The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. 

Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man from Utah, has been arrested for allegedly assassinating right-wing activist and influencer Charlie Kirk. As of this recording, people on all sides of the political spectrum have been ransacking the internet to try to assemble a picture of Robinson’s views and motives. And it’s murky going. But one thing is not murky. President Donald Trump is signaling very clearly that he’s going to seize on this horrific killing to wage open warfare on the liberal left. And many of his top supporters are a hundred percent there with him. It appears very clear as of right now that Tyler Robinson’s actual views and motives don’t matter in this equation at all. Whatever is learned about him over time, the decision to exploit this shooting has already been made. We’re talking about this with one of our favorite analysts of the far right, The Bulwark’s Will Sommer. Will, thanks for coming on, man.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me. 

Sargent: So we’re recording this on a Friday afternoon. By the time people hear this on Monday morning, some of the info might be outdated. Apologies for that. But Will, what can you tell us about Tyler Robinson’s views and motives as of this moment? 

Sommer: Yeah, well really, you know, pretty much everything we’re getting here is coming from law enforcement. And so there hasn’t been—I think in part because he had such a generic name, and perhaps because a lot of his online activity was happening on Discord, according to the police, which is a kind of private chat room where the average person can’t just go … and search it. So what we’re looking at here is a lot of it is coming from the writing he allegedly did on the bullet casings that he brought to assassinate Charlie Kirk. 

The one on the casing of the bullet that ultimately hit Kirk says, “Notices, bulges, oh-wo,” and then, comma, “What’s this?” Now that is, you might say, I think it’d be very reasonable to have no idea what that means. And I didn’t this morning. But it’s a reference to an internet meme that’s basically about a cartoon. People can look it up on KnowYourMeme.com. It’s a cartoon about two men pretending to be furries—or being furries. Furries are adults who pretend to be animals that have sex with each other. And the joke is that these guys are gross and old, pretending to be silly animals. But basically it’s an internet meme. And you might compare it to—for people who are a little older, like me—something like “All your base are belong to us,” or other early internet memes.

So this, I think, was initially what people took to be—The Wall Street Journal reported that there was supposed to be trans writing. And I think the bulge is maybe what people are thinking of there, but this seems to be kind of like random internet ephemera. If there is a political valence to this, it’s weird, refracted by so many hours on the internet. Just running through another one: It said, “Hey, fascist, catch,” followed by a series of up and down arrows that police, I think, initially took to be some kind of antifa symbol. But in fact, it’s a code from the popular game Helldivers 2.

Sargent: Well, isn’t the bottom line that this guy appears to have been really, really steeped in online meme madness? It sounds like there’s a whole stew of incoherences here that are very hard to make sense of—he’s just internet-brained.

Sommer: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean there really is no clear message here. I mean, it’s almost like people in the Air Force writing silly memes on bombs they’re going to drop. What does that mean? At the same time, his family claims he was saying that Charlie Kirk spread hate—that he hated Charlie Kirk. One thing I think we can say for sure is that this is a very kind of this like kind of internet brand, as you said, this this very kind of garbled messaging. 

Sargent: Well, let’s move on to Donald Trump for a sec, because he’s being very, very clear about what he intends to do here. Here’s what he said on Fox and Friends.

Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): Radicals on the right as well. We have radicals on the left. People have gotten, are watching all of these videos and cheering. Some people are cheering that Charlie was killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together? 

Trump (voiceover): I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, we don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem.

Sargent: So, Will, that’s a fairly direct declaration that far-right extremism is........

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