ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t suspended for very long for preposterously claiming that Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson, was a right-wing MAGA type. In the wake of Kirk’s killing, the media aggressively played dumb, claiming the motive was “elusive” and “complicated.”
Now we’re seeing the effects of the misleading coverage. According to a November 25 McLaughlin & Associates national poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted for the Media Research Center, less than a quarter of respondents correctly described Tyler Robinson, the man accused of murdering TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, as left-wing.
The poll asked participants the following question:
On September 10, 2025, Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus. What was the political ideology of his killer?
Options for answers included: “left-wing,” “moderate,” “right-wing,” “no ideology,” “other,” and “don’t know.”
The plurality of respondents (27.5%) professed no knowledge of Robinson’s political ideology. Less than a quarter – 24.1 percent – identified him as left-wing, while 22.3 percent incorrectly asserted that he was right-wing. Another 13.2 percent claimed he was either moderate or a centrist.
The evidence that Robinson was a left-wing radical is voluminous.
- In a text conversation obtained by investigators, he plainly stated his motive: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
- Multiple family members publicly confirmed his left-wing tendencies. Robinson’s mother remarked that over the past year, her son had started to “lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights-oriented.” Another family member recalled him expressing outright hatred of conservatives.
- Robinson inscribed his bullet casings with unambiguously far-left messages, despite the bad-faith insistence by corporate journalists that they were somehow inscrutable. The slogans included, “Hey, fascist, catch,” and “Bella Ciao” (the name of a left-wing song popular among antifa radicals).
With nearly a quarter of respondents convinced that Kirk was killed by a right winger, it is inarguable that the corporate media have mangled the facts of the case. But the fact that the most common response was professed ignorance about Robinson’s motive highlights another pernicious aspect of the press’s approach to this story: their lack of interest.
To left-wing journalists, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension for lying about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer was orders of magnitude more deserving of coverage than the shooting itself. As soon as ABC yanked the show, the corporate media pivoted to focus on what they deemed a case of government censorship. CNN host Jake Tapper called the four-day hiatus “pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Americans had just days to catch any of the press’s few quiet admissions that Robinson was a left-wing radical. After that, Charlie Kirk was relegated to the role of background character in articles and news reports resulting from his own murder.
Given the media’s disastrous mishandling of this story, it should come as no surprise that respondents’ news consumption habits proved a significant determining factor in how they understood Robinson’s politics. Only 18.8 percent of those who primarily watched left-of-center cable news outlets were able to correctly describe his ideology, as compared to 27.7 percent who asserted that he was right-wing. Surprisingly, even among right-of-center cable news viewers, barely over a third of participants (33.5%) answered that Robinson was left-wing, and a still-considerable 18.0 percent believed him to be right-wing.
The professed political ideology of respondents also heavily affected their perception of Robinson’s own political proclivities. A whopping 35.4 percent of liberals believed he was right-wing, while just 12.7 percent identified him as left-wing. For conservatives, 17.0 percent answered that he was right-wing, whereas over 41.9 percent described him as left-wing.
Students were the single least likely cohort to correctly identify Robinson’s political bent; 33.2 percent of students believed Charlie Kirk’s accused murderer was right-wing, while a paltry 4.0 percent accurately labeled him left-wing.
The American left appears to have a political violence problem. According to a September survey by YouGov, nearly one-fifth (18%) of liberals believed politically-motivated violence was at least “sometimes justified.” But despite leftists’ burgeoning fondness for political terrorism, the McLaughlin poll demonstrates that the left-wing media remain unwilling even to acknowledge when their own side has engaged in it.
