Leadership at Turning Point USA had hoped that after a few months following the assassination of their founder, Charlie Kirk, the public would lose interest in the conspiracies surrounding his death. So they stayed quiet.
By December, they realized that wasn’t going to happen.
Because the conservative nonprofit intends to pursue Kirk’s mission now, the organization will remain prominent, and therefore, “there will be endless content for the people who just want to lie about us and tear us down for their own purposes,” Blake Neff, a political commentator and producer on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” told the Deseret News.
Twenty-three-year-old Tyler Robinson pleaded not guilty to seven charges, including aggravated murder, after a judge earlier this month ruled the state prosecution brought forward “substantial evidence” to bind the case over to trial.
Yet nearly a year after Kirk was killed during a public, outdoor event at Utah Valley University, parallel false versions of the case and the details surrounding the incident continue to thrive online.
The conspiracy theories vary wildly:
Israel orchestrated the killing because Kirk had grown increasingly critical of the Middle Eastern nation.
Robinson is a patsy — perhaps set up by Turning Point USA, the FBI or his transgender partner, Lance Twiggs.
Robinson wasn’t even on campus that day.
There was a second shooter.
And the fatal shot could not have come from the rifle investigators recovered near the scene.
Many of those claims have persisted in the social dialogue even as prosecutors have publicly laid out surveillance footage, forensic evidence, witness testimony, and even Robinson’s alleged admission tying him to the killing.
“Once a person decides it was a targeted operation, every new fact gets folded in. Clean evidence was planted. Missing evidence was scrubbed. There is no result the theory can’t absorb, which means it has stopped being about the murder and started being about loyalty,” Jennica Pounds, better known by her X handle, DataRepublican, told the Deseret News.
“Most conspiracy thinking is a hunger for justice that ran out of patience,” she said.
The theories began to germinate instantly
A day after the killing, as Kirk’s TPUSA team boarded Air Force Two with Vice President JD Vance and Kirk’s widow, Erika, Mikey McCoy remembers realizing that the accusations were only beginning.
Before taking off, McCoy, Kirk’s former chief of staff, recalled asking one of Kirk’s security guards if he was OK, to which the man began to break down.
“He’s like, ‘There’s conspiracy theories online that are saying that I did this and this,’ and I was like, ‘what are you talking about?’ I remember being so confused,” McCoy said.
He added that the gravity of Kirk’s death didn’t fully sink in until Air Force Two landed in Phoenix.
“Until we landed in Phoenix and got off Air Force Two, and I saw how many people were out there,” McCoy said. “I just kind of realized, this is gonna be a big thing.”
Neff remembers sitting in the waiting room at the Orem, Utah, hospital where Kirk was taken on Sept. 10 and talking about how podcaster Candace Owens would react to Charlie’s death.
He said, “Charlie was aware” of Owens’ theories about France’s first lady being transgender, as well as what he described as “weird stuff about Jewish cults,” and that some of her views were part of the reason TPUSA had become less involved with Owens around 2024.
“Someone said ‘Candace is gonna have an extreme reaction to this,’ and instantly I’m like, ‘yeah, yeah, she will.’”
Owens was among the earliest high-profile voices to publicly question official accounts of the shooting and try to frame Kirk’s killing as a possible hit rather than a straightforward lone-gunman case.
At 7 a.m. on Sept. 11, she posted, “Who called the hit on Charlie? We need answers.” Posts implying Israel’s involvement came just days later and were also fed by fellow political commentator Tucker Carlson.
In June, Carlson went on a podcast and said that Kirk “was not murdered for his opinions on transgenderism. ... I believe and most people who knew him well as I did and was friends with him as I was believe he was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.”
Neff was quick to dispute that claim:
“Actually, those of us who knew Charlie best, a group that doesn’t include Tucker, do think that Tyler Robinson did it and was motivated by transgender radicalism. Tucker is lying.”
He told the Deseret News that even if the man on trial were to enter a guilty plea, “nothing would ever satisfy these people,” because “they’re too emotionally invested in the conspiracy itself. So it can endlessly evolve.”
These online sleuths, Neff said, are “very plainly motivated by desire for attention, desire for money,” and are “actively destroying whatever good might have been able to come out of his death. ... They’re actively trying to ruin whatever legacy his life has left behind, and they’re doing it for these grubby, low reasons, and it just genuinely distresses and disgusts me.”
How these theories stay relevant
In his book “Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational,” science historian Michael Shermer explains that the greater the significance of the victim or event, the harder it can be for people to accept an explanation that feels comparatively small — a psychology term called “proportionality bias.”
In an excerpt of his book that he shared with the Deseret News, Shermer demonstrated that with Kirk — a famous and politically influential person — a lone individual or a straightforward motive can feel psychologically inadequate. “Highly influential people and events feel like they need a highly influential cause of their death,” he wrote.
In another excerpt, he wrote the following:
“9/11 is a type specimen: the most consequential terrorist attack in U.S. history can’t possibly have been caused by 19 guys with box cutters, could it? Well, as a matter of fact, yes, that’s exactly how such a massive event could happen, in contrast with the hundreds of thousands of people who would have had to be involved to pull it off as an inside job by the Bush administration.”
His point is that it can be more psychologically satisfying to believe that a powerful organization or government orchestrated an event than to accept that history can be dramatically altered by just one person or circumstance. It also helps people have both an explanation and the feeling that they understand what is really happening, he explained.
Pounds believes the origins of a conspiracy begin with distrust.
She argued that institutional failures, like what occurred with COVID-19 and the lab-leak debate, create conditions in which official explanations become inherently suspicious to some people.
“Part of why this happens is that people were never really taught the difference between data and narrative. We were taught to trust the experts,” she said. “But the experts, over and over, handed us a narrative instead of the underlying data. So the lesson people actually absorbed wasn’t ‘show me the numbers.’ It was ‘whoever tells the best story wins.’ And when they stopped trusting the official story, the only tool they’d ever been handed was to build a better one.”
“I don’t think the fix is scolding ordinary people for not trusting experts. The experts have to earn it back by showing their work, and the public has to be willing to sit with an uncomfortable fact instead of trading it for a more satisfying story,” she added.
Pounds has built an online following by doing almost the opposite of traditional conspiracy sleuthing: rather than beginning with a theory, she says she begins with large public datasets, documents and financial records and works backward from what evidence shows.
She’s done exactly that with the Robinson case, debunking Owens’ claims publicly.
“Charlie gave me a platform when nobody knew who I was. I was a deaf, nonspeaking data analyst posting into the void, and he treated my work like it mattered before there was any upside to it. He genuinely made me,” she told the Deseret News.
“So when the theories started,” Pounds continued, “I didn’t come to it as a neutral analyst. I came to it as someone who owed him. And the most honest thing I could do was refuse to turn his death into a story that flattered anybody, my own side included. He was a real person. He has a wife and kids and friends who have to read all of this. The least the rest of us can do is get the facts of how he died right.”