A year after Charlie Kirk's death, it seems (to me at least) that the right faces a real challenge internally between the desire to let everyone have their say and the desire to avoid trafficking in conspiracy theories that sound crazy because they are.
It's almost as if Charlie Kirk himself was holding this particular line in check in some ineffable way. He was the person who put free speech and open debate at the very forefront of what he did. It was clear he really believed in its value and he died, at least in part, because of his willingness to speak to everyone, allowing himself to become a target at an open forum advertised in advance.
At the same time, Kirk avoided letting his views devolve into the kind of conspiracy theorizing that seems to have run rampant since his death. A year later, we have plenty of free speech on the right, which is good, but so much of it seems focused on fringe conspiracies that have come to dominate a lot of the conversation about global politics and of course about Kirk's death.
Kirk mostly managed to walk a fine line that now seems, not lost, but certainly outshouted in his absence.
Consider the story of Hunter Kozak. He's the liberal college student who was asking Charlie Kirk a question at UVU when a shot rang out. Since then he's become a focus for conspiracy theorists everywhere who are convinced he was somehow part of a secret plot.
The man started to approach Kozak, then seemed to change his mind. Then he got closer. “Are you Hunter?” the man demanded...
Kozak was just getting back from the hospital after visiting his baby girl in a neonatal intensive care unit, where nurses told him her lungs weren’t yet fully formed. Earlier in the day, he’d been questioned by the FBI. He’d avoided his apartment because of the carousel of TV cameras, but now he was exhausted and was looking forward to collapsing into a familiar bed.
The man spoke again. “I know you were in on it,” he said. Kozak froze.
Kozak had already received hundreds of online death threats with that same message. Until then, he didn’t think anyone would actually show up where he lived, where his son and wife could be asleep upstairs.
Instinctually, Kozak recalled, he yelled at the man, like trying to scare off a wild animal. “Get the hell out of here,” Kozak barked. “Now. Leave.”
That was an extreme case but it was enough to convince Kozak he needed to move. To this day, he still gets threats from conspiracy theorists inspired by Candace Owens and others.
...doubters combed through his social media, where they found his relatives on Facebook and posted their addresses online.
They shared his wife’s name, too. They learned the couple’s daughter was in the NICU and questioned why they were at the event.
“One day I will find you … when you least expect it,” one wrote. Another said, “We’re coming for you Hunter.” Others threatened him with torture.
As fast as Kozak could block or report users, 100 more would regenerate. It hasn’t stopped.
“Just today I blocked someone,” Kozak said. “It happens daily. … The conspiracy theorists have only ramped up in their fervor.”
That's how it seems to me as well. In the wake of Kirk's death, the conspiracy theorists have run wild, not just about his assassination but about Israel. In fact, Candace Owens in particular has really melded the two issues, suggesting that Kirk was assassinated not for his views on trans rights but for his changing views on Israel. Again, this is another place where Kirk seemed to be walking a fine line before he was killed.
Toward the beginning of 2025, Neff and Kirk started having more frequent conversations about one issue in particular: Israel. Online, Neff had noticed that young conservatives were growing increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel, and that many of their criticisms were tipping into explicitly antisemitic territory. According to Neff, Kirk, whose own thinking on the issue was shifting away from a staunchly pro-Israel position, was open to serious geostrategic critiques of U.S. support for Israel, but he also saw the deepening antisemitism on the right as a real moral and political hazard. “One time — and I got a kick out of this — he was like, ‘Blake, why do people hate Jews?’” Neff recalled. He received an assignment from Kirk to carve out a middle-ground position that made room for criticism of Israel without licensing antisemitism. “Go read everything you can about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so you will know about it, and I can go to you if there’s something I need to know,” Neff recalled Kirk telling him.
In September of that year, Neff was reading Righteous Victims, an 800-page history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, when Kirk requested that he join a brief trip to Utah for an event at Utah Valley University. Kirk was anticipating fielding questions about the Israel issue from Groypers — self-identified followers of Nick Fuentes — and he wanted to do some last-minute brainstorming with Neff...
