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COMMENTARY by Candace Owens — "Who Killed Charlie Kirk? How conspiracy theories sparked a MAGA civil war" (published 2026-08-06).
This is third-party opinion/analysis ABOUT State of Utah v. Tyler James Robinson — NOT the court record. It is indexed for comparison against the primary transcripts/filings. Transcript is the YouTube auto-caption track (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnNwU92c15Y) — verbatim ASR.
The Zapruder film, 26 seconds, 486 frames, silent and in color. A home movie taken by a dressmaker named Abraham Zapruder on November 22, 1963. It captured the assassination of a president. This film wasn't shown on television until 12 years after its recording. For two years, he, like most Americans, believed in the official version, the Warren Commission version of what happened. but the day he first saw that 8mm approved of film, that amateur film that was made, that was the day he stopped believing. -It triggered our most popular and enduring political conspiracy theory, that Kennedy wasn't killed by a lone gunman but by a cast of conspirators, foreign and domestic, hiding behind a patsy. Fast forward more than 50 years to another assassination, this time of a Republican activist who dominated new media, arguably swayed elections, and wielded huge influence over Trump's cabinet picks, a 31-year-old who many on the right hoped would someday be president. This assassination was captured by scores of cameras from as many different angles and broadcast immediately to millions on smartphones. The Zapruder film, a grainy home video, had the power to make many Americans believe their government had orchestrated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The videos of the killing of Charlie Kirk, live and at the speed of social media, could have even more power, to splinter a political movement and maybe shatter what's left of a shared reality. Whatever you think of Charlie Kirk, campus crusader, MAGA Kingmaker, hate monger. He was one of a kind. A teenager who talked his way into the conservative movement and by 31 was a major voice in picking President Trump's second running mate and current vice president. - J.D. Vance is the best for a lot of different reasons. - He was a media giant with millions of followers and billions of views. - This video that you're about to see, one billion people saw. Who knows what it means for the election and for the civilization? I'm Brandi Zadrozny, a senior reporter at MSNOW, and I've been covering the MAGA movement for over a decade. I've watched how politicians and operators on the right embraced conspiracy theories. In that time, I saw what was once fringe become normal. Conspiracy theories became constant-presidential elections, QAnon, a pandemic- and I watched as Charlie Kirk pushed those conspiracy theories into the mainstream right. Allegedly, Haitians are going around and taking people's pets and eating them. After his death, a machine powered up, one that runs on distrust, one that Kirk helped build. And it did exactly what it was designed to do. It rejected the official story. The question is, was he the shooter? It seems like we're being spoon-fed a narrative. I now believe there is a federal level of corruption and conspiracy involved in this Murder, okay? - Now, a cottage industry of conspiracists say Kirk's accused killer is a patsy, suggest his widow Erica is in on a coverup, and that our own government, or a foreign one, ordered the hit. This far-out content has incredibly convinced millions, unleashing waves of harassment against those who were closest to Kirk, breaking apart one of MAGA's most powerful alliances between politicians and conservative influencers. - We should not say things like, "They shot Charlie." - Candace knows I disagree with her on this. - Stop. That's it. That's all I have to say. Stop. - It's also building a captive and paranoid audience on top of his grave. - Where are Charlie's homies at? Why are you guys all silent? Something's not right. We don't know know, but we know. And soon, we're gonna know know. - This is a story about what happens when a political movement built on conspiracy theories becomes the target of one, when what they've built comes for them. I've spent months following this story. It's taken me to the university in Utah where Kirk was shot, to the turning point stages where his widow is fighting to keep hold of his legacy, into the Provo courtroom where prosecutors are building the case against his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and into the unhinged online universe where creators are dismantling that case and selling another story, just asking the question. Who actually murdered Charlie Kirk? And who shot Charlie Kirk? Who killed Charlie Kirk? You know we're getting close. I first met Candace Owens in 2018. OK, so first, I really appreciate you taking this time. I know that this was by-- I'm sorry, I started on a Twitter battle. I'd come to Stanford University to see her speak with Charlie Kirk. Kirk was just 24 years old then. He'd worked social media on Trump's 2016 campaign and was back to building Turning Point USA, the group he'd started four years earlier to fight the left on college campuses and to recruit young Republicans. -If you're asking me, "Do I think the black community has been crippled economically?" the answer would be yes, it has been crippled economically by Democrat policies. -Kirk was crisscrossing the country, owning the libs, and building a digital enterprise on the back of its college debate tapes. -What if I ever said that's racist? -Name one thing. -We've enabled people to speak -- -Name one. -About racism, and by enabling people and giving them a platform -- -Like