Thank you for seeing this young man as a person. One who was not evil, or prone to violence. Whose IQ was higher than most in the courtroom, but who will waste away in prison for the rest of his life - unfulfilled. He was trying to stop the hate, to show how wrong it was. He just chose the wrong way to go about it. I grieve for his family, for Charlie Kirk's children, and mostly for this beautiful young man who will become a shadow in a world that will capitalize on his actions.
Toni, this is the comment I was hoping someone would write — and also the one I have to be careful with.
You’re right that this series is trying to see him as a person. That’s the job. If I flatten Tyler Robinson into a monster, I lose the story. If I make him a symbol, I lose the truth. The whole point of Chapter Six is to hold the scholarship video and the rooftop in the same hand and not look away from either one.
But I want to gently discuss one thing a bit differently. He wasn’t trying to stop the hate. He was trying to kill the man he believed was spreading it. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where everything in this case lives. A twenty-two-year-old who believed he was doing something righteous drove 240 miles with a bolt-action rifle and fired into a crowd that included children. The intention doesn’t soften the act. It explains it — and that’s worse, because it means the machinery that produced this moment is still running.
You’re also right that the world will capitalize on his actions. It already has — from every direction. That’s Chapter Ten’s territory. But for now, in this chapter, I’m just trying to build the record of who he was before he became what he did. Because if we skip that part, we learn nothing. And if we learn nothing, the next kitchen, the next scholarship kid, the next dinner table argument — we miss it again.
Thank you for reading this chapter and for grieving in more than one direction. That’s rare. That’s what this series is asking people to do.
I'm smell a book, Gloria⁉️ This could be a best seller, outlined here in your series 🤓 You've really hit on the back story...!! Thank you and will reStack ASAP 💯 👍
Thanks again Gloria for keeping us up to date on everything you possibly can.I appreciate all the hours of hard work you put in to keep us educated on all the facts so we can form an opinion of our own. It is truly heartbreaking on both sides. Look forward to your next chapter Thank you.
What I would like to know if possible, is how this could have been prevented? I can understand Tyler's argument about hate, but where does it cross over to shooting this person is acceptable? What can we point a finger at?
Intolerance towards gay/trans people, the internet, civic teaching in school. It doesn't sound like he had any kind of mentally disturbing characteristics or anything like that.
Arthur, you’re asking the question Chapter Eight exists to answer — the security failure. Because the honest answer to “how could this have been prevented” has two parts, and one of them is uncomfortable.
The first part is physical. Six cops for 3,000 people. No metal detectors. A rooftop that campus security was asked to cover and agreed to cover and then didn’t cover. A building anyone could walk into. That’s Chapter Eight, and it’s the chapter that will make people angry, because the prevention was right there — it was requested, promised, and skipped.
The second part is the one nobody has a clean answer for. There was no manifesto. No criminal record. No diagnosed mental illness in the public record. No history of violence. A 4.0 GPA, a scholarship, a family that loved him, a partner who didn’t know. He said Kirk “spreads too much hate” at a dinner table — which millions of Americans have said — and nine days later he was on a rooftop. What do you surveil? What do you intercept? A dinner table opinion and a week of planning and a grandfather’s rifle with no serial number?
That’s what makes this case so hard to metabolize. The crossover point you’re asking about didn’t announce itself. It never does.
And thank you for the last line. I hear you on the death penalty. That’s Chapter Ten territory. Stay with me.
You are such a wonderful writer. I wasn’t interested in him for many reasons but you drew me in. That’s what good writing does. There’s so much to this story but most of us thought there was nothing. I think about his lover turning him in with ease. Could anyone be more powerless than her? She who stirs the storm is such a fitting title.i look forward to the next chapter. We may see things differently but it’s a story of lost souls one way or another, from the grandparents on down.
I’m not sure lots of people will write about this. Most will see it as not worth developing as I did. It seemed so one dimensional. You were able to because of your creative writing style and your adherence to unexpected facts.
In the end it will be people putting their heads together figuring out how to put this country back together again. Good writing will be the springboard. When you get to publishing if you need help just ask.
And believe it or not I spent a night in St George. It had one restaurant connected to the gas station and one seedy motel. These are simple, easily manipulated, one dimensional people. They need your book!
Karen, "lost souls from the grandparents on down" — that's the generational read this series is building toward and you just said it in nine words.
You're right about Lance. Lance kept the messages. Lance cooperated. Lance did exactly what the system asks a person to do, knowing what it would cost. The most powerless person in this story may also be the one who held the most integrity under pressure. That deserves more attention than it's gotten.
But I want to pull at one thread in what you said — not your read of St. George, but the framing. Simple and easily manipulated is how the coasts have always described places like Washington County, and it's part of how we got here. These are people who run businesses and raise families and go to church and hold political convictions as firmly as anyone in Brooklyn or San Francisco. Tyler Robinson wasn't simple. He was a presidential scholar who could lecture on Benghazi at fourteen. His parents weren't manipulated — they were operating inside a system of belief that felt as rational to them as yours and mine feel to us. The danger isn't that they're one-dimensional. The danger is that they're not, and we keep treating them as if they are, and then we're stunned when a kid from that world does something three-dimensional and catastrophic.
That said — they do need this book. And so does everyone who thought this story wasn't worth developing. Thank you for reading closely enough to change your mind. That's the whole point.
“Read the inscriptions in order and you see a twenty-two-year-old who loaded a rifle with memes. Not manifestos. Not ideology. Memes. Furry community references and video game inputs and an Italian folk song he probably learned from a Netflix show. The political vocabulary is there — “fascist” appears twice — but it is wrapped in the irony-soaked language of a generation that communicates in layers of plausible deniability, where everything is a joke until it isn’t, where sincerity is the only taboo. This is not the language of a movement. It is the language of a young man who lived online.”
The act unconnected to a movement to me is selfish, thus greedy. It feels like MAGA thinking. We’re unhappy so we’re taking over rather than working it out. Let’s elect a strongman and have our way v. let’s fix things.
Gloria’s writing is brilliant. It’s thought provoking. Seems he went after hate the way his parents went after what they hated. Kill the other side. Hire Trump to do that for us.
