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Velshi 9/13/25 | ️ Breaking News September 13, 2025
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00:00Good morning to you. It's Saturday, September the 13th. I'm Ali Velshi. We begin this morning
00:04with the latest in the investigation into the killing of Charlie Kirk. The suspect, 22-year-old
00:09Tyler Robinson, is in custody. Investigators are in the process of putting together pieces
00:14of information toward a possible motive and have discovered that Robinson left behind
00:19ammunition engraved with a reference to fascism and obscure internet memes and video games.
00:25Joining us now from the campus of Utah Valley University's NBC News correspondent Steve
00:30Patterson, who's been following the complex developments of this story closely. Steve,
00:34good morning to you. What are we learning about both the suspect and a possible motive?
00:41So, Ali, obviously this all, the break in the case occurred just a few, you know, a few days ago.
00:47Obviously, the FBI putting out those images, more video, surveillance video, trying to get anybody
00:53who might know, a person of interest as described at the time, and contact authorities. That did
00:59happen. It was Robinson's own father, saw some of those images, got in contact with a family,
01:05youth pastor. That pastor then in turn got in contact with the local sheriff's department and
01:10an arrest was made. You know, obviously this started with the investigation really focusing on
01:16gathering more video, more photo evidence, and then again putting that out to the public and then
01:22leading to that arrest. Meanwhile, you know, we're learning a little bit more about Robinson. Described
01:27as somebody that was kind to the people that knew him, somebody that was intelligent, lived in
01:32Washington, Utah, which is about four hours from where I'm standing, was attending a technical
01:38university on an electrical apprenticeship, but before then got into Utah State University. This was
01:43somebody that was considered highly intelligent, again, somebody that was considerate but reserved,
01:47but that does pair with what investigators say, which is that they were hearing he was getting
01:52more political as time went on, as the years went on, and somebody that obviously knew about this
01:58rally that Kirk was having and was not afraid to list his misgivings about Charlie Kirk. That,
02:06of course, pairs with some of the cultural elements that were found on that ammunition,
02:09that rifle that was discovered by investigators, all part of the investigation into this search
02:15for the motive, and obviously with charges that will likely be coming as early as Tuesday.
02:20This has also created something of an atmosphere. Obviously, people in Washington, D.C.,
02:25very concerned about safety and security, lawmakers canceling events, and then the online community,
02:32teachers, lawmakers, people in the corporate world, anybody that has posted anything making light
02:38of the Charlie Kirk murder is being called out. There's a lot of vast sort of cancellations
02:43of folks who speak their mind online about this. I don't want to call it a witch hunt,
02:47but it is certainly a concerted effort, not only by members of the conservative populace,
02:52but by people who own businesses, people, again, in the political world in Washington, D.C.
02:57This atmosphere of tension has only increased since the shooting. Meanwhile, Robinson in the Utah
03:03County Jail, again, expected to face charges as early as Tuesday during his first court appearance.
03:08Camp is here, shut down until at least Wednesday. Steve, it's a complicated and fast-moving story,
03:14and we can always rely on you to make it make sense for us. I appreciate that, sir.
03:19Steve Patterson for us in Utah. Over the last 15 years or so, there has been a surge of high-profile,
03:25politically motivated acts of violence in America against members of both parties.
03:31The victims have been politicians. They've been public figures with all different points of view,
03:35going back to 2011 when Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot and gravely wounded at an
03:41event with her constituents. She survived a gunshot wound to the head. She suffered aphasia as a result.
03:48She's now a fierce advocate for common-sense gun laws. In 2017, the Republican Congressman
03:53Steve Scalise was shot and wounded at a congressional baseball practice. In 2020, a group of men plotted
03:59and came dangerously close to kidnapping Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. On January 6, 2021,
04:06a violent mob of Donald Trump supporters who accepted his big lie about the stolen 2020 election
04:11stormed the U.S. Capitol. Five police officers died in connection with the attack. More than 1,500
04:17people were charged, 1,270 were convicted, and all of those defendants were either fully pardoned
04:25or had their sentences commuted by Donald Trump on his first day back in office.
