was kind of my point was that.

19:14The problem is that she's also playing to her... I mean, I love that we're just rehashing what we already said, but that she is playing to her echo chamber because she'll be more criticised for not being like that by some of the people who very strongly support her, which isn't to say that it's the right moment or thing to do. I don't think any of us say it's right or wrong. It just feels sort of politically inept, or maybe not. You're saying maybe not. Yeah, because you have to reach beyond your own echo chamber. I was thinking over the weekend, you'll remember, Justin, and the speech Bill Clinton made after the Oklahoma bombing, the address to the joint houses of Congress that Obama made after Gabby Giffords, the Democratic representative in Arizona, was shot.

19:50Those were moments of national unity where a president stood up with great rhetoric and was able to talk about healing, about bringing people together, about the greater project of democracy, about the bigger idea of America that could survive these kind of moments. That is the opposite of what we've heard in the last few days, unfortunately. So why wouldn't Donald Trump do that? Because you're right, the president has a unique place in a position to do that, to sort of lies above. Is it just because it's not in his nature? Is it because he's not running again? And that is a choice by him personally, isn't it?

20:31I think there's lots and lots of reasons. I think he does feel this way in terms of it being them and us. And I think he feels it personally, acutely, because he was so very nearly killed. I mean, he was quite changed, apparently, by the fact that one of the two attempts on his life last year came so very close. So there is something viscerally personal about it. And he was a personal good friend of Charlie Kirk's. I mean, this is remarkably close. But he is a very partisan person. So you wouldn't expect him because when he listed all of the events of political violence that had been recently, it was all against Republicans.

21:02and he missed out some really awful things. It was Minnesota lawmakers that were shot in their own homes just a few months ago, didn't happen to mention them. But it plays into his wider crackdown on crime. This has happened at a time when, as you know, he's got the National Guard on the streets of Washington. He's talking about sending them into Memphis, possibly back to L.A. He's wanting to take personal executive control of law enforcement across the United States. This goes to this idea of him as the president who's cracking, not only cracking down on crime, but taking charge of all of this in a highly partisan way that will suit his politics for the next nearly three and a half years.

21:45You're right, he's not running again, but he's got a long time left in an office in which he's gathering more and more power towards himself as he's doing it. And this will not hurt in that enterprise. Is there anyone calling for gun control? Online? I would actually say, and I think this probably backs up what we were mentioning about that AOC might be playing to her echo chamber, that in the much more left-leaning groups on social media, I've seen quite a lot of videos on TikTok, for example, of younger people saying, well, I mean, they haven't gone as far necessarily as condemning the killing of Charlie Kirk, although they haven't said that they think it's a good thing.

22:20But they have kind of said, well, this is a byproduct of it would be true to say that you shouldn't kill people. But also Charlie Kirk is someone who advocated for guns and they felt wasn't as empathetic as he could have been when other people like children, for example, were killed in mass shootings. And and that this is kind of the product of it type thing. There's been quite a lot of that chat and analysis, which, again, some people have found very offensive. Other people think it's justified because it's a political argument. and that sort of is the... I would say that it feels like it's got a little bit less heated probably over the past, like, day or so.

22:56I think because it's almost confused people a bit, the information about Tyler Robinson, that they're kind of all a bit like, ooh... Discombobulated. Yeah, we're not quite sure what to do with this. Just very briefly, Justin, what do you make of Dave Rubin's suggestion that free speech would be better protected in the UK if we all had more access to guns? What I make of it is this, that there is a cultural rift between the United States and the United Kingdom, Sarah will be very aware of this, which you only fully grasp when you live there for a bit. And this is one of those things. Religion is another, religiosity.

23:29Open talk of religious faith, I think, is another thing that divides us. But, you know, it's not just tomato, tomato. There are a whole load of things that are really, really profound. And this belief, and it's a genuine belief. I don't think Dave Rubin was kind of messing around when he said that to you. who probably genuinely thinks that if we all had guns in the studio, we'd be safer and would get on better. It's such an alien idea to people here. I know, exactly. And as opposed to that, I think the cultural connections, oh, we watch the same telly, we eat the same food and all that, and then you're confronted with something like that.

24:00And it was a really striking moment, which is why I wanted to play it. Now, the reason that Sarah is here is because President Trump arrives in the UK for his state visit on Tuesday night. But it's all been a bit overshadowed by the departure of Britain's ambassador to the US. Peter Maddelson over his friendship, ongoing friendship, it turned out, with the convicted penalophile, Geoffrey Epstein. Well, we've just heard from Keir Starmer. He's been speaking to reporters about his decision to fire Lord Maddelson. Had I known then what I know now, I'd have never appointed him. Because what emerged last week were emails, Bloomberg emails, which showed that the nature and extent of the relationship that Peter Maddelson had with Epstein was far different to what I had understood to be the position when I appointed him.

24:49On top of that, what the email showed was he was not only questioning, but wanting to challenge the conviction of Epstein at the time. That, for me, went and cut across the whole approach that I've taken on violence against women and girls for many years and this government's approach. On top of that, what emerged last week on Wednesday evening late were Peter Manilson's responses to questions that have been put to him by government officials. I looked at those responses and I did not find them at all satisfied and therefore on the basis of those three things the nature and extent of the relationship being far different to what I'd understood be the position at the point of appointment that was kia starmer speaking a little earlier about his decision to fire peter maddison let's go now to helena in loughborough who's got a question about the state visit and peter maddison all that hi helena hi yeah um i was just wondering how awkward is it going to be for donald trump i know he's got a very thick skin but there are certain similarities between Epstein's friendship with him?