He didn’t help the gay cause. He made it more disturbing for the people who hate it. He couldn’t enjoy a gay relationship so he made it harder for others when he could have stood for something.
To me greed is making other people jokes so you do what you want. It’s think only about yourself. Do what’s good for you.
When she pointed out his lack of sincerity it made me think of greed. And although the costume was a sarcastic thought, who would have known who he was for Halloween if not for Gloria? Her writing is so unique that I tossed that in almost as a tribute. She really gets people thinking.
And, of course, since my mission is exposing the corruption in our schools that turned our children shallow but is almost impossible to make known, he is no exception. When you’re shallow you’re likely greedy. He could have committed an act that made a difference for his fellow gay people. Instead he made more people need a strongman to disappear an issue so many hate.
Karen, this is the kind of comment that makes me stop and reread my own work through someone else’s eyes.
The greed framing is one I hadn’t considered, and it landed. You’re right — there’s something profoundly selfish about what he did, and your parallel cuts deep. His parents hired Trump to do their fighting for them. Tyler picked up a rifle and did his own. Different methods, same architecture: I’m unhappy, so someone else has to pay for it. The MAGA apple didn’t fall far from the MAGA tree — it just rolled in a different direction.
And you nailed the cruelest irony of the whole case. He was in love with a trans woman. He could have been something — a voice, a story, a young man from a conservative Mormon family who chose love anyway and stood in it publicly. That’s a life that changes minds. That’s the thing that actually moves the needle. Instead he handed every person who already hated queer people a reason to point and say see what they do. He didn’t strike a blow against the hate. He gave it a recruiting poster.
Your line — “he went after hate the way his parents went after what they hated” — I wish I’d written that. That’s the whole chapter in one sentence. The mechanism was inherited. Only the target changed.
And thank you for seeing what the writing is trying to do. I’m not here to tell people what to think about Tyler Robinson. I’m here to build the record clearly enough that people like you arrive at things I hadn’t even seen yet. That’s the job working.
This is the beauty of a democracy. Words move us forward. I have a tendency to forgive and feel sorry for young people. I hope you will include these thoughts and one day get your story to him and his family. Perhaps they’ll grow beyond hate.
They think they can hate gays away. They will only stop when they realize like it or not gender has become an issue. My astrology friend says the age of Aquarius will be one gender. Maybe that’s why this is happening. It’s not my choice but I have to accept it’s a choice the way I accept other things that aren’t my choice. My daughter just married a woman. I’m glad she’s happy.
That’s what these people don’t get. That’s what the con man used to rile them up. And to complicate things further, the people running our schools are intentionally promoting this issue knowing it will keep people from their doorway. That’s how insidious they are. Bring in books discussing gay issues. Get the parents mad and those fires are all they see.
Whether you’re for or against this issue the parents should teach their kids. They need time. It’s a hard issue. Too much change for many.
The gay issue is the best thing they have going to destroy democracy when it should be worked out via democracy.
Once people follow my lead about our schools so much will heal. Once I get a leader to learn what I know they can heal this country.
A society can’t change and move forward with corrupt schools. The gay issue is tearing us apart. If people understood education as I do they’d see the urgency. His story to me is a red flag I’m right.
But I didn’t mean to disparage him as greedy when all our young people are that unless they re exceptional souls. I hope one day he reads your book on him and then reads mine on why he was so limited.
I hope he isn’t given the death sentence. He’ll have time to read.
What you’re pointing out is that the shift from MAGA thinking to liberal thinking didn’t happen. It didn’t happen when he became gay. It didn’t happen when he dealt with Charlie. He simply took his MAGA hate and twisted it against a fellow MAGA—Charlie—using the MAGA weapon of choice.
One could say he felt a right to be gay as a MAGA, which was a lot for him to ask in that world where men are superheroes.
I’m feeling less sympathetic to him as I read further into this because of that. He didn’t kill because Charlie was spouting evil thoughts. He killed because he was greedy. He wanted to be an accepted MAGA.
The question is did he write that fascist comment on the bulletin to make us think he has a liberal heart? Or is he dissociative with his two parts battling each other?
The other question on my mind for having learned this from you, is did dressing as Trump for Halloween start him down a path of evil?
Thanks for the diversion. There may very well be others writing books but I doubt as well.
Karen, you’re building something here that I need to ponder, because you’re not wrong and you’re not entirely right, and the space between those two things is where this whole case lives.
The MAGA operating system theory — that he never actually uninstalled the software, just pointed it at a different target — is the most uncomfortable read of this case I’ve encountered. And I’ve been inside these documents for months. You’re saying the violence wasn’t a departure from how he was raised. It was an application of it. The family taught him that when you’re angry enough, you act. You don’t organize. You don’t negotiate. You don’t show up at a school board meeting. You hire a strongman or you become one. He just picked a different enemy.
Your two questions deserve separate answers.
The bullet inscriptions — “Hey fascist! Catch!” — I don’t think that was performance for an audience. I think he meant it. But I also think he didn’t fully understand what he meant by it. He called Kirk a fascist the way the internet calls everything fascist — as currency, not as analysis. He wasn’t writing a political treatise on those casings. He was writing in the only language that felt real to him, which was the language of the internet, which is the language of people who have never been forced to mean what they say. Whether that’s dissociation or just a generation that was never taught the weight of words — the trial might tell us. Or it might not.
The Halloween costume. Did it start him down a path? No. But it tells you where the path started. It tells you he was raised in a house where Trump wasn’t just a politician — he was a costume, a family joke, a shared identity. That’s the water he swam in. And when he left that water, he didn’t learn to breathe different air. He just held his breath and kept swimming the same way.
You said you’re feeling less sympathetic. Good. That means the chapter is working. It’s not asking for sympathy. It’s asking you to look.
And Karen — “did dressing as Trump for Halloween start him down a path of evil” is a line I’d put on the back cover of the book. Don’t think I won’t remember you said it.
Karen, something in your reading pulls at me — and I want to sit with it honestly rather than argue past it.
Six chapters of documented evidence ground Gloria's work: the Trevor Project data, the USU departure, the Discord community, the texts to Lance, the surrender. When I hold all of that alongside "he was greedy," I notice a gap so wide I genuinely wonder whether we read the same series.
