Tiffany Cross is a progressive pundit and podcast host. She previously had a show on MSNBC, and now makes occasional appearances on CNN. This week, she joined the panel for Abby Phillip’s show, alongside legal analyst Elie Honig (a moderate) and TV personality Kevin O’Leary (a libertarian-leaning conservative).
It did not go well. Right off the bat, Cross repeated the provably false claim that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a right-wing extremist.
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She conjured up this lie during a discussion of the recent attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), who was assaulted by a deranged man; he squirted an unknown liquid substance at her while she was speaking. Honig condemned this act of political violence—as everyone should—but then made the very fair observation that there is plenty of extremism on both sides. He went out of his way to assert that he did not necessarily think there were exactly equal amounts on both sides, only that conservative figures faced violence, too. But when he mentioned Kirk, Cross interrupted him to say that Kirk had been killed by a right-wing person.
????CNN’s Elie Honig had to fact check Tiffany Cross after she claimed Charlie Kirk was the victim of right wing violence
Honig: “Let’s also not forget Kirk was murdered-“
Cross: “Not by a left-wing extremist! [Robinson] was a right-wing extremist”
Honig: “That’s just not true” pic.twitter.com/B3bQ6dE8xe
— Brianna Lyman (@briannalyman2) January 28, 2026
The notion that Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s alleged killer, had right-wing motivations has apparently remained appealing for leftists, ever since the progressive Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson helped to mainstream this idea in the immediate aftermath of the shocking murder. Nevertheless, it is absolutely false. While Robinson did indeed come from a Republican family, his own motivation for committing the assassination was that he disliked the things Kirk had said about transgender people. We know this because Robinson confessed it in messages to his romantic partner, a transgender individual, writing that he felt compelled to take action to stop Kirk from spreading hate against the transgender community.
This is not really open to debate. Robinson is not a right-wing extremist, and his stated reasons for murdering Kirk were characteristic of left-wing thinking.
Perhaps you can forgive a commentator for getting this wrong if it’s before all the facts come in, but at this point—months after Kirk’s death—Cross is just repeating something that is completely debunked.
She also argued with O’Leary about whether new recruits who have joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are members of the Proud Boys, a far-right militia group. Cross asserted that she knew for a fact that Proud Boys had joined ICE, and cited as evidence the presence of what she described as “white supremacist” tattoos on the necks of some ICE officers.
There may be former Proud Boys who are members of law enforcement. And there might be members of law enforcement who have white nationalist tattoos. It’s true that one ICE agent attracted attention for having a Norse tattoo that some on the far-right claim as their own. I would caution about reading too much into this in general, however. Tattoos mean different things to different people. For twenty years, Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, had a tattoo plausibly associated with Nazi iconography on his chest. He claims he didn’t know that that’s what a totenkopf is.
But Cross suggested that there were so many Proud Boys joining ICE that it was having an effect on the former group’s organizing.
“There’s a reason why we have not seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys, and that is because I believe a lot of them are likely made ICE officers,” said Cross.
There’s simply no evidence for that. If the Proud Boys’ ranks have been reduced, it’s probably because of lawsuits against them and criminal convictions of their members. Enrique Tarrio, former chairman of the Proud Boys, was imprisoned for two years after being convicted of having organized the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, though President Donald Trump subsequently pardoned him, and all other January 6 defendants.
Tarrio was also revealed to have been an FBI informant in 2012 and 2014. So in that sense, there have definitely been Proud Boys working for the federal government. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Cross meant.
I saw many people on social media who refused to accept the attack on Omar on its face, and presumed it was some kind of hoax. The Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh stopped short of displaying certainty on this point, though he certainly entertained the possibility.
I don’t know if the Ilhan Omar thing was staged or not. There’s certainly plenty of reason to be suspicious. We know that leftists do these kinds of hoaxes all the time, and Somalis are notorious scam artists. We’ll see.
What I do know is that leftist agitators are out in the…
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 28, 2026
Since I am known for writing about hate crime statistics and debunking associated hoaxes, several people asked me what I thought. The issue here is that most hoaxes involve an alleged victim making some kind of claim that can’t be confirmed or debunked, especially by arresting a purported perpetrator. With the former Empire star Jussie Smollett, the whole thing fell apart for him as soon as the police were on the scent of the supposed assailants, the Osundairo brothers.
In this case, Omar’s assailant was caught on camera and apprehended immediately. The idea that she, or someone else, arranged this, seems extraordinarily unlikely, since the subsequent interrogation of the man is going to expose the true motivation pretty easily. We’re still awaiting all the details, but so far, it looks pretty straightforward: the guy is physically and mentally unwell, and dislikes Omar, according to The New York Post.
Washington, D.C., has done an abysmally terrible job of plowing the roads after the recent snowstorm, and as a result, the Free Media team has not made it to Reason‘s offices at all this week. That means no new content yet, although we are taping FREED UP a day earlier, and so you can expect the latest episode this afternoon. Here’s last week’s episode, if you haven’t seen it yet.
By the way, it’s truly amazing how bad the snow clean-up has been. Initially, things seemed fine: They plowed most of the main roads in my neighborhood, and I was able to drive to work on Monday with minimal difficulty. I assumed that eventually the city would send the plows to clean the rest of the streets. This proved to be incredibly naive on my part.
Love to live in the capital of the most powerful nation in history, where three days after a winter storm, in the middle of the work week, the crosswalks for major thoroughfares downtown remain uncleared. pic.twitter.com/zrnqKek83W
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) January 28, 2026
I understand that the unique combination of snow and freezing rain we got last Sunday has made clean-up a very challenging task, but… I’m from the Midwest, and I’m accustomed to the snow removal people basically having everything cleared the same day. The next day, worst-case scenario. What gives? What are our tax dollars here in D.C. paying for? This was an entirely foreseeable problem, and yet schools are probably going to be closed all week. Insane.
I just finished Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man: A Novel. It came out last year. I would describe it as postmodern, though it’s not a particularly challenging work. The narrator is a frustrated academic who is something of a caricature of 20-something men these days: his only joys are listening to podcasts and working out. It’s not a spiteful caricature, though. Much like Eddington, the real villains are the “wokesters.” Anyway, the entire thing takes place over the course of one day, and has only three different scenes: the narrator attends a meeting of his department, he goes to the gym, and he confers with administrators who are investigating…something. You’ll probably guess where it’s headed. Worth a read for those who have an interest in political correctness on college campuses and the podcast bro phenomenon.
