Last week was the preliminary hearing that will decide whether or not Tyler Robinson's case will go to trial. After watching much of it I can assure you that the case will go to trial because the evidence him is overwhelming. But we won't get the judge's decision until September 1.
In the meantime, Candace Owens and others who are making a living spreading conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's death are doing their best to dismiss the evidence presented at the hearing.
In any case, the hearing has resulted in some mainstream coverage of what Owens is doing. The Washington Post and Politico both published stories about her on Saturday.
Prosecutors had just laid out their evidence against Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer in painstaking detail, walking a Utah courtroom — and those watching online — through surveillance footage, DNA analysis and apparent confessions over text.
Right-wing influencer Candace Owens was not satisfied.
“Enjoy your fed slop!” she told her nearly 8 million followers on X, declaring the text messages suspicious. She claimed law enforcement never collected the relevant phone — even though they just testified they had.
Owens, a podcaster who once worked for Kirk’s activist group Turning Point USA, is the face of a months-long torrent of conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death. Those theories have divided the online right, which Kirk helped lead, and infuriated those closest to the slain conservative activist. Owens has baselessly suggested that the targeted killing of Kirk as he spoke at Utah Valley University was orchestrated and covered up by Israel, Turning Point USA officials and even Kirk’s widow, Erika.
The Post mostly seems interested in this as a squabble on the right.
Blake Neff, a producer for “The Charlie Kirk Show,” said in an interview Friday that the evidence aired in court could help address the conspiracy theories but that he is “under no illusions” it will make them go away.
Dealing with the murder of a friend has been painful enough, he said. “To take a clear-cut case and say actually the guilty people are the people who have suffered most through all of this — it’s an incredibly heinous act.”
Neff and others close to Kirk sparred online this week with Owens and other influencers questioning the case. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, responded directly to Owens on X: “You … target innocent people, ruin their lives for sport, inspire a wave of harassment and death threats against them, before predictably moving on to your next harebrained ‘theory’ when that one collapses.”
That's a pretty good description of what Candace Owens actually does. She's had so many shifting theories about this over the past several months. She just drops whatever isn't working for her and moves on to something new. When was the last time we got an update on Egyptian planes or French attempts to assassinate her or Wilmington, Delaware or any of the other junk she's attempted to make part of her theory. Recently she's been discussing an exploding microphone and other vague theories. And the people around her, Baron Coleman and Ian Carroll, just do their own freelancing. Sometimes Owens repeats what they are saying and sometimes she doesn't.
Politico's story is more focused on the consequences of all these theories in the real world.
The number of Turning Point’s on-campus chapters exploded after Kirk’s death — thanks in part to some red states facilitating high school chapters — from around 2,000 chapters nationwide to over 6,000. But at campus chapters across the country, leaders found themselves having to refute Owens’ theories.
“It’s really frustrating,” said Nathan Lutz, who founded a Turning Point chapter at his high school in Trumbull County, Ohio. “The only problem that I have with Candace Owens is she says a lot of stuff, but really just says it, and doesn’t have the stuff to support it.”
Owens has “caused a lot of pain among the students,” said Arizona State University professor Owen Anderson, who serves as adviser to the campus group that sits in the backyard of TPUSA’s headquarters. He has seen a major influx of interest since Kirk’s death, but Owens’ conspiracies have led to security concerns among the student’s leaders, some of whom feel “unsafe.”
The danger has been especially felt by people at TPUSA that Candace has landed on as part of a secret plot.
Following Owens’ conspiratorial videos, staffers received a series of threats, and Turning Point ramped up security at its Phoenix headquarters and the homes of several employees, according to three people with direct knowledge of the arrangements, who — like others in this piece — were granted anonymity to discuss private matters. One of those people took their family into hiding multiple times and eventually moved into a rental property so their name would not appear on public documents; the home they own is now rented out. This person also told POLITICO Magazine they spent thousands of dollars scrubbing their children’s images from the internet.
Several others who work for or with Turning Point received death threats after Owens mentioned them on her show; out of concern for their safety, they hired private security. Farnsworth, the contracted camera operator, feared for his life: After multiple death threats, he and his wife pulled their kids out of school and went into hiding for over a week, according to the three people familiar with Turning Point’s security arrangements, as well as a fourth person with direct knowledge of the situation. (Farnsworth declined to comment.)
Unfortunately, this is exactly what social media is really good at. It's good at forming cancel culture mobs that direct their energy toward individuals selected for punishment by ring-leaders like Owens. I've written about altruistic punishment many times before but it's basically a good feeling people get from punishing rule breakers for the greater good. That's what Owens is doing to these people. She's created a mob who find it satisfying to attack strangers online on the grounds that they are the real evil-doers who have escaped justice. Since this is largely about emoting and feelings, logic doesn't have a big role in it. Unfortunately it means you can't really argue people out of it, at least not easily. You have to embarrass them to the point that they stop enjoying it so much.
As I said, we've got several weeks until the case begins to move forward and that's time that Owens can continue to rally her fans for more fun bashing strangers over her nonsense claims. This isn't going to stop until we get an actual trial and a conviction. Unfortunately that could still be many, many months away.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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