Christopher Rufo writes for City Journal about problems plaguing our current political scene.
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, I thought it would be prudent to upgrade my firearms collection. So, for the past two months, I’ve been in and out of my local gun shop, filling out paperwork and purchasing components for a new pistol and a new shotgun. During this period, I’ve gotten to know some of the men behind the counter, and, after one recognized me for my appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, I’ve talked politics with them.
Last week, when I went to pick up a new red-dot sight for the pistol, the conversation turned back to Kirk’s murder—with a twist. One of the gentlemen told me that he believed that the official story—that Tyler Robinson assassinated Kirk as a way to stop “hate”—was fake. I was taken aback, but after asking some questions, I realized that he had accepted some of the schizoid narratives emanating mostly from Candace Owens, who has insinuated that the official story is a cover-up.
Owens, whose YouTube channel has more than 5 million subscribers, has raised questions about camera angles and underground passageways near the shooting site; suggested that Israeli cellphone signals detected on the day of the shooting might have had something to do with the assassination; and argued that the alleged shooter’s chat messages, released by the FBI, are, in fact, fabrications deployed in service of a grand cover-up.
This narrative is, of course, nonsense. The evidence released to the public is persuasive. In this account, a young man named Tyler Robinson, who had a transgender-identifying boyfriend and was “terminally online,” assassinated one of the Right’s most effective communicators, Charlie Kirk, because he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.” Law enforcement obtained chat logs, video, forensic material, and the murder weapon. Robinson’s parents, according to law enforcement, turned him in.
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