Greed names wanting more of something you already possess. What does Tyler Robinson possess in Gloria's account? A family system he's drifting away from. A church that holds no room for who he actually is. A political identity dissolving in real time. A single person — Lance — carrying the full weight of his interior life. The Trevor Project puts 42% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah seriously considering ending their lives in a single year. Washington County runs that pressure at full concentration. What Tyler needed, Gloria documents chapter by chapter, was ground to stand on. He ran out of it.
The Halloween costume as origin story — I understand the impulse. We all want the thread we can pull backward that explains the knot. Yet any childhood photograph contains, in retrospect, the seeds of wherever someone ended up. That's hindsight carrying the load meaning needs to carry.
Your "two parts" observation genuinely interests me. Gloria's Chapter Six earns exactly that reading. What I'd add: those parts form under impossible conditions, one performing what the surrounding system requires, another carrying what the system refuses to hold. The pressure between them produces a predictable outcome — and Gloria's refusal to call that outcome a moral verdict is precisely what makes this journalism worth six careful chapters.
What specific moment in Gloria's account brought you to the greed reading? I'd genuinely like to understand the path there.
Jay, this is the comment section I built this series for. Two readers pulling the same chapter in different directions, both landing on something real, neither one entirely wrong.
You’re right to ground it in the data. The Trevor Project numbers, the USU gap, the LDS pressure cooker, the single relationship carrying the full weight of a closeted interior life — that’s the structural read, and it’s the one the evidence supports. Tyler Robinson was not operating from surplus. He was operating from deficit. That’s not greed. That’s collapse.
But Karen is seeing something too, and I don’t want to wave it away. The mechanism — not the motive, the mechanism — does look inherited. The idea that when you’re angry enough, you act on it. That you don’t organize, don’t testify, don’t show up with a sign. You eliminate the source of your pain. Karen is calling that greed. I might call it something else — maybe the only model of power he’d ever been shown. But she’s not wrong that he replicated the structure even as he rejected the content.
What I love about your question back to her — “what specific moment brought you to the greed reading” — is that it’s the right question asked the right way. You’re not dismissing her. You’re asking her to future discuss her thoughts. That’s what this series does, and the fact that my readers are now doing it to each other in the comments tells me the work is landing where it should.
The chapter asks you to hold two things at once. You’re each holding one. Neither of you is going to let go. That’s the point.
Gloria, your perspective illuminates the distance between our readings. I feel a cultural gap here, yet I appreciate the chance to bridge it.
My curiosity focuses entirely on the text already written. I seek the specific moment where the narrative reveals greed or a deep MAGA connection, as these elements remain hidden to me within the chapters we discussed. I want to return to those pages and look again. Re-evaluating my own assessment requires finding the exact point where Karen saw these motives.
I value Karen’s sight. I ask for a hint—a signpost in the text or perhaps a link to general media reports about Tyler—so I might see what she sees. Finding that anchor allows me to understand her path and perhaps revise my own thinking. I want to stand where she stands and look at the same evidence.
This is fantastic. I'm too sleepy to write more on my phone, aside from saying that playing Wordle after blasting someone's carotid artery with a bullet is chilling.
The Wordle is the detail I can’t stop mulling over. Not damning — just disorienting. He solved it in three tries. I can barely solve it in six on a good day.
Charles — I follow several Substacks that cover the platform’s own tools, and the best of them is Amanda Bray’s The Publishing Spectrum. She just published a piece on a new feature called the callout block — Substack’s version of a magazine sidebar. I read it yesterday and immediately put it to work in this article. Glad it landed.
I see it now. I missed it. I'm usually pretty attuned to Substack changes. I literally called the paragraph I wanted to use something like this for, "Sidebar."
They also added a fantastic new time saver called "Template" but that was a little more obvious to me as it was right in the top of the editing menu. Thanks again for this tip.
I am so grateful for you writing this series. This time I stay inside the psychological part of your essay which I have read 3 times by now. Hours later I'm still inside it — and I want to bring a perspective shaped partly by German systemic family therapy and IFS, partly by my own biographical material. Where facts ground us I'll say so. Where I speculate I'll name that too. Consider this less analysis, more an open field of questions worth sitting with.
- What the legal record leaves untouched
The USU semester — one spokesperson statement and a gap. Walking away from a $32,000 scholarship makes economic sense only when the psychological cost of staying runs catastrophically higher. Someone in Logan may have seen something. Resident advisors. Fellow students from Tyler's cohort. The university spokesperson's phrasing — "no disciplinary record" answering a question nobody publicly asked — reads as careful institutional language doing specific work. What work, exactly?
The classmate in the Challenger rode 240 miles believing they headed to a work site. What did he notice and file away? What felt ordinary that morning?
And the trigger week. "A bit over a week." Something moved Tyler from dinner table anger into action. What shifted in those specific days? Did the Kirk announcement land inside an already-fracturing dynamic with his father? The crossing point stays completely dark.
- A scenarios playground — IFS and systemic family therapy as possible lenses
What if the 4.0, the ACT scores, the scholarship letter his mother filmed signal a high-functioning protective system running at full capacity rather than a simply thriving child? IFS calls this a manager — a part formed early around one specific learning: perform perfectly and the field around you stays safe. The achievement becomes the adaptation. The family celebrates. The visible signals run green. The cost stays invisible, paid internally, in the gap between the performed self and whatever lives underneath.
What might Tyler's progressive withdrawal map, viewed through this lens? Each retreat possibly following a failed attempt to exist authentically in the previous container. LDS community first. Family of origin. USU. Then gaming spaces and online communities offering what Washington County structurally may have withheld: anonymity, chosen identity, belonging decoupled from biography. The furry community reference on the casing points toward deep immersion — someone living inside those spaces long enough for their linguistic register to become the most natural voice available. Even on a bullet casing. Even then.
By September 10 his map of safe territory may have contracted to Lance and the online communities. A question worth sitting with: what does a person do when even that last container shows signs of strain?
