Six days after the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University, the state’s public safety commissioner, Beau Mason, described the suspect arrested in the case as a “lone gunman.” Mr. Mason was careful to note, as law enforcement officials often do in such situations, that the government’s investigation of the Sept. 10 assassination was ongoing.
In the meantime, amateur investigations were proliferating, with different theories of the case.
On her online talk show last week, Candace Owens, the far-right provocateur and conspiracy theorist, showed an image of what she claimed to be a “trap door” leading to “a whole underground thing” near the location where Mr. Kirk was killed. Ms. Owens wondered if investigators had considered that someone may have shot Mr. Kirk from below and escaped through a tunnel system.
“I’m theorizing,” Ms. Owens said, “because I have a right to. I have a right to think.”
A bumper crop of conspiracy theories have bloomed in the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s death, turbocharged by social media and America’s online influencer class. They are suggesting shadow actors and hidden motives, and casting suspicion on the working theory of the case: that the suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, devised a plan on his own to assassinate Mr. Kirk because of his right-wing politics.
On the left, the theories tend to support the idea that Mr. Robinson was not, as Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah put it, a man with a “leftist ideology.” Some liberals continue to believe that Mr. Robinson was a member of the white nationalist “groyper” movement, far to the right of Mr. Kirk.
At the same time, some conservatives have been looking for evidence that Mr. Robinson did not act alone. Such evidence — which hasn’t borne out — would lend credence to the assertion by Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, that there was an “organized campaign that led to this assassination,” involving “terrorist networks.”
Yet another conspiracy — the idea that Israel was somehow involved in the shooting — has become so ubiquitous that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently felt compelled to make a video denying it.
“Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, said that the bigger the lie, the faster it will spread,” Mr. Netanyahu said in the video. “Well, somebody has fabricated a monstrous big lie that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder.”
Mr. Kirk’s killing is reminiscent of the shocking political assassinations of the 1960s, which also gave rise to public theorizing that ranged from the plausible to the fantastical.
In this case, much of the speculation is being promulgated by conspiracy theorists Mr. Kirk himself helped elevate by inviting them to speak at events sponsored by his conservative youth group, Turning Point USA, and other affiliated groups.
Besides Ms. Owens, they include: Alex Jones, the host of Infowars; Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Trump and host of the “War Room” podcast; and Kari Lake, senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Many are Trump supporters who questioned official government narratives when Mr. Trump was out of power, and have continued to do so now that he is back in the White House.
Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, in North Carolina, said that conspiratorial thinking has long been a feature of American public life — but that its impact has grown. “What is different today is the spread and the power of these conspiracy influencers to really say whatever they want,” he said, “and it becomes accepted by folks to say this is legitimate.”
Saying they seemed “too stilted, too much like a script,” Mr. Bannon recently cast doubt on the authenticity of text messages that the authorities released between Mr. Robinson and his romantic partner. Mr. Bannon also said that the left-wing antifascist movement known as antifa should be investigated, as should the possibility that the shooting was connected to the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump last year in Butler, Penn.
Mr. Kirk was also a friend of Kash Patel, a promoter of conspiracy theories whom Mr. Trump chose to lead the F.B.I. Mr. Patel was invited to speak at a Turning Point event in 2022.
Now some critics are worried that Mr. Patel’s handling of the investigation is fueling more conspiratorial conjecture.
Last week, Mr. Patel wrote in a social media post that government investigators were looking beyond the “initial findings” of the Kirk investigation. Among other things, he said, investigators were looking into “the possibility of accomplices.”
Mr. Patel went on to describe two specific matters that he said the government was scrutinizing, both subjects of much online speculation. One of them, he said, was “hand gestures observed as potential ‘signals’ near Charlie at the time of his assassination.” The other, he said, focused on a plane “that allegedly turned off its transponder after departing from an airport near the assassination site.”
Mr. Patel wrote that investigators had determined that the transponder on the airplane was in fact “not turned off,” and that the “apparent gap” was the result of “incomplete flight data in rural areas.”
But the statement struck some law enforcement experts as unorthodox, potentially sowing confusion among the public.
“It’s the obligation and the duty of the F.B.I. to investigate every credible lead,” said Bill Nettles, a former U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina appointed by President Barack Obama. “It is not their job to give credence to unfounded internet speculation.”
The F.B.I., in an email, declined to comment.
Mr. Robinson, who was living in the town of St. George, Utah, surrendered to authorities about 33 hours after Mr. Kirk’s killing. He was charged with multiple counts, including aggravated murder. He had no past criminal record. In the text message exchanges that officials released between Mr. Robinson and his romantic partner, Mr. Robinson wrote that he had “had enough” of Mr. Kirk’s “hatred.”
Mr. Robinson’s mother told the police that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” in recent months. His partner, who was living with him, had been transitioning from male to female gender, prosecutors said.
Mr. Kirk was an outspoken critic of transgender rights.
The unsupported theory that the state of Israel was involved in the Kirk killing set off alarm bells at the Anti-Defamation League. In a statement released two days after the shooting, the group noted that such conspiracy narratives “perpetuate centuries-old antisemitic tropes about supposed outsized Jewish power and control that have incited persecution, discrimination and violence.”
One popular theory, the group said, raised the possibility of a “false flag” operation, in which Israel or Jewish groups had Mr. Kirk killed “because he had supposedly become more critical of Israel, or that Israel suspected he would eventually ‘turn on them.’”
The group said that an analysis conducted on Sept. 11 found more than 10,000 posts on X with the phrase “Israel killed Charlie Kirk.’” That number rose to 72,000 posts by Sept. 16, the group said.
The ADL noted that Ms. Owens, who formerly worked in communications for Turning Point USA, had said on a recent show that Mr. Kirk had been wavering in his support of Israel, but that supporters of Israel had pressured him not to change his position.
Ms. Owens, a vocal critic of Israel, specifically accused Bill Ackman, a wealthy supporter of Israel, of staging an “intervention,” in which she said he had warned Mr. Kirk against backing away from his support of the country.
Mr. Ackman rebutted the allegations on X and said that Ms. Owens had slandered him.
In a video posted on Friday to Instagram, Ms. Owens, who has 6.3 million followers there, said she had received a “communication” that answered questions about the “non-story that we are getting from the feds” concerning Mr. Kirk’s death. She teased the possibility of more revelations.
“This is crazy,” she said. “Nothing more that I can say. This is very serious. I don’t know what’s going on. But I do know that what we are being told has gone on is just not so.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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