who? Like Candace Owens? -Exactly. -Oh, Candace Owens is a racist. -Kirk had just hired Candace, technically as Turning Point's Director of Urban Engagement, then promoted to Communications Manager, but really, she was a sidekick, and everything Charlie wasn't -- a woman, black, and, to Charlie and his roster of old white donors, comparatively cool. -Met Candace back in November, hired her five minutes after I met her, and as they say, the rest is the future. - Before we go any further, I should note that Candace declined to be interviewed for this video. When I asked, she sent a statement through her rep. She called me slimy and said it made her skin crawl that I would reach out in the wake of Charlie's assassination. And for the record, this is a weird thing to say, since this was the text Candace sent after that story published. And inconsistent with how Kirk spoke publicly about me. - And we've dealt with Brandi Zadrozny before in some stories. very smart, a relatively fair person, but she still has that pepper in her insults. -But Candace runs on vibes, and for an audience with a very short memory and attention span, it seems to be working out. -Happy 6 million subscribers. We did it. I'm so proud. -Now, how she became the fastest-growing right-wing podcaster in America, it's a story worth telling, because Candace's rise and ultimate crash through conservative media helps make sense of why she'd go on to do what she did to Charlie Kirk and the movement he helped build. Candace grew up in Stanford, Connecticut, with her parents and grandparents. In high school, she was the victim of some pretty terrible racist bullying. It was big state news. The NAACP took up her case, and her parents sued, eventually settling with the school. In 2016, as Trump stampeded toward the White House, Candace was living in New York City, working with a few other young women in a small marketing startup when she had an idea. It was rooted, she said, in her experience being bullied in high school. She called the project Social Autopsy. It would be a website, really a searchable database, of people's online accounts and posts. -With the ability to privatize social profiles and use pseudonyms in place of real names, it has been a free-for-all. That is, until now. -Candace said Social Autopsy would rid the Internet of cyberbullies and trolls. Social autopsy is your digital footprint, so be mindful of the words that you share. But social autopsy ran straight into another corner of the internet, Gamergate, maybe the most consequential battle in the internet culture wars. Gamergate, it's a story about sexism in the world of video gaming with all the elements of a Hollywood script. Players were invited to click on the screen and when you did that, an image of me became increasingly battered and bruised. As a result, now she says she and her husband had to flee their home this weekend because of threats made against her on Twitter. -Candace's problem wasn't with the mob of mostly far-right men leading the organized campaign of harassment, doxing, and threats against women in the video gaming community. It was with its victims, who feared that social autopsy was a doxing machine that Internet trolls were gonna use to victimize more people. They called Candace out, she dug in, and she found support from the men pushing GamerGate and others on the far right. Her company lost its financial lifeline when Kickstarter suspended the project. Owens blamed a conspiracy from the left, from the victims of Gamergate. And so she left behind her career as a tech founder and reinvented herself as a hard-right influencer. -I became a conservative overnight, you know? I realized that liberals were actually the racists, that liberals were actually the trolls. -So Candace starts a YouTube channel called Red Pill Black, a reference to her race and the Matrix speak for discovering some secret truth. In these new videos, Candace sported a bold lip and a sarcastic tone, and no take was too conservative or contrarian. -Oh, my God, Charlottesville. White supremacy is alive and well. Run! -Stop. -Charlie Kirk noticed, and four months after she started with her new conservative identity, Turning Point USA scooped her up. At the Illinois event where her hiring was announced, Owens said, "By the end of 2018, I'm going to be one of the most well-known people in this country because I'm going to lead the Black Revolution for the conservative movement." She would turn out to be half right. Candace started making videos for Turning Point, where she's anti-DEI, anti-feminism, anti-BLM, anti-MeToo. You get it. "Colin Kaepernick, you are a coward. America, despite what CNN may tell you, is not a racist country. Does this look like a symbol of hate? Am I offending you? Is this offensive?" By 2018, she was one of the most well-known people on the right. But her reputation wasn't stellar. Candace sort of burned through the conservative movement at a pretty impressive clip. In the interest of time, I'm going to speed through this part. April 2018, Kanye West tweets, quote, "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." From there, Owens is hanging out with Trump, traveling everywhere with Charlie. Antifa just showed up to protest us eating breakfast because they're fucking losers. Candace was also getting into trouble, into what would become a pattern of being charitable, we'll call them gaffes. The worst one came in December 2018 at a Turning Point UK event. When you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. That's not, to me, that's not nationalism. -Describing this years later, Candace would say the backlash to those Hitler comments literally made her sick, got her blacklisted at Fox News, and almost cost her everything. -I quite