04:30In 2022, an assailant broke into the home of the then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her
04:35husband with a hammer. She wasn't home at the time. The attacker later admitted that she was the
04:41intended target. Paul Pelosi suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his arm and his hand.
04:46And just in the last year, two assassination attempts against Donald Trump. In April, a man broke into
04:51the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and set it ablaze, forcing him and his family to flee
04:57into the night. In June, a masked gunman shot two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses.
05:04State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed. The lawmakers were allegedly on
05:09the shooter's list of 45 mostly Democratic lawmakers. And this week, the murder of the right-wing
05:15activist Charlie Kirk at a speaking event in college at a college in Utah. This is not even an exhaustive
05:22list. There's been much, much more political violence in recent years. Judges threatened, abortion
05:27clinics targeted, local and state politicians intimidated, protesters attacked. It all falls
05:34under the category of violence that's motivated by political rage and by hate. Many experts and historians
05:39are comparing this current moment to one of the most socially turbulent and bitter decades in modern U.S.
05:45history, the 1960s, when in separate attacks, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.
05:52and Robert F. Kennedy and the civil rights leader Medgar Evers were all gunned down in cold blood.
05:59And while American politics has a storied history of intense outrage, political violence has largely been
06:05an anomaly since the civil rights movement. Zach Beecham, senior correspondent at Vox, argues that America
06:11today is not prepared for what may be to come. He writes, quote, in the past, American Democratic consensus
06:17has been strong enough to survive assassination attempts. Some, like the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.,
06:23tested its bonds but did not break them. Others, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, may actually
06:29have strengthened those bonds by creating a sense of shared grief and solidarity. But now the American
06:35political system is crumbling, and many of its tools for containing political violence lie shattered.
06:41This probably will not be the event to break America, but we have to consider the possibility
06:46that it may be, end quote. Zach Beecham joins me now. He's the senior correspondent at Vox, where he
06:52covers challenges to American democracy. He's the author of The Reactionary Spirit, How America's
06:57Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. Zach, good morning to you. Thank you for
07:03being with us. I really want to mine what you are talking about here. We are in a place where
07:11political assassinations, and we've seen this this week, do not garner the same reaction from a normal
07:19range of people. If you take 10 people in the street and you ask them what happened this week,
07:22you will not get a range of reactions that feels like a country that is unified and
07:27under attack. No, not at all. Right now, in the United States, virtually everything is filtered
07:35through the lens of partisan polarization, right? And this has been true for quite some time. I mean,
07:42you could set the date where you want. I would think this more or less kicked in in the Obama
07:46administration. But polarization is so extreme, and not just in the sense that the parties are far
07:54apart on policy issues, but in the sense that people, the membership of both parties at the elite
07:58and rank and fire levels, treat each other and see each other as fundamentally hostile to their way of
08:04life. We can discuss the degree to which that's true on both sides. But what's important for present
08:09purposes is that people believe it, right? And once that belief is set in stone, it has a tendency to
08:14escalate itself, right? When there are events like this, it fuels that kind of mutual distrust
08:20because there isn't an underlying layer of respect and basic sense that everybody's operating in good
08:26faith. This is why you saw immediately, both this time and after the attempted assassination of Donald
08:32Trump last year, you had very prominent conservatives saying that the left did this, the left, the organized
08:37left did this. I've seen calls to dismantle left-wing organizations to go out for left-wing funders.
08:42There's no evidence that organizations or funders were involved in this. I suspect, honestly, there
08:46never will be. And in the Trump case, there was never any meaningful evidence about the shooter's
08:51ideology at all. It seemed to be largely apolitical. We still don't know. The evidence base for this
08:57one is leaning possibly towards ideological motivation from the left, but it's very hard to
09:01say, right? The evidence is really thin at this point.
09:03Well, it's hard to say here. It was hard to say in the last two attempts on President Trump's life,
09:09right? I mean, in the old days, you'd figure it out. You'd figure out somebody's ideology.
09:13Maybe there'd be a manifesto or something. And it was all fairly well laid out. This feels different,
09:18feels squishier.
