The left and the right in America have completely lost the ability to converge on a shared reality. It’s not just a matter of having different partisan norms or interpretations. There is a gigantic epistemic wall erected between the two groups and virtually no one dares cross it. Both sides rely on their own truth-forming authorities to which they delegate the creation and dissemination of their own facts. And every single major political event has at least two completely different interpretations based on what is convenient to either side.
Nowhere is this more clear than with the perceived motives of Charlie Kirk’s assassin. If you told me whether you think Tyler Robinson was a liberal or a conservative, I could with 100% reliability predict how you voted in the last election.
There are two completely alternative stories of his motivations circulating right now. The liberal account goes as follows:
Tyler Robinson was a young white Christian cis male raised in a gun-toting, Conservative family in Utah. He fell into gamer culture and became an acolyte of the ultra-right winger Nick Fuentes, signing on to his “Groyper army”. He killed Charlie Kirk for being too moderate, and left clues including the reference to Groyper anthem Bella Ciao on one of the casings. The furry meme on the other casing was generic internet culture; and the Hey Fascist! Catch! was actually a Helldivers 2 reference, an ironic video game modeled on Starship Troopers. The commentary from law enforcement and Utah politicians about him being left-wing is just wishful thinking and an attempt to muddy the waters.
The conservative account goes something like this:
Tyler Robinson was born into a conservative, God-fearing family in Utah, but drifted left and became radicalized in college or by his online friends on Discord gaming groups. He fell in with trans-antifa furries and started dating a transgender man. He developed a virulent hatred of Charlie Kirk for embarrassing liberal college students and preaching against the transgender agenda. He shot him during a question about trans mass shooters to make the point. He left clear trans/antifa messages on the casings, including “Hey fascist! Catch!”, the reference to known antifa anthem Bella Ciao, and “Notices bulge OwO what’s this”, a furry/trans meme. The Helldivers reference and the gay joke are irrelevant. Robinson most likely planned the assassination in his trans/antifa discord groups, with several trans folks in Utah showing prior knowledge of the plot. He may have had help from an antifa/trans terror cell.
These accounts of the shooter’s motivation couldn’t be further apart, but they are the default views among liberal and conservative camps respectively. As of Sunday the 14th, only eight percent of Democrats polled thought the shooter was a fellow Democrat, and 41 percent thought he was a Republican. By contrast, 40 percent of Republicans thought he was a Democrat and only 13 percent thought he was a Republican. (The truth is that he was not registered to either party. The governor of Utah has reported that he had leftist sympathies, however.)
This represents a total loss of shared reality.
It’s not just this one topic either. If you ask members of both parties which side is more responsible for recent political violence, you will get a similar parallax.
How did this happen? Because both sides have completely independent institutions that they rely on to interpret reality and generate “facts”. On the left, you have establishment media (in particular the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC), “fact checking” organizations like Politifact, NPR fact check, RealClearPolitics, Snopes, or the ADL, and then of course leftist pundits that are more than willing to manufacture disinformation.
The Groyper interpretation emerged from the bowels of leftist social media (one early proponent was the notorious liar Adam Cochran) and was immediately laundered into the elite discourse, with mentions on virtually every major press platform. The WSJ, to their eternal shame, used the fact that Bella Ciao appeared on a Groyper playlist on Spotify as evidence in favor of that hypothesis. (Never mind the fact that the song is a well-known antifa and leftist protest anthem and appears on numerous antifa and “anti-capitalism” playlists.) Elsewhere, the fact that Robinson had dressed up as a gopnik in 2018 (doing the “slav squat”) was peddled as further evidence, because there also exist pepe gopnik memes. (This, already an incredible stretch, conflates pepe and the distinct groyper pepe mascot. And the picture is dated to a full year before Fuentes’ “Groyper army” became a thing.) The “Hey Fascist! Catch!” language which should have been an obvious indication of the shooter’s motivation was implausibly explained away as “a reference to a satirical slogan in the popular video game Helldivers 2”. (It’s not. I have actually played Helldivers II, unlike these people.)
But it was enough. For the online boomer left, trusted sources telling them authoritatively about Helldivers II and groypers and Nick Fuentes was sufficient. None of them had heard of Nick Fuentes or groypers or the Fuentes v TPUSA “groyper wars” before the shooting, but it allowed them to shrug off shared responsibility for the shooting. The interpretation was a cognitive salve, enabling them to avoid grappling with the fact that this was, by all accounts, yet another act of antifa/trans-adjacent leftist political violence.