literally was facing a threat that everything was going to be over because how dare I say that? I have absolutely no right to say that. -Turning Point Campus chapters called for her to resign, and by 2019, she was out, but not done. In 2019, she's picked up by PragerU, an ultra-conservative nonprofit that makes short-form videos. Candace hosts a podcast and narrates right-wing revisionist history shorts. - And now for a brief history of slavery. - After a year, she signs up with The Daily Wire, a company helmed by Ben Shapiro that defined and dominated conservative media. - I'm here, I'm a conservative, I'm not apologizing. And at Daily Wire, she could see where her audience was going. More extreme, more seduced by conspiracy theories. On September 1st, 2023, on her own Daily Wire show, she told them this. "This almost feels fraudulent, right? Oh, if I don't like the person, I'm going to just smear them. I'm going to just say that they are a Soros puppet. And then a bunch of people will believe it because a bunch of people on the internet have had their minds bent and they can't process reality." But she kept feeding them conspiracy theories, And The Daily Wire seemed fine with that. It's easy to understand why, right? Candace up to now had generally followed the unwritten rule of the right. Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. But in 2023, something happened to make Owens and many others break ranks, and to make some, including Owens, lean into a specific genre of conspiracy theory, the oldest one, that would be a red line for The Daily Wire. The breaking news out of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel is in a state of war after what's being called the worst attack on the country in 50 years. On October 7th, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups carried out an attack on civilians in Israel and on military bases near the Gaza border. In all, more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed. Israel responded with bombs in Gaza and declared a complete siege, cutting off food, fuel, and electricity. pundits and people ran to ideological corners. The loudest voices seemed either all for Israel or all against it. Nuance, as it often goes on the internet, was really hard to come by. And incredibly, Candace's initial response was measured. - I find that when I can't get behind people that think it's fine because a Jewish person is dead and because I can't get behind an individual that think it's acceptable to basically come within an inch calling for a genocide of Muslims, it's best to remain silent, right? Candace didn't stay silent for long. In November, she said Israel was committing a genocide. Daily Wire boss and founder Ben Shapiro, who's an observant Jew and a big supporter of Israel, called her disgraceful. They fought in public. He told her to quit, she called him unhinged. And while this workplace fight was playing out publicly, Candace's program, which was ostensibly supposed to be focused on culture, was dedicating more and more time to the war in Gaza. But also just blatant anti-Semitism. Talking about sinister gangs of Jews in Hollywood and what she called "DC Jews," chasing political power and trying to silence her. And in March 2024, she was out. Or as Candace put it, she was free. She started out again on her own, but what would become clear and fast is that Candace hadn't so much been flung out of MAGA Media as she'd outgrown it, and she was no longer content to peddle existing conspiracy theories aimed only at the left. She would create them and deploy them at her new enemies on the right. September 10th, 2025. Utah Valley University. It's the first stop on Turning Point USA's fall campus tour. The setup is familiar, Charlie Kirk sitting under a white tent, a long line of people before him waiting to ask their question. Thousands of young people and fans from the area are watching from this kind of fishbowl courtyard. A graduate student and liberal TikToker named Hunter Kozak has the mic. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years? Counting or not counting gang violence. Great. Within hours, Utah law enforcement officials had announced they had a suspect in custody. Tyler Robinson, 22 years old, from St. George, Utah. We got him. Robinson's arrest might have united a MAGA movement that had been tearing itself apart over the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It might have provided a common enemy, a focus on the lefty posters who were joking about Kirk's death, or the trans community, or Antifa, that the Trump administration had blamed for Kirk's murder. -We are gonna channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. -It might have, if not for Candace Owens. -They would be going down the center part of town somewhere. This is Lewis Witt, a Dallas insurance salesman. But for 15 years after the Kennedy assassination, Witt was just known as "Umbrella Man." It was one of dozens of details from the scene that journalists and the public pored over from that day. Details that when zoomed in on in question, seemed strange. A man, standing, watching Kennedy's motorcade, right about the spot where Kennedy is shot. He's holding a black umbrella, but there's no rain. Skeptics leapt on the Umbrella Man. Some theorized that he'd opened his umbrella to signal a gunman. Others got more creative. One JFK truther who went on to publish a newsletter called the "Grassy Knoll Gazette" imagined that the umbrella had hidden a kind of weapon, a dart launcher, that shot Kennedy so a CIA gunman could finish the job. Witt came forward in 1978, after his identity was revealed by a Dallas newspaper. Why were you carrying an umbrella that day? -Um, actually, I was going to use this umbrella to, um, heckle