09:19It's really, it's really hard to tell, right? But everyone's seeing it through their lens. I think
09:26there are a lot of people, a lot of people on the left that I've seen have said, there's no evidence
09:30that this person had any kind of left-wing motivation. There's a little bit of evidence,
09:34maybe, but it's hard to tell. People on the right are saying this was clearly a left-wing political
09:38killing. Well, there's not enough evidence for that either, right? I've been looking at everything
09:42that's been reported about this guy so far. And then the information environment itself is
09:46the Guardian put out this quote saying that he was very left-wing and then had to retract it
09:51because the source said, I realized I didn't know him well enough to make that kind of claim,
09:55right? And so I feel like in this particular case, the lack of reliable information has made it so
10:01that it fits even more tightly into both side scripts. If we could definitively prove that this
10:07is a left-wing motivation, the voices on the left, the dominant voices saying that this isn't us,
10:12this is unacceptable, would be able to say that much more clearly rather than having some
10:16people, you know, there being a fight about what meaning to, how to make meaning out of this at
10:21all. So you talk about being able to say things or disavow things more clearly. Last night, Jen Psaki
10:26was talking about a number of shootings that have occurred over the years, including Gabby Giffords,
10:31including Steve Scalise. And in those cases where a shooter potentially identified with a political
10:41movement or ideology, leaders in the political parties immediately disavowed that. They immediately
10:47said, this is not who we are. This is not what it is. In neither of those cases, and in subsequent
10:53cases, did politicians imply that it was someone ideologically different who influenced it? All
11:01these points you're making about left-wing organizations or right-wing organizations. Back then,
11:05when it turned out the Steve Scalise shooter had been a Bernie Sanders volunteer, Bernie Sanders on
11:11the floor of the United States disavowed the shooter, talked about how violence shouldn't make
11:17sense. John Boehner talked about Gabby Giffords' shooter. This week, we saw something entirely different.
11:25Yes, that's right. I mean, it was a rush, particularly on certain factions of the right close to the
11:32president. Honestly, I mean, among the president himself, to say, this is the work of our ideological
11:37enemies. And we are going to use this as a justification for policy action targeting them.
11:45Trump's, you know, at one point, Trump said something like right-wing radicalism is okay.
11:50It's left-wing radicals who are the problem, which was an absolutely wild thing for the president of the
11:55United States to say. And it's tempting to blame that just on Trump's unique character flaws. And I
12:01certainly, that's a huge part of the story. But the underlying question, the underlying issue here
12:07is that someone like Trump was able to lead a major party in the first place, right? It's reflective
12:10of a deep and profound level of social mistrust. Again, we can talk about who started it, who's
12:18responsible. Again, I have my theories. But I just don't feel like this is the particular political
12:24moment to really spend a lot of time on that kind of thing, right? What we should be thinking about
12:29now is why, in the immediate moment, it feels like our institutions are doing a poor job
12:35reacting to this. And how it is, we as citizens, and for you and I, you know, people in the media,
12:40how we can respond in such a way that works to build social bonds and resilience against a spiral of
12:47political violence. Yes, because it's a spiral. It doesn't matter what side of things you are on
12:52this one. Killing of people for political motives is not who we want to be in America. I also want
12:58to talk to you about the fact that there's this idea of being extremely online and these gaming
13:03memes that I'm not fully understanding the role that it's playing. But I need to take a break
13:07and have a quick commercial. We'll come back and continue the conversation with Zach.
13:12Back now with Zach Beacham, senior correspondent for Fox. Zach, let's just talk about, I don't
13:17really understand it. I'm too old. I'm not a gamer. I'm as online as anybody is, but I'm not a sort of
13:23a lover of social media. There was some reference to that kind of thing with this shooter. And it led
13:30to conversations around ideology and motivations behind shooters these days being a little more
13:35complicated because it's not necessarily deep ideology the way we're used to. It's
13:41influenced by rhetoric and the effect that social media has on people. And I'm not trying
13:47to diagnose anything because I don't know enough about this shooter, but this idea of rhetoric and
13:52memes and ideas influencing people as opposed to deep political ideology.