Here's what the Trevor Project's 2024 Utah survey documents about what living inside this state costs LGBTQ+ young people — and these figures ground the speculation in something measurable. 42% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah seriously considered ending their lives in the past year, including 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth. 11% attempted suicide. 66% experienced discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. 22% faced physical threats or harm. 56% reported politics negatively impacted their wellbeing — a lot, meaning daily. 47% wanted mental health care and couldn't access it. And 56% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah — including 63% of transgender and nonbinary youth — reported considering leaving the state entirely because of LGBTQ+-related laws and politics.
The research points toward environment as the driver, not identity. Washington County sits inside that environment at full concentration.
- A different possible reading of the rooftop
The text exchange with Lance, the Discord confession, driving home and reporting in rather than running — what if the sequence runs less as a political act and more as something closer to: I can't have what I need. I'm not allowed to exist as I actually am. If I can't change any of this, I can at least make it mean something?
The hints of suicidal ideation in earlier chapters reframe the rooftop when held here. A bolt-action rifle at 430 feet against a protected target in an open courtyard reads poorly as tactical planning for a successful assassination. As a departure act with a statement attached — does it carry a different kind of coherence?
He told Lance what to do. Lance kept the messages and cooperated fully. What might Lance have understood, and for how long?
I leave those questions deliberately open.
- Where my own body brings something — two distinct moments, neither a map for Tyler yet both pointing toward him
Tyler returns from USU to Washington County — possibly carrying something he discovered in Logan fitting nothing the world he grew up inside ever offered him. The speculation worth sitting with: did the return run as an attempt to bury it? Stay only far enough from whatever opened in Logan, trusting distance from the source would let the whole thing blow over?
In 2007 I walked back into my childhood home after my mother died. I carried zero awareness of the weight I placed on my own psyche by returning. The house activated something the intervening years had simply buried deeper. Completely dissociated, completely exiled from myself — holding the lid on a pressure cooker while the body reacted constantly, the psyche reacted, and I suppressed what I could and managed the rest.
I never grasped the burden. I simply went.
Which opens a question I want to leave here rather than answer: might Tyler have experienced something similar, walking back into Washington County — and known nothing of what he carried back in with him?
Then 1987. I reached a point of desperation the containers around me could no longer hold. I tried to end my life. Two things stopped me — my brothers, four and two years old. The body overrode the decision through its own logic entirely, arriving at two small faces before the conscious mind caught up. An anchor the self-destruction logic simply couldn't answer.
What anchored Tyler? Lance carried everything — the sole container holding his actual self. What happens when that weight concentrates in one person and the container shows even the smallest crack?
The body keeps its own account. It always collects.
The distance you're measuring, Gloria — everyone else looks away from it. You hold it steady.
Jay, I have read this three times now too, which feels right given that you read the chapter three times before writing it.
The IFS lens — the 4.0 as a manager part, not a marker of thriving — stopped me cold. Because you’re right. The scholarship video reads differently if you watch it as a performance of the system working, not as evidence of a happy kid. His mother films it. The family cheers. The visible signals run green. And the cost stays invisible, paid internally, in the gap between the performed self and whatever lives underneath. That framing doesn’t appear in the charging documents. It doesn’t appear in any of the reporting. It belongs in this series, and it will.
Your USU question is the one I keep circling. “No disciplinary record” answering a question nobody publicly asked — you caught the institutional language doing its work. Something happened in Logan. One semester is not burnout. One semester is a door opening or a door slamming, and the fact that nobody — not the university, not the family, not a single piece of published reporting — has named what happened in that gap tells me either nobody knows or nobody wants to say. The trial may crack it open. The preliminary hearing might. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep pulling the thread.
The bolt-action rifle observation — that it reads poorly as tactical planning and differently as a departure act — is the single most unsettling reframing anyone has offered me in six chapters. A bolt-action Mauser at 430 feet against a moving target in an open courtyard. One round. No escape plan that actually worked. He tried to retrieve the rifle and couldn’t. He drove home. He told everyone. He said he wanted to die. You’re asking whether the rooftop was an assassination or a suicide that took someone else with it. I’m not going to answer that, because I can’t. But I’m going to hold it.
And Jay — thank you for putting your own body in this. 1987 and 2007. The return to the childhood home carrying weight you didn’t know you were carrying. The anchors that override the logic of self-destruction. You earned the right to ask what anchored Tyler, because you’ve stood in the place where the answer matters. Lance carried everything. One person. One container. That’s not a relationship. That’s a structural failure with a heartbeat.
The chapter asks readers to hold two things at once. You’re holding about seven. Keep questioning.
Gloria, I'm grateful for your generous answer and for holding my scenarios rather than dismissing them outright. I offered my biographical background deliberately — I'm certain I'd have missed what might lie underneath without it.
And that underneath may explain why Robinson's defense never sought a second ballistic analysis.
Follow the sequence his own texts lay out: retrieve the rifle first — "I'm worried what my old man would do" — then end it. The suicidal ideation arrives in the phone call with his father, after the rifle stays in the woods. His parents redirect him toward Hurricane. The surrender replaces the plan he drove home carrying.
He never planned a trial. He planned a retrieval, then an exit.
Which means his legal team inherited a client who originally intended to render all evidentiary procedure irrelevant. The objection to the second ballistic test originates with lawyers working the one gap still breathing in a record otherwise sealed shut — texts, Discord confession, DNA on trigger and casings, his own surrender, his own parents. The ATF inconclusive result stays the sole opening. Closing it serves no one on Robinson's side of the courtroom.
Your bolt-action observation sharpens here rather than softens. A person mounting a political act guards the evidence trail. Robinson guarded a family heirloom and planned to disappear. Those two intentions run in entirely opposite directions — and the family heirloom matters structurally, across generations, in ways the charging documents will never touch.
Keep pulling Logan. Something opened or slammed there. The trial may say what.
Thank you for seeing this young man as a person. One who was not evil, or prone to violence. Whose IQ was higher than most in the courtroom, but who will waste away in prison for the rest of his life - unfulfilled. He was trying to stop the hate, to show how wrong it was. He just chose the wrong way to go about it. I grieve for his family, for Charlie Kirk's children, and mostly for this beautiful young man who will become a shadow in a world that will capitalize on his actions.
Toni, this is the comment I was hoping someone would write — and also the one I have to be careful with.
