The Iraq War sparked the first big political fight I had with my father. Like many in my generation, Iraq awakened me to the reality that America occasionally does bad things — and sometimes evil things, as in the case of Abu Ghraib. And yet, my father, the most moral and intelligent person in my life (a description that still holds), defended the war and the politicians behind it. 

The disconnect baffled me. So I waved placards, wrote protest songs and letters to the editor, cut a heart-shaped hole out of an American flag, and hung it in my college apartment. I became a real piece of work, as my father might have described me at the time. He knew, as I did, that all of my “activism” was really just an extension of our argument played out in public. I couldn’t wave my liberal pieties in his face, so I did the next best thing and waved them at the world.

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DECONSTRUCT THE DEEP STATE. DON’T BECOME IT

I got lucky on the question of Iraq. The war didn’t make sense to me on either a moral or strategic level. But I wasn’t exactly working with great information. My views at the time were shaped largely by Michael Moore documentaries and the back page of the New York Times, making my victory more the product of luck than superior judgment.

Thankfully, my father and I reconciled over Iraq and everything else fathers and sons need to reconcile over following those turbulent years. 

But not all political disagreements between fathers and sons end with reconciliation. Some fester, others explode, and in the tragic case of Tyler Robinson, the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk, and his father, a political divide turned deadly.

Early reports indicate that a political disagreement between a father and son may have played a key role in the assassination of Kirk at Utah Valley University. The mother of Tyler Robinson, the suspected killer in the horrific attack, told reporters that Tyler and his father had engaged in heated political arguments with increasing regularity and intensity in the year leading up to the shooting.

Pictures of Tyler and his father leaked online in the early hours of the manhunt. One from what appears to be only a few years ago shows the pair seated beside one another at a diner, leaning into each other and smiling, perfectly comfortable in each other’s company. Both are wearing baseball caps with sunglasses perched on the brim and T-shirts. It looks like they’d just been out for a hunting trip together. The picture was widely shared by liberals who wanted to paint Tyler as a Republican. And for all the world, that’s just what it looks like. 

But by 2025, the two couldn’t have grown more different politically. The father is described as a conservative member of the Mormon Church who supported President Donald Trump, while Tyler is said to have moved heavily toward the Left in recent years, and according to his mother, “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” 

To further complicate matters, Tyler had begun a romantic relationship with his roommate, a young man purportedly transitioning into becoming a woman. The engravings on the bullet casings — especially the phrase “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” — indicate that Kirk’s opposition to transgenderism played a major role in Tyler’s decision to kill him. It also likely drove a wedge between the father and son, given the elder Robinson’s affinity for Trump and membership in the Mormon church.

Tyler’s mother told police that weeks earlier he had been angry about UVU’s decision to host Kirk on campus, saying that Kirk “spread too much hate.” Tyler’s own words confirmed his mother’s account. In text messages sent to his romantic partner while he was still at large, he wrote, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Given what we know about his political identity, the father likely agreed with Kirk on the issue, meaning Tyler found him “hateful” as well.

Tyler was preoccupied with his father’s politics, even as he evaded authorities following the shooting. In the same text message thread with his romantic partner, Tyler lamented that his father had “been pretty diehard MAGA” since Trump came into office. He also worried about his father’s reaction if he did not return the gun home, texting, “how the [expletive] will I explain losing it to my old man.” 

The father’s role in eventually resolving the manhunt is no small part of the larger tragedy. His wife was the first to recognize Tyler from the surveillance still shots released by the FBI, and he agreed that it looked like their son. According to court filings, the father then confronted Tyler, asking, “Tyler, is this you? This looks like you.”

Tyler confessed but said he’d rather commit suicide than go to jail. But the father persuaded him to confide in a youth pastor and family friend who works with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Marshal’s Service. The arrest was made within hours.

It’s difficult to imagine what the father went through in those moments. He surely understood that handing over his son to the authorities amounted to participating in his son’s eventual execution. 

But for a father of faith, helping a son find a path to spiritual redemption is a higher calling than helping a son escape worldly harm. The terrible consequences of surrender, his son’s death and a lifetime of public shame for his family, did not outweigh his duty to assist in his son’s salvation. A suicide would have robbed Tyler of the opportunity to repent, while being in custody would allow him a little more time before coming face-to-face with his maker. The choice to surrender his son was about justice, but it was also about faith. 

Following my second year of college, during which I mostly played in a rock band, made cringey political gestures, and read Kerouac and Sartre, I dropped out. I headed from New York to California with nothing but a sack of clothes and a guitar. I told everyone in my life that I was going to find a way to live without any structures or boundaries, and maybe even become a famous musician in the process.

About a month into my misadventure, I called my father and asked him for a plane ticket home. 

“I thought you wanted to be one of the Dharma bums?” he asked. 

“I did. But I can’t,” I said. 

“You made your choice,” he said. “Live with it.”

I called back a few days later and begged. I felt myself letting go of reality, and it scared me. He heard it in my voice.

This time my father bought me the ticket — first class. And instead of making me take the train home or even pick me up himself, he sent a limousine to meet me at the airport. I’d never been in a limo before, and as I sat awkwardly behind the sharply dressed driver in my ripped jeans and T-shirt, I wondered why he did it. Only years later, when I first heard the Parable of the Prodigal Son and re-embraced the God I’d rejected in adolescence, did I understand. 

DEMOCRATIC PARTY ISOLATION IS GETTING WORSE

The duty of a faithful father is to point the son toward Heaven and let God take care of the rest. Sometimes that means making the unnatural act of offering up your own son to be killed. Sometimes it means making an elaborate and unforgettable gesture at great expense.

God is still working on me, and I join Erika Kirk in praying for Tyler’s repentance, a grace Charlie surely would have desired, for the sake of both Tyler’s soul and his father’s heart.