the president's motorcade. -Like most conspiracy theories, this one had a much less memorable explanation. It was a jab at Kennedy's father, who, as ambassador to Great Britain before World War II, had supported an appeasement policy with Hitler. -Has exhibit 405 ever contained a gun or weapon of any sort? -Uh, this umbrella? -Yes. -No, no. -In a 1967 "New Yorker" column, John Updike considered the Umbrella Man, alongside the other people and details conspiracy theorists had squinted over. He wrote, "We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses, gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance." And so it went with Charlie Kirk's assassination. Internet sleuths treated every person in the crowd as a potential suspect or co-conspirator. - We need to look into these umbrella boys, like these boys that showed up and were like huddling under an umbrella. - The content came so fast. - Okay, did you catch that? I'll show you in slow motion. The security guy in the blue and Charlie's bodyguard in the tent looked at their watch simultaneously. There was a significant number of young men wearing maroon shirts. First here, then here, then here, then it hits the back of his skull. They all became side characters in an alternative theory. People who call themselves citizen journalists took the videos from multiple angles, slowed them down, and zoomed in to dissect and analyze facial expressions and hand movements from the growing list of crowdsourced suspects, and mark them up with red circles and arrows that, together, are supposed to add up to something. Same as the JFK conspiracy theorists, just working much, much faster and chasing the instant payouts from social media platforms. Steven Prochaska studies how this kind of thing happens, how people online collaborate to interpret events and create narratives to explain them. People in academia call it participatory misinformation or collective sensemaking. When we are trying to understand anything that we don't understand initially, we're uncertain, something's ambiguous, something's new or novel. And so we don't understand these things in isolation. There's a collective sense-making process. It does involve these crowds of people coming together trying to understand something. But in practice, some people just have more influence within a particular community. There are people whose almost entire livelihoods are based off of navigating this attention economy. In other words, there's a hierarchy. And in this case, one person sits at the top. Since Charlie's death, I've watched nearly every episode of Candace's show. I know. Nearly every day of the week, in between ads for conservative-branded moisturizers and beef subscription boxes and crisis pregnancy centers, Candace pulls up her conspiracy board and spins a new yarn about who might be implicated. Every episode gets millions of views. Here, in her own words, edited for clarity, is her loose theory of the Charlie Kirk assassination. He was facing financial threats over his shifting stance on Israel. We have to explore every lead because the feds are not there implicated in this cover up. Charlie's wife is at the helm of the company. The reality is that you're most likely to be murdered by someone you know. I think we can all readily dismiss the repeated lie that Tyler Robinson confessed to his crime. This is a setup. Tyler was a patsy. I maintain that. This is not going to be the JFK story. I'm going to figure out exactly what happened, and I'm getting very close against all odds. -Candace's videos are not as coherent as this edit. She digresses to dreams and Satan and time travel and Japan. It's a lot. And the episodes don't really make sense on their own, but together, they paint this picture. Israel, billionaires, corrupt US government, greedy turning point, all conspiring to eliminate Charlie Kirk because, she says, he had finally broken free of those who controlled him. It is worth saying, again, this is a story for which there is no evidence, has never been any evidence. And even as Candace promises she is getting closer to some proof, some witness, some break in the case, it never arrives. Now, a daily show is a big lift, and Candace only has a few employees, but she has a stable of volunteers, part of what she calls the Candace Intelligence Agency. It is a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists focused just on this case. Candace put it like this. "We are all partners in this group project to figure out what actually happened on September 10th." Candace sits atop a network of online creators who feed off, amplify, and ultimately make money off each other. I mapped it out like this. Every time Candace referred to another creator or piggybacked on their content, I put them on a list. Then I watched their content, and when they referred to another creator's theory or piggybacked on that, I put that person on the list, too. It's not complete, but I think it's a useful data set for understanding this network. The creators on this list are podcasters, legal experts, gun enthusiasts, social media influencers, And a few people who really came out of nowhere each have their own pet theory. This decentralized media landscape is how influencers collaborate, how they build an audience, and how they are monetizing a complex new conspiracist universe. Okay, so imagine that Candace Owens is the sun. She provides the gravitational pull that keeps the entire "Who Killed Charlie Kirk" universe alive. Her YouTube channel alone sits at 6 million subscribers. Every episode gets at least a million views, and each post is a growth spurt for her channel and the smaller ones that she mentioned. You've got Ian Carroll, a conspiracy theorist and filmmaker known for