You’re right that this series is trying to see him as a person. That’s the job. If I flatten Tyler Robinson into a monster, I lose the story. If I make him a symbol, I lose the truth. The whole point of Chapter Six is to hold the scholarship video and the rooftop in the same hand and not look away from either one.
But I want to gently discuss one thing a bit differently. He wasn’t trying to stop the hate. He was trying to kill the man he believed was spreading it. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where everything in this case lives. A twenty-two-year-old who believed he was doing something righteous drove 240 miles with a bolt-action rifle and fired into a crowd that included children. The intention doesn’t soften the act. It explains it — and that’s worse, because it means the machinery that produced this moment is still running.
You’re also right that the world will capitalize on his actions. It already has — from every direction. That’s Chapter Ten’s territory. But for now, in this chapter, I’m just trying to build the record of who he was before he became what he did. Because if we skip that part, we learn nothing. And if we learn nothing, the next kitchen, the next scholarship kid, the next dinner table argument — we miss it again.
Thank you for reading this chapter and for grieving in more than one direction. That’s rare. That’s what this series is asking people to do.
I'm smell a book, Gloria⁉️ This could be a best seller, outlined here in your series 🤓 You've really hit on the back story...!! Thank you and will reStack ASAP 💯 👍
I’m certain a big time true crime writer is hunched over their keyboard as we speak.
Thanks again Gloria for keeping us up to date on everything you possibly can.I appreciate all the hours of hard work you put in to keep us educated on all the facts so we can form an opinion of our own. It is truly heartbreaking on both sides. Look forward to your next chapter Thank you.
Thank you so very much.
What I would like to know if possible, is how this could have been prevented? I can understand Tyler's argument about hate, but where does it cross over to shooting this person is acceptable? What can we point a finger at?
Intolerance towards gay/trans people, the internet, civic teaching in school. It doesn't sound like he had any kind of mentally disturbing characteristics or anything like that.
How can this be prevented in the future?
I know he should not be killed for this.
Edit: damn good writing.
Arthur, you’re asking the question Chapter Eight exists to answer — the security failure. Because the honest answer to “how could this have been prevented” has two parts, and one of them is uncomfortable.
The first part is physical. Six cops for 3,000 people. No metal detectors. A rooftop that campus security was asked to cover and agreed to cover and then didn’t cover. A building anyone could walk into. That’s Chapter Eight, and it’s the chapter that will make people angry, because the prevention was right there — it was requested, promised, and skipped.
The second part is the one nobody has a clean answer for. There was no manifesto. No criminal record. No diagnosed mental illness in the public record. No history of violence. A 4.0 GPA, a scholarship, a family that loved him, a partner who didn’t know. He said Kirk “spreads too much hate” at a dinner table — which millions of Americans have said — and nine days later he was on a rooftop. What do you surveil? What do you intercept? A dinner table opinion and a week of planning and a grandfather’s rifle with no serial number?
That’s what makes this case so hard to metabolize. The crossover point you’re asking about didn’t announce itself. It never does.
And thank you for the last line. I hear you on the death penalty. That’s Chapter Ten territory. Stay with me.
You are such a wonderful writer. I wasn’t interested in him for many reasons but you drew me in. That’s what good writing does. There’s so much to this story but most of us thought there was nothing. I think about his lover turning him in with ease. Could anyone be more powerless than her? She who stirs the storm is such a fitting title.i look forward to the next chapter. We may see things differently but it’s a story of lost souls one way or another, from the grandparents on down.
I’m not sure lots of people will write about this. Most will see it as not worth developing as I did. It seemed so one dimensional. You were able to because of your creative writing style and your adherence to unexpected facts.
In the end it will be people putting their heads together figuring out how to put this country back together again. Good writing will be the springboard. When you get to publishing if you need help just ask.
And believe it or not I spent a night in St George. It had one restaurant connected to the gas station and one seedy motel. These are simple, easily manipulated, one dimensional people. They need your book!
Karen, "lost souls from the grandparents on down" — that's the generational read this series is building toward and you just said it in nine words.
You're right about Lance. Lance kept the messages. Lance cooperated. Lance did exactly what the system asks a person to do, knowing what it would cost. The most powerless person in this story may also be the one who held the most integrity under pressure. That deserves more attention than it's gotten.
But I want to pull at one thread in what you said — not your read of St. George, but the framing. Simple and easily manipulated is how the coasts have always described places like Washington County, and it's part of how we got here. These are people who run businesses and raise families and go to church and hold political convictions as firmly as anyone in Brooklyn or San Francisco. Tyler Robinson wasn't simple. He was a presidential scholar who could lecture on Benghazi at fourteen. His parents weren't manipulated — they were operating inside a system of belief that felt as rational to them as yours and mine feel to us. The danger isn't that they're one-dimensional. The danger is that they're not, and we keep treating them as if they are, and then we're stunned when a kid from that world does something three-dimensional and catastrophic.
That said — they do need this book. And so does everyone who thought this story wasn't worth developing. Thank you for reading closely enough to change your mind. That's the whole point.
And I'm holding you to that offer.
Here’s what brought me there:
“Read the inscriptions in order and you see a twenty-two-year-old who loaded a rifle with memes. Not manifestos. Not ideology. Memes. Furry community references and video game inputs and an Italian folk song he probably learned from a Netflix show. The political vocabulary is there — “fascist” appears twice — but it is wrapped in the irony-soaked language of a generation that communicates in layers of plausible deniability, where everything is a joke until it isn’t, where sincerity is the only taboo. This is not the language of a movement. It is the language of a young man who lived online.”
The act unconnected to a movement to me is selfish, thus greedy. It feels like MAGA thinking. We’re unhappy so we’re taking over rather than working it out. Let’s elect a strongman and have our way v. let’s fix things.
Gloria’s writing is brilliant. It’s thought provoking. Seems he went after hate the way his parents went after what they hated. Kill the other side. Hire Trump to do that for us.
He didn’t help the gay cause. He made it more disturbing for the people who hate it. He couldn’t enjoy a gay relationship so he made it harder for others when he could have stood for something.
To me greed is making other people jokes so you do what you want. It’s think only about yourself. Do what’s good for you.
