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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

The bullet engravings are well known (and people pushing the groyper theory seem to believe the engravings support their theory just as well).

There is a claim circulating that Robinson had a transgender/transitioning (MtF) roommate/partner. A simple web search will easily find multiple sources for this claim, but most of them aren't exactly what you'd consider authoritative or journalistic.

Many sources similarly assert that Robinson's father "recognized" him in photos and "encouraged him to turn himself in" (see e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/12/tyler-rob...). However, I don't know anything specific about his "testimony".

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> There is a claim circulating that Robinson had a transgender/transitioning (MtF) roommate/partner. A simple web search will easily find multiple sources for this claim, but most of them aren't exactly what you'd consider authoritative or journalistic.

Could turn out to be true, but considering the hilariously wrong stuff that was being published even by mainstream sources in the 24 hours after (the initially extremely-wrong reports about the engravings, for instance) I’d not yet treat this as meaningful at all. I’ve not seen anything above tabloid-level pushing it yet.

> the initially extremely-wrong reports about the engravings, for instance

I am unaware of any mistakes of fact as to the actual text of the engravings published by any mainstream source at any point.

"Not getting the reference" is not the same thing as making an "extremely-wrong report".

The meaning and implications of these engravings is the subject of intense debate, and not at all an objective matter at the moment.

The very first reports of the engravings to break, supposedly from FBI sources, just said they had “pro trans” messages.

> The meaning and implications of these engravings is the subject of intense debate, and not at all an objective matter at the moment.

I agree. We can take away some things (like “very online” and some suggestions of certain connections to spheres or activities, like the Helldivers 2 reference) but there’s little more than rather mixed suggestions that could go multiple ways, as far as political affiliation and motivation that we can read from them, so far.

> The very first reports of the engravings to break, supposedly from FBI sources, just said they had “pro trans” messages.

Not the FBI, and the story is much more complex than that: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-bullets-...

Ah, thanks for the link. I saw several headlines about it when that “news” dropped, but only followed one, and it claimed an FBI source. It may have been even worse than the others, and downstream from them, so to speak.

This is a frequent challenge when following breaking news.

I similarly delayed accepting Charlie Kirk had actually died because the only source I could find was President Trump (and news sources reporting Charlie Kirk's death that, ultimately, seemed to be using President Trump as a source).

Since President Trump is an extremely-well-documented liar, this was not a reliable source. It can be hard to figure out the source for news like this, since news outlets are not in the habit of doing well-disciplined source citation or summarizing sources to make it easy to identify them (in contrast to, say, a research publication).

Yeah at the time (and I’ve yet to see this contradicted?) it seemed like Trump broke the news on that one, which is certainly an unusual way for that to happen, which also made it more reasonable to put that on the “maybe, but let’s see” pile.

(I did believe it, but only because I’d watched the close-view video and regarded survival as all but impossible… without that I’d have “grain of salt”ed it, too)

I also find it very interesting that Netanyahu's post about Charlie Kirk happened at the same time as Trump's. How would he know before the rest of the world such that he could post at the exact same time as Trump?

You have timestamped links for this, of course? This is the first I've heard anyone even claim that Netanyahu said anything about it, and as you can probably see I've been very active in the discussion.

They saw arrows and thought "must be trans ideology!" Turned out to be a Helldivers 2 reference, as with the "hey fascist catch this". The other references are all textbook groyper, and Robinson was even pictured on his mother's Facebook "as a guy from a meme" which was a copy of a groyper Pepe meme.

> The bullet engravings are well known

You can read anything you want into those if you want to. To me they reek weeb culture (as opposed to furry like everyone else jumps to - there are overlaps but they are distinct), 4chan trolling and lemmy more than anything. We can not know the intentions behind those engravings and they say nothing about which, if any, affiliation the shooter had. Could be a Luigi wannabe, could be a false flag to induce civil war.

"Unafilliated" seems like the most plausible assumption right now. Everyone pushing theories about shooter affiliation right now either has their own political agenda behind it and are doing so incincerly or are useful idiots serving the aforementioned.

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