9 July 2026 - 4:00pm
This week’s pre-trial hearing for Tyler Robinson is only four days in, but it has already produced a frenzy of conspiracy theories so fantastical that Stephen King may be forced into retirement.
Ben Shapiro’s security detail, maroon shirts, forged Discord messages, edited surveillance footage, and even the soil: these are just some of the holes that Tyler Robinson truthers have “found” in the prosecution’s case against Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin. Most are so outlandish that even Robinson’s own defence team has avoided them, but that has not stopped the conspiracist Right from cultivating ever more creative theories.
Chief among these theorists is Candace Owens, whose target list is so wide-ranging that it would be easier to name those who aren’t implicated. They include, but are not limited to: Israel, Egypt, the French Foreign Legion, Erika Kirk, the FBI, Turning Point, Ben Shapiro and several different security details (of the Zionist variety). Owens has described Robinson’s hearing as a show trial, warning that the public should “expect nothing but Erika’s tears and an orbit of her payrolled influencers trying to convince you that the unvetted evidence is overwhelming and undeniable”.
The evidence is indeed overwhelming and undeniable. Prosecutors provided scene, ballistics, and eyewitness testimony along with planning and post-crime evidence. Robinson’s DNA was found on the weapon and related items — including the rifle’s trigger, the fired cartridge casing, two unfired cartridges, a towel used to wrap the rifle, and a screwdriver — were left on the rooftop. There is also the gravel on the rooftop, where prints consistent with a prone sniper position were found.
In addition, video and surveillance footage showed Robinson visiting the campus three times on the day of the shooting wearing a maroon shirt before changing into a black shirt, dark cap and sunglasses for the attack. At 12:22pm, he fired a shot before fleeing and jumping off the roof two minutes later. He was then seen carrying an object as he ran towards a wooded area nearby. And just in case there were any lingering doubts about the nature of Kirk’s death, there is 4k video of the shooting itself, which shows him being struck in the neck by a single bullet — footage so graphic that the judge reportedly flinched when he saw it.
Sadly, however, every argument made by the prosecution has become fodder for more conspiracies. On the bullet question, for example, Owens wonders aloud whether there was a trap door beneath Kirk when he was shot. “Now I’m not implying that someone popped up and shot Charlie,” she reassures her audience. But less than a minute later, she floats the idea that Robinson was a decoy and someone did in fact pop up and shoot Kirk.
Because the incentive structure of the Right-wing media ecosystem rewards novelty over veracity, conspiracists are winning the information war. Owens’s clips about the Robinson case have garnered millions of impressions online, while other MAGA influencers struggle to hold the line. Some of the biggest Right-wing accounts on X have tried — and failed — to snuff out the Kirk conspiracies, despite support from Donald Trump Jr, who insisted: “Having literally been there in the room, seen the evidence with my own eyes, it’s very clear to me that Tyler Robinson will be found guilty.”
While conspiracy theories claim to uncover a hidden truth, the actual effect is to shroud a lie in so many falsehoods, half-truths and red herrings that it becomes impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Once the incentive is engagement rather than truth, no amount of evidence can definitively end the story. In that sense, Owens and her ilk represent the future of the media, not the past.
Douglas Murray wrote this week that “we may be about to see a conspiracy theory fall apart in real time.” That now looks like wishful thinking at best. If the past four days have proven anything, it is that where one conspiracy falls apart, a thousand more bloom in its place.