At the event, Neff was scrolling through his phone about 20 feet to Kirk’s left when he heard what he thought was a firecracker go off in front of him. He looked into the crowd, and then toward the tent where Kirk had been speaking. “You can imagine what I saw,” Neff told me, his voice breaking a little.
Neff says he knew even as he sat in the hospital that day what would happen next.
Sitting in the emergency room waiting area at Timpanogos Regional Hospital, Neff’s first thought was for Kirk’s wife, Erika, and his two children. His next thoughts, tinged with a sense of dread, were about Candace Owens. “I literally had a conversation with someone at the hospital, and somehow Candace came up, and one of us was like, ‘Oh, Candace is going to go nuts over this.’”
Neff didn’t know Owens personally — Owens left her role as communications director for TPUSA in 2019, while Neff was still at Fox — but he had watched her evolution online, where Owens had been waging a dual-front war against Israel, which she has called a “demonic state,” and Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, whom she has claimed is secretly a man. Almost immediately after the shooting, Neff feared that Owens would direct those same conspiratorial energies toward Kirk’s death. “I kind of knew what would happen,” Neff said.
He's seen the same thing happen with Tucker Carlson, who he worked for both at the Daily Caller and then at Fox News.
Neff is cautious about publicly criticizing Carlson, who maintains a relationship with TPUSA. But Neff told me that he has been troubled by Carlson’s claims that Kirk was killed primarily because of his “evolving views on Israel,” a claim that Neff has called a lie on X. He also has taken issue with Carlson’s decision to host a guest on his show who cast doubt on the lone-wolf shooter theory and criticized Erika Kirk for showing insufficient grief after Kirk’s death.
These are two of the biggest podcasts in the world, easily two of the biggest on the right. Both of them have become spaces for the wildest conspiracy theories. Just this week, Carlson had a guest who suggested algebra was some kind of Jewish plot to keep people enslaved. What does that even mean, and how could Carlson go along with it?
It's hard to imagine Charlie Kirk, if he were still here, would put up with something that dumb being said on his show. At a minimum he would have challenged it, but sadly Kirk is gone and we're left with the B-team, a group of talkers more interested in saying whatever gets clicks and promoting themselves than in sticking to reality.
For the people who are directly on the receiving end of this nonsense — people like Kozak and Neff — there is a real price to pay for abandoning the principles that made Kirk different. But I think the impact will go well beyond those on the front lines. In the long run, if it's allowed to continue, this will have a big impact on the right in general.
Something very similar has happened on the Left. The Left got comfortable with too little free speech and too much effort to censor and silence people. The result was that all of their institutions began being eaten alive from the inside by woke college grads who cared more about calling people out than sticking with the mission of whatever group they worked for. No one could get anything done because people were constantly one-upping each other with woke platitudes. The left needs more free speech and less desire to censor.
The right has the opposite problem. We have lots of free speech, which is good, but lots of people on the right seem to have little willingness to discern what's real vs. what merely sounds good. Everyone should, of course, be free to speak their mind but not every utterance from every person is equally worthwhile to individuals or to the party collectively. For instance, a lot of what comes out of Candace Owens' mouth is hot garbage with no basis in fact. That matters (or should) just as much as her freedom to say it.
Being able to discern what is valuable and what is trash seems to be a skill fewer people on the right are cultivating these days. Is algebra unnecessary? Is it part of a Jewish plot? Um, no to both things. And while you're free to bring it up (free speech really is the best policy), it's still a really stupid thing to say for a whole bunch of reasons which I can enumerate if you have time.
There shouldn't be limits on free speech but there should be discernment about what speech is worth listening to and what isn't. Right now, the Right seems to be giving a lot of attention to a number of people who just aren't worth listening to. That doesn't mean they should be silenced, but it does mean people should look at their record of conspiracy theorizing and tune them out. As Asmongold suggested this week, "Is algebra a Jewish plot?" should really be the point where people stop taking Tucker Carlson seriously. If we don't show more discernment, we're going to be swamped with dumb and irrelevant nonsense all the time.
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