When she pointed out his lack of sincerity it made me think of greed. And although the costume was a sarcastic thought, who would have known who he was for Halloween if not for Gloria? Her writing is so unique that I tossed that in almost as a tribute. She really gets people thinking.
And, of course, since my mission is exposing the corruption in our schools that turned our children shallow but is almost impossible to make known, he is no exception. When you’re shallow you’re likely greedy. He could have committed an act that made a difference for his fellow gay people. Instead he made more people need a strongman to disappear an issue so many hate.
Karen, this is the kind of comment that makes me stop and reread my own work through someone else’s eyes.
The greed framing is one I hadn’t considered, and it landed. You’re right — there’s something profoundly selfish about what he did, and your parallel cuts deep. His parents hired Trump to do their fighting for them. Tyler picked up a rifle and did his own. Different methods, same architecture: I’m unhappy, so someone else has to pay for it. The MAGA apple didn’t fall far from the MAGA tree — it just rolled in a different direction.
And you nailed the cruelest irony of the whole case. He was in love with a trans woman. He could have been something — a voice, a story, a young man from a conservative Mormon family who chose love anyway and stood in it publicly. That’s a life that changes minds. That’s the thing that actually moves the needle. Instead he handed every person who already hated queer people a reason to point and say see what they do. He didn’t strike a blow against the hate. He gave it a recruiting poster.
Your line — “he went after hate the way his parents went after what they hated” — I wish I’d written that. That’s the whole chapter in one sentence. The mechanism was inherited. Only the target changed.
And thank you for seeing what the writing is trying to do. I’m not here to tell people what to think about Tyler Robinson. I’m here to build the record clearly enough that people like you arrive at things I hadn’t even seen yet. That’s the job working.
This is the beauty of a democracy. Words move us forward. I have a tendency to forgive and feel sorry for young people. I hope you will include these thoughts and one day get your story to him and his family. Perhaps they’ll grow beyond hate.
They think they can hate gays away. They will only stop when they realize like it or not gender has become an issue. My astrology friend says the age of Aquarius will be one gender. Maybe that’s why this is happening. It’s not my choice but I have to accept it’s a choice the way I accept other things that aren’t my choice. My daughter just married a woman. I’m glad she’s happy.
That’s what these people don’t get. That’s what the con man used to rile them up. And to complicate things further, the people running our schools are intentionally promoting this issue knowing it will keep people from their doorway. That’s how insidious they are. Bring in books discussing gay issues. Get the parents mad and those fires are all they see.
Whether you’re for or against this issue the parents should teach their kids. They need time. It’s a hard issue. Too much change for many.
The gay issue is the best thing they have going to destroy democracy when it should be worked out via democracy.
Once people follow my lead about our schools so much will heal. Once I get a leader to learn what I know they can heal this country.
A society can’t change and move forward with corrupt schools. The gay issue is tearing us apart. If people understood education as I do they’d see the urgency. His story to me is a red flag I’m right.
But I didn’t mean to disparage him as greedy when all our young people are that unless they re exceptional souls. I hope one day he reads your book on him and then reads mine on why he was so limited.
I hope he isn’t given the death sentence. He’ll have time to read.
.
What you’re pointing out is that the shift from MAGA thinking to liberal thinking didn’t happen. It didn’t happen when he became gay. It didn’t happen when he dealt with Charlie. He simply took his MAGA hate and twisted it against a fellow MAGA—Charlie—using the MAGA weapon of choice.
One could say he felt a right to be gay as a MAGA, which was a lot for him to ask in that world where men are superheroes.
I’m feeling less sympathetic to him as I read further into this because of that. He didn’t kill because Charlie was spouting evil thoughts. He killed because he was greedy. He wanted to be an accepted MAGA.
The question is did he write that fascist comment on the bulletin to make us think he has a liberal heart? Or is he dissociative with his two parts battling each other?
The other question on my mind for having learned this from you, is did dressing as Trump for Halloween start him down a path of evil?
Thanks for the diversion. There may very well be others writing books but I doubt as well.
Karen, you’re building something here that I need to ponder, because you’re not wrong and you’re not entirely right, and the space between those two things is where this whole case lives.
The MAGA operating system theory — that he never actually uninstalled the software, just pointed it at a different target — is the most uncomfortable read of this case I’ve encountered. And I’ve been inside these documents for months. You’re saying the violence wasn’t a departure from how he was raised. It was an application of it. The family taught him that when you’re angry enough, you act. You don’t organize. You don’t negotiate. You don’t show up at a school board meeting. You hire a strongman or you become one. He just picked a different enemy.
Your two questions deserve separate answers.
The bullet inscriptions — “Hey fascist! Catch!” — I don’t think that was performance for an audience. I think he meant it. But I also think he didn’t fully understand what he meant by it. He called Kirk a fascist the way the internet calls everything fascist — as currency, not as analysis. He wasn’t writing a political treatise on those casings. He was writing in the only language that felt real to him, which was the language of the internet, which is the language of people who have never been forced to mean what they say. Whether that’s dissociation or just a generation that was never taught the weight of words — the trial might tell us. Or it might not.
The Halloween costume. Did it start him down a path? No. But it tells you where the path started. It tells you he was raised in a house where Trump wasn’t just a politician — he was a costume, a family joke, a shared identity. That’s the water he swam in. And when he left that water, he didn’t learn to breathe different air. He just held his breath and kept swimming the same way.
You said you’re feeling less sympathetic. Good. That means the chapter is working. It’s not asking for sympathy. It’s asking you to look.
And Karen — “did dressing as Trump for Halloween start him down a path of evil” is a line I’d put on the back cover of the book. Don’t think I won’t remember you said it.
Karen, something in your reading pulls at me — and I want to sit with it honestly rather than argue past it.
Six chapters of documented evidence ground Gloria's work: the Trevor Project data, the USU departure, the Discord community, the texts to Lance, the surrender. When I hold all of that alongside "he was greedy," I notice a gap so wide I genuinely wonder whether we read the same series.
