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 faceof 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.
Other prominent figures in the MAGA movement have pushed back, and some hope the evidence detailed over several days in this week’s court proceedings has helped combat outlandish claims. Prosecutors presented texts in which the defendant, Tyler James Robinson, told his then-roommate that he shot Kirk; the roommate also recounted the confession in a recorded interview.
But the furor over the case that played out on social media — outside the courtroom — showed the difficulty of fully dispelling conspiracy theories in an online-right ecosystem long sympathetic to them.
Owens is “generating smoke so that people will believe there’s a fire — about Erika, TPUSA, etc. This is evil. And it’s working,” conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro wrote on X. “She’s poisoning brains at scale. Resist the conspiratorial arsenic.”
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.”
“You’ve attempted to appropriate everyone else’s grief and honest searching and replaced it with Egyptian planes and exploding mics,” Kolvet continued. “What an awful trade for the country and the world.”
In a court filing, a lawyer for Erika Kirk appealed to the judge to make more evidence viewable to the public, alluding to the wild speculation that has frustrated the Kirk family.
“[In] the absence of transparency, speculation and conspiracy theories related to the tragic assassination of Mr. Kirk will continue to proliferate in the public domain, breeding doubt and distrust in the judicial system,” the lawyer, Jeffrey Neiman, wrote.
The purpose of the preliminary hearing was to assess where there is enough evidence to proceed with a trial. Prosecutors are trying to build a case that Robinson shot Kirk on Sept. 10 because of his political beliefs. They are seeking the death penalty. Robinson has not yet entered a plea.
The judge has not made a decision on a trial, and Robinson is due back in court on Sept. 1, when both parties will make arguments.
Kirk’s family issued a statement on Friday saying that “as difficult as these last few days have been, it brings our family comfort to know that the world has witnessed the overwhelming evidence of what occurred to Charlie that day.”
The Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit that tracks online threats, recently found in a report that Owens, through her public statements and social media posts, had caused a “statistically significant surge in death threats and calls for violence” against Kirk’s widow. Erika Kirk has asked Owens to stop, and met with her privately last year.
But Owens remains fixated on the case. Her spokesperson, Mitchell Jackson, said Owens’s family has also received threats and suggested “the media seems only to be concerned about Erika’s safety.”
In an “emergency update” video podcast ahead of this week’s hearing — viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube — Owens said she believed “unequivocally” that Robinson did not kill Charlie Kirk.
She made the same assertion last week on the show of Shawn Ryan, the No. 2-ranked podcast on Spotify. The episode, which has more than 5 million views on YouTube, is titled “I Don’t Believe Tyler Robinson Was Even There,” though authorities say video, DNA and Robinson’s own confessions indicate he was. (Owens was not in the courtroom this week; her spokesperson said she is on vacation).
Others have echoed Owens’s theories. Law enforcement’s transcripts of Robinson’s texts drew skepticism online on both the left and the right last year.
Tucker Carlson, the conservative podcaster and former Fox News host, said last month that he believes Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel”; authorities have not presented any evidence to that effect. Kirk defended Israel but also expressed some frustrations with its supporters.
Asked if the information in this week’s hearing had changed his view of Kirk’s killing, Carlson, a vehement critic of Israel with isolationist foreign policy views, initially said he did not recall making the comment about why Kirk was shot.
“Honestly I find the whole subject so sad that I haven’t been following the trial closely,” he said after a reporter sent a link to his remarks.
The speculation about Kirk’s death has become a flash point in a much broader rift in the MAGA movement as some conservative commentators accuse others of elevating extreme voices and misleading their followers with conspiracy theories.
Shapiro, the podcaster critical of Owens, used his speech at Turning Point USA’s national conference last year — a few months after Kirk’s death — to denounce “frauds and grifters.” He criticized fellow influencers, including Owens and Carlson by name.
This week, Shapiro and a host of right-wing leaders pushed back vociferously on Owens and those echoing her.
“It looks like more and more people have had enough of this bad behavior,” conservative commentator James Lindsay told The Post.
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