14:00Yeah, I mean, look, this has always been true about people who engage in spectacular, by which I mean,
14:06not good, but very visible and prominent acts of violence, is that they're doing so not just for
14:13some kind of ideological motive or even a personal grievance, but partially out of a deep desire for
14:18notoriety, right, to be famous in part. It's why there's been a longstanding policy among certain
14:25segments of the media to avoid as much as possible publicizing the names of mass shooters or showing
14:29their images everywhere. Because there's fairly good social science showing that there can be a copycat
14:33effect when it seems like this is a way to get famous. In the past, I think we remember the acts
14:40of mass violence that are politically motivated because they're the ones that change history,
14:44the ones that you learn about, right? You know, like the assassination of Archduke, Franz Ferdinand,
14:47right? That, you know, was really meaningful. There was a purpose. There was an intent to that,
14:51right? And the ones that have intent are often the ones that produce the political changes that we
14:55think about. But what's happening now is that we have instant real-time reporting on all sorts of
15:00different kinds of islands. Like, we learn about them. And people can target anyone, and they can
15:06do so for any sort of particular reason. Right? I think assassination attempts now are more likely
15:11to fail because security has gotten a lot better. But it means that now we're hearing about all these
15:16people that you might not have known about otherwise because they didn't get reported thanks
15:20to social media. And this guy, it's very hard to make sense of. I think I'm like just a little bit
15:27too old to my first millennial generation. Like, oh, wow, we're not young anymore experience.
15:32Is that like this game and the particular culture surrounding Helldivers 2, which is the name of
15:36the game, is just like not one that I'm familiar with. I play different games. So it's hard for me
15:43to make sense out of the different competing claims that are made here. It's actually making a case for
15:48those of us in the media to have like a dedicated gamer culture desk to understand this stuff.
15:52But the point is, you know, this aspect of reality now that people understand the world
16:02through subcultural lenses, and then that's like they see those as their motive to getting famous
16:08through acts that are obviously repugnant and horrible, that intersects with the sort of the
16:14culture of instant fame on social media in a way that I think I find very troubling.
16:19I you're not predicting in your piece. You're saying we may not know how to handle this. You're
16:22not pretty. You brought up the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which fundamentally
16:28set off World War One. But but the world was a tinderbox. And so this happened. A few things could
16:35have set off World War One. There is a bit of that implication in your your story that America is a
16:41tinderbox right now. This may not be the event, but we get closer and closer to things like this that
16:46seem isolated, becoming a bigger event in a heavily armed, heavily polarized society.
16:54Yeah, I mean, when there's no longer the foundations of trust in the democratic political
17:00system, which I think have eroded on both sides, again, for different reasons, right? It's not the
17:04Democrats don't trust election outcomes. It's that they believe that the current U.S. government,
17:08not incorrectly, is being mobilized against democracy themselves and don't know if there will be free and
17:13fair elections in the future. Right. And I don't need to tell your audience why what the Republican
17:19side has done about democracy. But the point is, there's incredible amounts of mutual distrust for
17:24a system that is designed to contain violence. Like fundamentally, the reason liberal democracy
17:29exists, the reason it's created in its very earliest ideological motivations, right, is to contain
17:36the violence from the wars of religion that emerged out of the Reformation. Right. That is why we have
17:42liberalism. It's a system for resolving disputes peacefully. And democracy is part of, is the
17:47mechanism that is used, right? Everybody respects election results that are conducted freely and
17:51fairly. But in a world where people don't respect those, and I've seen this, you know, reporting on
17:56democracy and elections in developing countries where democracy is very insecure and has a weak social
18:00base, so violence can lead people to believe the system won't represent them, that they won't get a
18:05chance at winning if they lose the next election or the other side will turn to violence. And that's what I'm
18:10worried about in the U.S. right now. It's not that I think that this assassination will necessarily
18:15lead to Trump declaring martial law. It's that it could provoke incremental responses that create
18:20a cycle of escalating mistrust that leads to somewhere very bad. And I don't want to be too
18:26specific about where somewhere very bad is. Predictions like that are hard to make and are
18:30generally wrong. You're just concerned. But I'm worried in a way that I haven't been in a while.
18:34Zach, thanks for your thoughtful analysis on this, because that's what we need this week. We
18:38appreciate that. Zach Beecham is a senior correspondent at Vox. He's the author of the book The Reactionary
18:42Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. All right, coming up,
18:47Missouri is now the latest state to heed President Trump's demand to redraw its congressional map.
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