Editor’s note – following publication of this report, a representative of the Carnegie Endowment reached out to confirm that their senior fellow, Rachel Kleinfeld, had been falsely quoted by Reuters as attributing the assassin’s motivations to the far-right or groypers. Reuters has now acknowledged the error, removed the false quote, and issued a correction at the top of their piece.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was quoted by Reuters as defending the theory that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was carried out by a sympathizer of the right-wing “groyper” movement – only for Kleinfeld’s quote to be swiftly scrubbed from the story following online backlash.
The original version of Reuters’ story (archived here) claims Kleinfeld said markings on the assassin’s bullets pointed to groyper involvement, while making the contradictory claim that it was “hard to read too much into the messages” left on the shooter’s shell casings.
The original section is as follows:
RIGHT, LEFT OR CRAZY?
An expert on democracy and security said it was hard to read too much into the messages left on the shell casings recovered by authorities. One of the inscriptions read: “hey fascist! CATCH!” followed by a combination of directional arrows, an apparent reference to a sequence of button presses that unleashes a bomb in a popular video game.
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the symbology found on the bullet casings suggests the shooter had affiliation with the so-called Groyper movement, associated with far-right activist and commentator Nick Fuentes.
“It’s an eclectic ideological movement marked by video game memes, anti-gay, Nick Fuentes white supremacy, irony,” she said. “It certainly leans right, but it is quite eclectic.”
Following criticism online, Reuters scrubbed its website of the direct insinuation that the assassin was linked to Groypers and Fuentes, leaving the later, more nuanced comments of the researcher intact.
The new, scrubbed, version, contains only the latter half of Kleinfeld’s statements:
RIGHT, LEFT OR CRAZY?
“In a way, the ideological beliefs of the shooter don’t matter,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“What matters is how they’re taken by society. And if our society chooses to keep pointing fingers, whether the person turns out to be right, left or just unstable, then the violence will grow from the pointing of fingers, regardless of the act itself.”
Kleinfeld said most perpetrators of political violence were not clearly on one ideological side or another, but typically driven by “a hodgepodge of conspiracy beliefs and mental illness.”
“So it wouldn’t be surprising at all if this person was a person of the far right, if this person was a person who held a variety of different beliefs and was sort of unclassifiable,” she added.
It is considered good journalistic practice, when a news website makes a clarification, correction, or any other substantial change to its initial report, for the authors to include a note informing readers that a change has been made.
No such note can be found in Reuters’ report, making the edit look more like an attempt to cover up misinformation than an honest correction. [Editor’s note – Reuters later did add a note conceding that they quoted Kleinfeld inaccurately].
More reporting has found that the etchings of the bullet casings instead read, “Hey fascist! Catch!” Another was etched with the lyrics of Bella Ciao, an Italian antifascism song from World War II.
The unsubstantiated theory that Kirk’s assassin was a right-wing groyper has spread like wildfire in left-wing circles and in the legacy media, with coverage in The New Republic, Salon, and Newsweek in addition to Reuters.
The Carnegie Endowment: Another US Funded Censorship NGO
It will come as no surprise to followers of FFO research that Kleinfeld’s “disinformation research” is partly paid for by the American taxpayer.
The Carnegie Endowment has for years received millions of dollars in US federal funding, including $1.27 million from the Department of War, $1.09 million from the Energy Department, $781,776 from the State Department, and $53,680 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
The Endowment is also funded by a variety of western governments including the UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, the European Union as well as Japan and NATO.
The Carnegie Endowment currently has an ongoing $839,059 grant from the Department of Energy that ends in July 2026. The nearly $1 million grant started in August 2023, during the Biden administration.
During the past decade, the Carnegie Endowment became a hub for the kind of “disinformation research” that fueled online censorship. Major figures in the censorship industry are associated with Carnegie, including former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, Brazilian censorship advocate Marco Ruediger, and longtime National Endowment for Democracy employee Dean Jackson.
Carnegie’s Influence Operations Researchers Guild serves as a global umbrella for some of the most important organizations behind online censorship, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, GLOBSEC’s Center for Democracy and Resilience, Graphika, and the Global Disinformation Index.
Disinformation Researchers Weigh In
On BlueSky, another disinformation pro, former research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory Renée DiResta, criticized commentators for leaping to conclusions regarding the shooter’s motivations before all the facts were in, while also claiming that “Yes. The shooter could be a groyper. Give it time.”
Another famous name in the anti-disinformation world, former head of the Biden Administration’s “disinformation governance board” at DHS Nina Jankowicz, did not comment on the groyper allegations. She did, however, posthumously criticize Kirk for bringing his child to his event, and went on to argue that Kirk’s assassination was partly because of “an environment” created by “the right.”
What is different in the mind of me and the mind of Charlie Kirk that he thinks he can bring his kid to an event like that and and also be safe at an event like that? I haven’t felt that way in 3 years and I have much less of a high profile than him. I will never bring my child to an event with me in the United States. I don’t post pictures of him online because I don’t want him to be targeted.
Is it that the right thinks that guns won’t come after them? This is this is an environment that they’ve created… And it’s very sad, and I hope again, I just really hope that this is a watershed moment where we can change something in this country.