Greed names wanting more of something you already possess. What does Tyler Robinson possess in Gloria's account? A family system he's drifting away from. A church that holds no room for who he actually is. A political identity dissolving in real time. A single person — Lance — carrying the full weight of his interior life. The Trevor Project puts 42% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah seriously considering ending their lives in a single year. Washington County runs that pressure at full concentration. What Tyler needed, Gloria documents chapter by chapter, was ground to stand on. He ran out of it.
The Halloween costume as origin story — I understand the impulse. We all want the thread we can pull backward that explains the knot. Yet any childhood photograph contains, in retrospect, the seeds of wherever someone ended up. That's hindsight carrying the load meaning needs to carry.
Your "two parts" observation genuinely interests me. Gloria's Chapter Six earns exactly that reading. What I'd add: those parts form under impossible conditions, one performing what the surrounding system requires, another carrying what the system refuses to hold. The pressure between them produces a predictable outcome — and Gloria's refusal to call that outcome a moral verdict is precisely what makes this journalism worth six careful chapters.
What specific moment in Gloria's account brought you to the greed reading? I'd genuinely like to understand the path there.
Jay, this is the comment section I built this series for. Two readers pulling the same chapter in different directions, both landing on something real, neither one entirely wrong.
You’re right to ground it in the data. The Trevor Project numbers, the USU gap, the LDS pressure cooker, the single relationship carrying the full weight of a closeted interior life — that’s the structural read, and it’s the one the evidence supports. Tyler Robinson was not operating from surplus. He was operating from deficit. That’s not greed. That’s collapse.
But Karen is seeing something too, and I don’t want to wave it away. The mechanism — not the motive, the mechanism — does look inherited. The idea that when you’re angry enough, you act on it. That you don’t organize, don’t testify, don’t show up with a sign. You eliminate the source of your pain. Karen is calling that greed. I might call it something else — maybe the only model of power he’d ever been shown. But she’s not wrong that he replicated the structure even as he rejected the content.
What I love about your question back to her — “what specific moment brought you to the greed reading” — is that it’s the right question asked the right way. You’re not dismissing her. You’re asking her to future discuss her thoughts. That’s what this series does, and the fact that my readers are now doing it to each other in the comments tells me the work is landing where it should.
The chapter asks you to hold two things at once. You’re each holding one. Neither of you is going to let go. That’s the point.
Gloria, your perspective illuminates the distance between our readings. I feel a cultural gap here, yet I appreciate the chance to bridge it.
My curiosity focuses entirely on the text already written. I seek the specific moment where the narrative reveals greed or a deep MAGA connection, as these elements remain hidden to me within the chapters we discussed. I want to return to those pages and look again. Re-evaluating my own assessment requires finding the exact point where Karen saw these motives.
I value Karen’s sight. I ask for a hint—a signpost in the text or perhaps a link to general media reports about Tyler—so I might see what she sees. Finding that anchor allows me to understand her path and perhaps revise my own thinking. I want to stand where she stands and look at the same evidence.
Murder is the ultimate form of control.
Ian, LORDY! Seven words and you just wrote the thesis statement for the entire series.
This is fantastic. I'm too sleepy to write more on my phone, aside from saying that playing Wordle after blasting someone's carotid artery with a bullet is chilling.
Also, how did you make those grey text blocks?
The Wordle is the detail I can’t stop mulling over. Not damning — just disorienting. He solved it in three tries. I can barely solve it in six on a good day.
Most of us get the wordle at “Phew.” That detail stood out to me too. Another great piece Gloria. Thanks for sharing the human factor here.
Charles — I follow several Substacks that cover the platform’s own tools, and the best of them is Amanda Bray’s The Publishing Spectrum. She just published a piece on a new feature called the callout block — Substack’s version of a magazine sidebar. I read it yesterday and immediately put it to work in this article. Glad it landed.
Here’s her piece: https://thepublishingspectrum.substack.com/p/substack-just-gave-you-a-sidebar?r=a4vn&utm_medium=ios%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B
The call out blocks work brilliantly here. Astounding piece, brava.
I could have used it yesterday! I did a long piece it was suitable for.
I see it now. I missed it. I'm usually pretty attuned to Substack changes. I literally called the paragraph I wanted to use something like this for, "Sidebar."
They also added a fantastic new time saver called "Template" but that was a little more obvious to me as it was right in the top of the editing menu. Thanks again for this tip.
Thank you, Gloria! 😊
Gloria —
I am so grateful for you writing this series. This time I stay inside the psychological part of your essay which I have read 3 times by now. Hours later I'm still inside it — and I want to bring a perspective shaped partly by German systemic family therapy and IFS, partly by my own biographical material. Where facts ground us I'll say so. Where I speculate I'll name that too. Consider this less analysis, more an open field of questions worth sitting with.
- What the legal record leaves untouched
The USU semester — one spokesperson statement and a gap. Walking away from a $32,000 scholarship makes economic sense only when the psychological cost of staying runs catastrophically higher. Someone in Logan may have seen something. Resident advisors. Fellow students from Tyler's cohort. The university spokesperson's phrasing — "no disciplinary record" answering a question nobody publicly asked — reads as careful institutional language doing specific work. What work, exactly?
The classmate in the Challenger rode 240 miles believing they headed to a work site. What did he notice and file away? What felt ordinary that morning?
And the trigger week. "A bit over a week." Something moved Tyler from dinner table anger into action. What shifted in those specific days? Did the Kirk announcement land inside an already-fracturing dynamic with his father? The crossing point stays completely dark.
- A scenarios playground — IFS and systemic family therapy as possible lenses
What if the 4.0, the ACT scores, the scholarship letter his mother filmed signal a high-functioning protective system running at full capacity rather than a simply thriving child? IFS calls this a manager — a part formed early around one specific learning: perform perfectly and the field around you stays safe. The achievement becomes the adaptation. The family celebrates. The visible signals run green. The cost stays invisible, paid internally, in the gap between the performed self and whatever lives underneath.
What might Tyler's progressive withdrawal map, viewed through this lens? Each retreat possibly following a failed attempt to exist authentically in the previous container. LDS community first. Family of origin. USU. Then gaming spaces and online communities offering what Washington County structurally may have withheld: anonymity, chosen identity, belonging decoupled from biography. The furry community reference on the casing points toward deep immersion — someone living inside those spaces long enough for their linguistic register to become the most natural voice available. Even on a bullet casing. Even then.