blaming 9/11 on the Jews and who early on blamed Israel for Kirk's death. -You would normally not think to look at Israel, which is like, "Charlie is, like, the biggest Israel supporter ever." But when you understand the circumstances and the context, they immediately become the most likely. - Jimmy Dore, a stand-up comedian, was early to tell his audience that they shouldn't believe what they were being told about Kirk's death. - So JFK was killed by a magic bullet, but Charlie Kirk was hit with a miracle bullet. What are the odds? - Candace has been on both of their shows and vice versa, in effect cross-pollinating their brands and widening their reach. Now with the mid-sized planets, they don't have an audience that Candace needs. Instead, they supply the fresh content to feed the overarching narrative. Guys like Baron Coleman, a lawyer and a former radio host, whose show Owens calls the "afterparty" to hers. Coleman is a just-asking-questions guy. The word allegedly hangs on a sign behind him in his home office. His value comes in the holes he pokes in Tyler Robinson's criminal case. Now, Coleman's pet theory, and it's maybe the most popular one, is that the rifle that prosecutors allege was used to shoot Kirk couldn't have done so because that gun was too powerful not to cause an exit wound. The case was over. Tyler Robinson's not, I mean in my opinion, not gonna get convicted because that neck wound is so inconsistent with a gunshot. Now the prosecution hasn't entered an autopsy into evidence but people close to Kirk including his head of security have said that the bullet was shot from a rooftop above, moved down and fragmented inside Kirk's body. Coleman, without evidence, posits that instead of a gun, Kirk may have been killed by an explosive device hidden in a microphone or a necklace. Then we've got Elizabeth Lane. She's smaller than Coleman, but a rising star. Journalist Elizabeth Lane, that's the one who has been positing that Erica Kirk is a psychopath. Lane's theory of the case is that Robinson is a Patsy, likely the victim of a secret CIA mind control operation who was set up by his roommate. Lane hails from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and was, until recently, an actress and a model. But sometime in 2024, she started calling herself an "investigative journalist" and hosting programs on Unified TV. That's a streaming platform owned by a wellness guru, who sells among many other products, recliners that he claims can heal all sorts of ailments. Lane was kind of an unknown, attracting only the attention of fact-checkers and disinformation researchers for her pro-Kremlin dispatches and unqualified support for Putin around the war in Ukraine. But after Kirk's death, Lane went hard on conspiracy theories around Charlie Kirk. A high-profile interview with Tucker Carlson put her on the map. I do want to ask you, it bothers me a lot, and I know it does bother you too, and I know that you probably don't sleep because you think about this stuff. Who killed Charlotte Kirk? Um, I mean, I, you know, there's a man in custody. Based in Utah, Lane became a fixture at the Tyler Robinson hearings. Investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane is not giving up on this story. She's been on the ground in Utah connecting the CIA dots, the three-letter agency dots and connections. Lane isn't the only person to come from nowhere. There's Billy Webb, a Candace Reply girl who I've sat behind in Tyler Robinson hearings. Lily was a flight attendant, an adult content creator, and a van life influencer on TikTok before that. And now, she's a popular Kirktruther. There's a 22-year-old kid up against the death penalty for something that he didn't do, and I'm not going to stop talking about it. Then you move out even further from the sun, and you get to your niche creators. Now, these are the architects of a very specific kind of content, content that informs the other creators and sometimes will eventually make it all the way upstream. There's Zach DiGregorio, aka Wolves and Finance. He makes content that alleges fiscal impropriety by turning point. "Anyone who knew about the political activity and was involved in the cover-up would go to prison. And yes, that includes Erica Kirk." DiGregorio's content, presented with no actual evidence, has fueled the "Turning Point was in on it" conspiracy theories. Turning Point's lawyers have sent him a cease and desist letter. "I'm looking for a lawyer." Mom and gossip vloggers who'd previously covered the Amber Heard trial in Blake Lively's legal drama turned their talents toward Erica Kirk. I genuinely started to consider whether Erica is a pathological liar, has some sort of psychological disorder, is a variant from another timeline, or is a victim of MKUltra. Like, I know the last two options sound pretty extreme, but like that's genuinely where my mind started to go because I honestly just can't make sense of the things that she says. That's Nisi, a Canadian YouTuber who started out like Candace, making videos assailing wokeness. And since Kirk's assassination, after she started posting about Erika, her channel's subscribers have grown by 50%. YouTubers who do not get nearly enough credit for their amazing discoveries. One such YouTuber is Nisi. An astounding number of conspiracist creators have shot into the carcasses of various dead animals. We got the pork shoulder. We got the steel. I knew we got these two leaders behind it. We're gonna shoot a cow femur and then to make it even harder I'm gonna slap on a huge slab of beef hickory smoked young Turkeys, but they're very a lot thicker than a neck. Yeah, I do have a moose leg Chris Martinson a former economist he shot at pig carcasses for his videos Theorizing the bullet