The morning after course selection period ended, Penn students settled into their early-semester routines: finalizing schedules, sending off last-minute club applications, and stacking coffee chats on Google Calendar. Social media brimmed with posts determining, as usual, who’s throwing on Saturday. But then, word spread that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot during a debate at Utah Valley University. Following that, a post by President and 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump on Truth Social confirmed that Kirk, the 31-year-old co-founder of Turning Point USA (self-titled as the “largest conservative student movement”), had died.
By that evening, a campus usually occupied with ordering fake IDs and ranking fraternities turned into an amateur detective bureau, churning out theories about the shooter’s message while authorities had yet to actually identify the suspect as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. We saw similar reckless takes to what wound up last year, when the New York City Police Department announced 2020 Engineering graduate Luigi Mangione as a suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Even now, just over a week after the attack on Kirk, the thin record of incriminating evidence offers little clarity on Robinson’s motive. Authorities — already under fire after FBI Director Kash Patel gave inconsistent public updates on the suspect — have only shared that Robinson isn’t cooperating with investigators.
Yet on Sidechat, an anonymous forum platform, many at Penn accused the other side using non sequiturs, casting the tragedy of Kirk’s assassination as a Rorschach test for their politics. Penn’s gun control advocates quickly pointed to Kirk’s remark from April 2023 — “You will never live in a society with an armed citizenry and not have a single gun death… I think it’s worth it” — and stressed the almost karmic irony of a man who defended the cost of gun deaths being felled by one.
One such student’s post read, “The man who said ‘gun deaths are necessary’ finally decided to stand on business and support his claims.” Another chimed in, “[Kirk] advocated for more guns, so …” Both of these armchair diagnoses seemed to misunderstand the ethos of the conservative argument: A shooting carried out by an assailant and a defensive shooting that stops the assailant can both end in a gun death.
Conservative commentators, for their part, described Kirk as a martyr silenced by left-wing extremism and used his death to argue that speaking as a Republican in public life had become a mortal risk. A post lamenting, “Y’all are fucking disgusting for celebrating,” with a follow-up that “[Kirk] was a father, a husband, a son … this is EVIL,” drew over 100 upvotes.
But if family makes a victim more deserving of sympathy, then the five to eight people shot on an average day in Philadelphia, many of them who have families themselves, should provoke the same response. They don’t, though. And they weren’t the ones comparing the Prophet Muhammad to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Family status only matters when it fits the story we want to tell.
As for Robinson, we do know that he grew up in a conservative, Trump-supporting family. Relatives told reporters they are registered Republicans, but Robinson himself is unaffiliated. Early in the investigation, his only hint at a motive was a series of engravings on bullet casings, all of which crib from internet slang as opposed to any coherent ideology. Even Robinson’s seemingly leftist messages — “Bella Ciao,” an anti-Nazi folk song, and “Hey fascist! Catch!” — play double duty by referencing the popular Netflix show Money Heist and various shooter video games. Unfortunately, many at Penn grabbed the casings and ran with them, ignoring contradictions to paper over the cracks in our theories of persecution or poetic justice.
Last year, after a Facebook status from Mangione about “one of [his] fishies g[etting] sucked into the filter” resurfaced on Sidechat, Penn’s aspiring prison wives concluded that the convict was just a “nice boy” that they “could fix.” Ironic or not, these comments recalibrated Mangione’s campus afterlife as worthy of affection — or at least a willingness to treat him as a subject of in-jokes and memes. And I doubt that these commenters using campy language attached much gravitas to their muse’s worldview, which leaned toward a heterodox sort of right-wing populism and included some interest in now Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Mangione had also opposed identity politics, DEI, and “wokeness.”
Students likely ignored these contradictions because there was something seductive about the idea of a Penn Engineering grad turned vigilante. Someone with a splashy resume who seemed to take revenge on the kind of corporate niche everyone on Locust claims to hate but secretly hopes to join. Kirk was already a highly visible, polarizing public figure whose every move and opinion had been debated and used as rage-bait for years, so he couldn’t become a vessel for our projections in the same way. And as a consequence, we rewrote the event itself. But in the rush to make it mean something, too many at Penn ended up sounding like Robinson himself: chronically online and desperate to force a meme-addled act of violence into a political narrative.
MRITIKA SENTHIL is a junior from Columbia, S.C. Her email is mritikas@upenn.edu.