By September 10 his map of safe territory may have contracted to Lance and the online communities. A question worth sitting with: what does a person do when even that last container shows signs of strain?
Here's what the Trevor Project's 2024 Utah survey documents about what living inside this state costs LGBTQ+ young people — and these figures ground the speculation in something measurable. 42% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah seriously considered ending their lives in the past year, including 46% of transgender and nonbinary youth. 11% attempted suicide. 66% experienced discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. 22% faced physical threats or harm. 56% reported politics negatively impacted their wellbeing — a lot, meaning daily. 47% wanted mental health care and couldn't access it. And 56% of LGBTQ+ young people in Utah — including 63% of transgender and nonbinary youth — reported considering leaving the state entirely because of LGBTQ+-related laws and politics.
The research points toward environment as the driver, not identity. Washington County sits inside that environment at full concentration.
- A different possible reading of the rooftop
The text exchange with Lance, the Discord confession, driving home and reporting in rather than running — what if the sequence runs less as a political act and more as something closer to: I can't have what I need. I'm not allowed to exist as I actually am. If I can't change any of this, I can at least make it mean something?
The hints of suicidal ideation in earlier chapters reframe the rooftop when held here. A bolt-action rifle at 430 feet against a protected target in an open courtyard reads poorly as tactical planning for a successful assassination. As a departure act with a statement attached — does it carry a different kind of coherence?
He told Lance what to do. Lance kept the messages and cooperated fully. What might Lance have understood, and for how long?
I leave those questions deliberately open.
- Where my own body brings something — two distinct moments, neither a map for Tyler yet both pointing toward him
Tyler returns from USU to Washington County — possibly carrying something he discovered in Logan fitting nothing the world he grew up inside ever offered him. The speculation worth sitting with: did the return run as an attempt to bury it? Stay only far enough from whatever opened in Logan, trusting distance from the source would let the whole thing blow over?
In 2007 I walked back into my childhood home after my mother died. I carried zero awareness of the weight I placed on my own psyche by returning. The house activated something the intervening years had simply buried deeper. Completely dissociated, completely exiled from myself — holding the lid on a pressure cooker while the body reacted constantly, the psyche reacted, and I suppressed what I could and managed the rest.
I never grasped the burden. I simply went.
Which opens a question I want to leave here rather than answer: might Tyler have experienced something similar, walking back into Washington County — and known nothing of what he carried back in with him?
Then 1987. I reached a point of desperation the containers around me could no longer hold. I tried to end my life. Two things stopped me — my brothers, four and two years old. The body overrode the decision through its own logic entirely, arriving at two small faces before the conscious mind caught up. An anchor the self-destruction logic simply couldn't answer.
What anchored Tyler? Lance carried everything — the sole container holding his actual self. What happens when that weight concentrates in one person and the container shows even the smallest crack?
The body keeps its own account. It always collects.
The distance you're measuring, Gloria — everyone else looks away from it. You hold it steady.
Jay, I have read this three times now too, which feels right given that you read the chapter three times before writing it.
The IFS lens — the 4.0 as a manager part, not a marker of thriving — stopped me cold. Because you’re right. The scholarship video reads differently if you watch it as a performance of the system working, not as evidence of a happy kid. His mother films it. The family cheers. The visible signals run green. And the cost stays invisible, paid internally, in the gap between the performed self and whatever lives underneath. That framing doesn’t appear in the charging documents. It doesn’t appear in any of the reporting. It belongs in this series, and it will.
Your USU question is the one I keep circling. “No disciplinary record” answering a question nobody publicly asked — you caught the institutional language doing its work. Something happened in Logan. One semester is not burnout. One semester is a door opening or a door slamming, and the fact that nobody — not the university, not the family, not a single piece of published reporting — has named what happened in that gap tells me either nobody knows or nobody wants to say. The trial may crack it open. The preliminary hearing might. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep pulling the thread.
The bolt-action rifle observation — that it reads poorly as tactical planning and differently as a departure act — is the single most unsettling reframing anyone has offered me in six chapters. A bolt-action Mauser at 430 feet against a moving target in an open courtyard. One round. No escape plan that actually worked. He tried to retrieve the rifle and couldn’t. He drove home. He told everyone. He said he wanted to die. You’re asking whether the rooftop was an assassination or a suicide that took someone else with it. I’m not going to answer that, because I can’t. But I’m going to hold it.
And Jay — thank you for putting your own body in this. 1987 and 2007. The return to the childhood home carrying weight you didn’t know you were carrying. The anchors that override the logic of self-destruction. You earned the right to ask what anchored Tyler, because you’ve stood in the place where the answer matters. Lance carried everything. One person. One container. That’s not a relationship. That’s a structural failure with a heartbeat.
The chapter asks readers to hold two things at once. You’re holding about seven. Keep questioning.
Gloria, I'm grateful for your generous answer and for holding my scenarios rather than dismissing them outright. I offered my biographical background deliberately — I'm certain I'd have missed what might lie underneath without it.
And that underneath may explain why Robinson's defense never sought a second ballistic analysis.
Follow the sequence his own texts lay out: retrieve the rifle first — "I'm worried what my old man would do" — then end it. The suicidal ideation arrives in the phone call with his father, after the rifle stays in the woods. His parents redirect him toward Hurricane. The surrender replaces the plan he drove home carrying.
He never planned a trial. He planned a retrieval, then an exit.
Which means his legal team inherited a client who originally intended to render all evidentiary procedure irrelevant. The objection to the second ballistic test originates with lawyers working the one gap still breathing in a record otherwise sealed shut — texts, Discord confession, DNA on trigger and casings, his own surrender, his own parents. The ATF inconclusive result stays the sole opening. Closing it serves no one on Robinson's side of the courtroom.
Your bolt-action observation sharpens here rather than softens. A person mounting a political act guards the evidence trail. Robinson guarded a family heirloom and planned to disappear. Those two intentions run in entirely opposite directions — and the family heirloom matters structurally, across generations, in ways the charging documents will never touch.
Keep pulling Logan. Something opened or slammed there. The trial may say what.
Damn girl, I'm glad I found you on here. This is fantastic.
Thank you!