came from another shooter this shot you're about to watch strikes about in the center, goes right through the bone. Here's the paper behind it. Notice that there are no holes in it at this point. And the shot comes in and it's just gonna replay that over and over here so you can see it. So again the shot's coming in downhill like this from here to here. It's coming in on a downward angle. But few of the sleuths in this outer galaxy have been more determined, or "obsessed," as he puts it, than John Bray. Bray is an Oklahoma farmer who, with his wife, sells products like beef tallow and kombucha. He is essential as the original architect of the exploding microphone theory. Bray watched Kirk's assassination and focused on the wireless microphone attached to Kirk's shirt. What if it wasn't just a microphone Bray theorized, but a little bomb? Bray tested his pet theory with experiments out of his garage. He built a tiny explosive device, encased it in a pig carcass, and set it off. He said the wound matched Kirk's. And then you see the full rectangle kind of area on it. As he explained on Kirk Truether podcast, Bray fed Grok and Claude a stack of forensic papers, uploaded video of the assassination, and then told the chatbots to act as forensic experts. The result, Bray says, prove a "coordinated, multi-source event." These creators are singular and symbiotic. Over the last year, they have grown together, many doubling and tripling their audiences. And to be very, very clear, this, for most of them, is their full-time job. Consider signing up for a membership on my website, wolvesandfinance.com. For $6 a month, your support helps me to keep making these videos. There is a whole lot of money to be made on YouTube and downstream by pushing these conspiracy theories. For Candace, there's the membership. For $12 a month, Club Candace gets you into a private forum. And the donation she asks to fund her legal fights, but which the small print clarifies she can spend any way she likes. And then there's the live audience paying her in real time, with superchats. Those are messages that viewers buy to get their comment penned up high so that Candace might read it on air. But for Candace, the big money, it comes from ads. It's not clear just how much Candace makes per ad. According to Bloomberg, top conservative podcasts, including Candace's, can command anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 from reading a single ad. Candace isn't the only conspiracist making a living off Kirk's death. Baron Coleman, the host of the Candace After Party, he quit his job as a lawyer this year to be a full-time podcaster. -Friday, January 2nd. I informed my full-time job that I was no longer going to be an employee there. Now, Coleman streams three or four hours at a stretch, about five days a week. And a good chunk of those hours is just Coleman reading superchats out loud. $5 here, $200 there. I didn't realize they were sending you money with these. I didn't even see the dollar signs next to these things. Wow, look at you guys. Yeah, that's so we don't run ads. They're paying me to not run ads. According to Playboard, a YouTube analytics platform that counts superchats, a single one of his streams can pull in as much as $6,000. In all, he's earned about $350,000. On top of that, of course, Coleman sells merch and a $9.99 a month membership that unlocks private streams. Not bad for a father of eight who told me by text he isn't chasing it. "I'm not out to be a new media star," he said. Even the creators with tiny audiences can hit gold. John Bray, that guy with the farm and the exploding mic theory, his tiny channel has a link to support this work that goes to his Blue Mountain Farm website. In early December, he starts to appear on some of the bigger Truth or Shows, like this one, from a guy who goes by the handle TriggerSmart. The next day, Baron Coleman covers the Bray theory. I think he's onto something here. And then, Candace gives him a shout out. I have seen John Bray and the work that he's doing. I find it to be very compelling as well. And I have been communicating with him behind the scenes. - For John and his farm, a small miracle, a massive influx of orders and messages. - No one could have ever guessed the variables that have come together to sort of allow us to now be known really worldwide. Lately, we've had so many requests for people wanting our products across the globe. - You might've picked up that I'm not trying to debunk Candace or the creators in her orbit. Most of them rest on this overwrought innuendo and red-string theories that either can't be disproved because they never state a real claim or take enormous energy to disprove. And for those, there's little payout, because by the time you do, they're on to their next storyline. It follows Brandolini's law, coined back when Twitter was good, that says the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than needed to produce it. But for farmer John Bray's work, since it seems like the most concrete and has spread the farthest -- -Did you see that exploding mic theory? Did you guys talk about that on here? -I've heard that theory, but I don't know if that makes sense. -I think the energy may be worth it, both to get the facts out there and to show what it takes for someone trained as a librarian and a journalist to get to the bottom of just one of these theories. So, first, I reached out to Josh Brunte. Josh Brunte is a professor of cyber forensics at Marshall University with a joint appointment in the Department of Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Forensic Sciences, and Department of Computer Sciences, and Electrical Engineering. He serves on the editorial boards of Forensic Science International, Digital