The consequence of a couple days of misinformation is that, because liberals had an urgent psychological need to reject the apparent facts as they existed – that a radicalized leftist killed Charlie Kirk because he didn’t like what he had to say – they simply hallucinated an entirely alternative interpretation, and came to believe it, almost uniformly. The fact that some left-leaning news outlets later came to their senses and realized that the evidence for the groyper hypothesis was incredibly flimsy, or effectively nonexistent, did nothing. The narrative had been set. The most beloved conservative influencer and organizer was killed by one of his own, implausibly because he wasn’t far right enough. This whole brouhaha? Simply an internecine right-on-right dispute. Nothing to trouble the left about. Conscience clear.
While the left was the side engaging in collective hallucination this time, it could just as well have been the other way around. There are plenty of examples you can pick from in which the conservative interpretation was just as fictitious and unmoored from reality.
The cause is hard to triangulate. Partially, the fragmentation of social media has meant that there is a platform for every interest group. Bluesky for delusional blue-anon libs and journalists; Twitter for everyone else; Meta for normie moms; TikTok for normie gen Z girls; Reddit for aging millennial libtards; Discord for gamers and deviants; Telegram for crypto users and people posting clips from the Ukraine war. The filter bubble is easier than ever to establish. Another issue is the total decimation of institutional trust given massive failures of our truth-forming institutions. The right is still hungover from government-sponsored disinfo around Covid and the left simply won’t believe anything the Trump administration says. Also to blame is the deteriorating economics of establishment media alongside the move towards digital, which has de-emphasized truth seeking. The use of AI as a popular fact-checking machine, even though in fast-moving situations it’s simply a sentiment-weighing machine, is also to blame. For breaking news, Grok and GPT-5 regurgitate whatever happens to be the prevailing narrative. People are generally unable to apprehend that AI is not an authoritative Fact God but just a weighted average of whatever the internet is saying. This leads to a massive rush to seed the AI with a quick narrative, knowing that most people will only read about a trending topic for a day or two before making up their minds and moving on. Another issue is that you genuinely do have to be deeply enmeshed in these internet subcultures to make sense of the situation, and most people simply aren’t attentive enough. How many people know about:
Bella Ciao as an antifa anthem?
The trans/furry meaning behind the phrase “Notices bulge OwO what’s this?”
The history of Nick Fuentes’ rivalry with Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, dating back to October 2019?
Whether Nick Fuentes would ever call Charlie Kirk a “fascist”? (He wouldn’t)
The difference between Pepe and the Groyper variant?
The meaning of up right down down down?
Whether “Hey fascist! Catch this!” appears in Helldivers II (It doesn’t)
The “slav squat” gopnik pepe and its (lack of) connection to Groypers?
The startling rise in trans/antifa violence, whether it’s trans school shootings, or extreme leftist trans cults like the Zizians?
If you’re feeling lost, I don’t blame you. It’s only people like antifa watcher Andy Ngo that possess sufficient context to decode all the signals and make sense of all the scattered breadcrumbs. Until the Discord logs and text messages are released, we won’t have that much evidence on the shooter’s motivations and thought process. Given the limited amount of available data, and the cryptic nature of the inscriptions, it’s not that surprising that some opportunistic individuals were able to poison the well and falsely finger Fuentes and his acolytes. Because leftists don’t believe anything the Trump administration or a Republican governor or law enforcement official have to say, they fall back to their own truth factories. And because journalists are mostly clueless mouthpieces for internet commentators, and aren’t smart enough or sufficiently plugged in to fact check obvious falsehoods for themselves, you end up with these lies plastered on the front page of the WSJ. And because liberal boomers simply don’t have the epistemic scaffolding to make sense of all this for themselves, they adopt the most emotionally convenient narrative. I found it equal parts hilarious and sad to see liberal boomers (who had never heard of Nick Fuentes before) posting about the shooter definitely being a Groyper and confidently making assertions about the meaning of “hey fascist, catch!” in the context of Helldivers II.
Is this fixable? I doubt it. People increasingly will get their information from AI, so we just have a new set of gatekeepers. Based on some test queries, GPT-5 is at least as leftist as the old media gatekeepers. So conservatives will use Grok or some other BasedAI and liberals will use ChatGPT. The rift grows ever deeper.