Investigation, and the Journal of Forensic Sciences, is a fellow of the Digital and Multimedia Sciences section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and is the author of loads of award-winning research, including research on forensic analysis of wearable devices. - They're able to essentially generate scientific content, videos that might look credible. They might use reverse projection techniques, techniques that are somewhat used in the forensic community, but they're able to generate scientific terminology that make these things seem as if they're real. And then they're able to produce a website within a matter of minutes and post those analyses to that particular site. -Do you trust this website? -I'm very suspect of it. -Then I talked to a second video forensics expert, who declined to go on the record because of the nature of this story. They said there was no scenario where the types of measurement that Bray claims he was making could be made from the videos on his website. Then I emailed Gunnar Farnbeck. He's the inventor of the optical flow algorithm that Bray cites as his main method of investigation. Dr. Farnbeck said in part, quote, "I have a hard time making sense of the optical flow-related claims on that site. From the parts I think I understand, it seems likely that there are enough methodological flaws that the analysis provides little evidence for or against any hypothesis at all. Then I asked an expert to analyze the audio. I sent Bray's website to Dr. Robert Marr. He's a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Montana State University, Bozeman, and author of the textbook, "Principles of Forensic Audio Analysis." He specializes in gunshot sounds. He said the audio from the Kirk shooting had the classic ballistic crack of a bullet passing by the microphone, and then the pop sound of the muzzle blast from a gun. He said, quote, "Any assertion that a microphone "Mr. Kirk was wearing was somehow involved "in the fatal injury would need to account "for why the ballistic audio characterization "is exactly aligned in time." And while we're here, the speed of the bullet, Marr said, something like 800 meters per second from his audio analysis, would also rule out a handgun or a palm pistol, as other conspiracy theorists have suggested. What's the palm gun guy, Jesse? Well, the palm gun guy is a member of Charlie's security team and it does appear that he had a palm gun and fired it at Charlie at point-blank range. Here's the footage. Take a look at this man right here, folks. This is Charlie Kirk's security guy. He appears to have a palm gun in his right hand and he aims it at Charlie Kirk and squeezes the palm gun firing off around directly into Charlie Kirk's neck. Dr. Marr declined to speak about Bray further. He said, "I'm sorry to say that I don't have the time or interest in going through a conspiracy theorist's claims in a step-by-step manner. My work goes from the audio evidence without need to conjure up details that are likely due to limitations of the recorded data and other faulty assumptions. Finally, I tried to talk to John Bray to check what I found and ask him what I was missing about his theory. He declined to be interviewed, as did most of the Kirk conspiracists mentioned in Candace's network. And really, there's no reason for them to talk to me or any other journalist at all. Their audiences are loyal and growing. Their universe is expanding, with new creators joining all the time, just hoping to break through. It is a great day. We made it to Candace. We made it on Candace's show. If you have deep connections with Candace, please make sure you get this video to her. Candace needs to see this. Stop telling content creators someone already covered that. We got it. We have to keep recovering, covering, and covering, and covering to keep this story alive. I've reported on conspiracy theories for a long time now, and the question I got a lot was, "Why do you focus so much on the political right?" But it wasn't really ever a choice. While there are plenty of conspiracy theories on the left, the right was, with a few exceptions, just better at this game. They were more willing to embrace conspiracy theories as a means to a political end. Charlie Kirk certainly was. >> You can see the white population collapse in LA. That's intentional. They've wanted it that way. They want us to believe that this was a political attack against Paul Pelosi. >> About two 9/11s have already died of people that have died since getting the vaccine. But it could be 10 or 20 times beyond that because some people might not be registering these adverse reactions, and I'm just saying reportedly have died. I just want to be very clear about this. And maybe because of that, when conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens grabbed hold of Kirk's assassination, when they turned on Erica Kirk and Turning Point USA and Trump effectively, a lot of people felt like, well, perhaps they had it coming. Jen, I had your same feelings with Candace. Like, I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I kept agreeing with her. Yeah, but I kept being like, "This is Candace Owens. You can't." It was something I brought up to Jack Posobiec, Kirk's regular podcast co-host who famously pushed Pizzagate and a million other conspiracy theories since. I was at Turning Point's America Fest in December. I was trying to report on the future of Kirk's organization, but I found attendees preoccupied with the conspiracy theories about Kirk's death. So was Posobiec. To the haters out there, no, these Robin Simpers, and that's what I'm going to call them, the Robinson-pers, no, Tyler Robinson did this. He did this. If we're ever gonna get through this personally, let alone the movement, the organization, et cetera, it's, you gotta start with that. You just gotta start with that. - Now he was asking for compassion, for common sense. He was asking people to believe the official narrative about Tyler Robinson and to leave a grieving widow alone. But what Posobiec should well know And what Turning Point was learning is that conspiracy theories don't stop. The theories build, and the collection of actors who must be in on it just grows. -TPUSA, the state government of Utah, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US military, foreign militaries, they're all involved. -By far, and surprisingly, some of the worst conspiracy theories have come for Kirk's widow, Erika. Since his death and since she took over as CEO of Turning Point, there's been a constant stream of commentary and content mocking and criticizing both Charlie Kirk and Erika. Viral AI songs... ♪ We are Charlie Kirk ♪ ♪ We carry the flame ♪ ...and comedy. Get on your feet! ♪ Boy, I'm a soldier ♪ Every morning, I wake up to a new headline lying about me. Now, making fun is one thing. Accusing her of murder is another. Public attempts to stop the conspiracy theories have only seemed to make things worse. I asked Turning Point USA for an interview to find out what they were dealing with and what they saw as the path forward. They declined to go on the record, but they invited me to their Phoenix headquarters where I sat down with Erica and other leadership. They spent hours with me. They answered all my questions. What I saw was an organization struggling. Struggling to weather a storm that would have been unthinkable a year ago. Struggling to grieve, struggling to navigate near constant threats and harassment, and wondering each day what false storyline Candace Owens will come up with next. In April, Turning Point USA canceled Erika's appearance at the University of Georgia, citing serious threats to her safety. San Antonio police arrested a 26-year-old in May for making terroristic threats against Erika and an upcoming women's conference. Before Kirk's assassination, Turning Point had a war chest full of cash and political capital and was ready to spend it on the midterms. Kirk was pulling in $85 million a year, mostly from his hard-won Rolodex of anonymous wealthy donors. And while Kirk's death inspired a surge in followers and new funds, it remains to be seen if Erica Kirk can pull Turning Point through the conspiracy storm. - What is the vision for Turning Point USA? Aside from the elephant in the room about my husband. Our mission is the same. - Before Kirk's assassination, Turning Point was mobilizing young conservatives to win races large and small. Now it's tied to JD Vance's 2028 hopes after Erica Kirk endorsed him. And TPUSA's early midterm results have been a mixed bag. Its candidates have won a lot of state primaries, but it also poured money into board races for Arizona's biggest utility in April and lost. - We beat Turning Point USA. - Beyond elections, Charlie Kirk was trying to hold together a MAGA coalition on the brink of civil war. Now, Erica Kirk has to do it without him, supporting Trump while honoring her husband's opposition to an unpopular war waged by the US and Israel against Iran. Meanwhile, conspiracists are playing back Kirk's own videos, including one questioning the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. - Was this a setup? What's going on here? - As proof that if he were still alive, he'd be questioning his death right alongside them. And maybe he would. What's clear is that at least online, without a North Star, Turning Point is being drowned out by the same conspiracists that Charlie Kirk used to command. - All right, you guys, straight to jail, straight to jail. For questioning at least, Erica. I don't care who's mad. I really do not care who wants to be upset after this episode. -When I sat down with Erica Kirk, she told me the conspiracy theories and lies from Owens and her minions were hurtful and frustrating, but that she'd already lived through the worst thing that could happen to her, so she'd weather this. Prosecutors say they have DNA evidence, multiple confessions, and videos showing Robinson's guilt. Erica and Turning Point are hoping that a trial will come soon and that Robinson will be found guilty, and they're hoping that an open, televised trial will quiet the conspiracy theories. I'm not so sure. It'll be easy for conspiracists to fold in the courts and evidence presented by prosecutors into their stories. -Our courts are completely compromised. Our courts want nothing to do with this. -The JFK conspiracy theory was the defining one of America's 20th century, and this may be the defining one of the 21st. Candace Owens' conspiracy theorists love the comparison. -Any other similarities between the JFK assassination Charlie Kirk? About five million. Israel's basically the only power capable of such an assassination of JFK and both and Charlie Kirk. JFK to MLK now to CJK. This is, in my opinion, an undeniable state killing. Why would an official story be enough to stop them? And why would they start caring about who gets hurt? The Candace Owens conspiracy machine shouldn't just worry Turning Point or MAGA. Anyone can become cannon fodder. It doesn't matter which side you're on. And the danger from this new era of conspiracy theory isn't just that we'll be duped by misinformation, but that we'll lose our sense of direction, that we'll give up on trying to make sense of what's real and what's not, and blindly trust strongmen or follow snake oil saleswomen who frame everything as a lie and a threat. How far can we go down the rabbit hole before we're lost there. (music fades) (film projector whirring) (film reel clicking) [BLANK_AUDIO]