Why Conspiracy Theories Took Hold When Charlie Kirk Died

Conspiracy theories about the assassination

of Charlie Kirk exploded online

in the hours and days after his death.

A month later, they still persist.

In this video, we'll unpack why they are so potent,

uncover what they have in common

with past assassination conspiracies,

and expose the mechanics of how they go viral.

I'm David Gilbert.

I write about online extremism

and the crisis of truth for WIRED.

Welcome to Disinfonation:

The Charlie Kirk Assassination Conspiracies.

Today I'm speaking with two experts

on the spread of false narratives.

Both are authors and researchers.

Joan, Nina, thank you for joining us today.

To get us started, can I just ask,

over the last couple of weeks,

what has been the most out-there conspiracy

that you have seen around the Charlie Kirk assassination?

One of the ones that I've seen

that I think is kind of interesting

and actually coming more from the left

is that Charlie Kirk and his family are a psyop,

that they aren't actually a real family

and that they may be involved with the Freemasons as well.

Yeah, the one that I was really intrigued by

had to do with that he wasn't even there.

He was being projected as a hologram,

and if he had been there,

he may have ended up being trapdoored

through some kind of underground tunnel.

I was actually at a conspiracy conference in Ireland

in real life a couple of weeks ago.

They had a tarot reader from Canada there,

and she did a tarot reading,

and the first question she was asked

by someone in the audience from Ireland was,

Was Charlie Kirk really dead?

And so she went and pulled her cards

and it turns out that he's not dead

and that in fact wasn't Charlie Kirk

in the university being shot but someone else.

I think conspiracies are often trying to give a balm

to people during confusing events.

They're a way for people to make sense of what's going on

and so it makes sense that folks would turn to tarot

or turn to elaborate holograms

to try to process what was going on.

Yeah, and I think we've seen this before.

Tupac, Biggie, Elvis, Charlie Kirk,

this idea that the people haven't really died.

You can't believe your eyes, in this case,

but also that you can't believe government.

You can't believe anything that you see or read,

which is where you start to see the repetitive types

of conspiracy theories come in.

Not just Freemasons, which is a well-known trope,

but also that Israel had something to do with it

or this was a military psyop from inside the government

in some way to try to produce a martyr.

[David] And we've literally seen President Trump

and others calling Charlie Kirk a martyr.

He's a martyr now for American freedom.

So are there examples, do you think, from the past

where we can see clearly that conspiracies from decades,

centuries ago can also be applied to what's happening today?

So, famously with the JFK assassination,

there was always this claim of a second shooter

or the shot itself was something

that never could have been made.

And immediately after Kirk's assassination, you saw people

sneaking back onto the campus of this university

late at night and filming the area and trying to,

themselves, see if they could see if that shot could be made

from the top of the building to where Kirk was sitting.

And so this notion of the impossible shot

or the magic bullet is a tale

that we've been through before.

[David] That's an interesting point.

And with JFK, there was the controversial theory

that a second shot came from the grassy knoll.

And similarly, videos now claim that Charlie Kirk

would have been shot from a nearby window or balcony.

This would 100% line up with the actual shot

from the backside of Charlie.

[David] Which is totally improbable.

And of course, Tyler Robinson and Lee Harvey Oswald

have both labeled as patsies or scapegoats.

Well, even when we talk about Charlie Kirk's assassination

for potentially being a hologram, right,

that's just a version of a false flag conspiracy theory,

which we've seen with many different assassination attempts

from JFK to even the assassination attempt

against President Trump during the 2024 election.

We had prominent voices on the left

suggesting that this might be a false flag

to bolster his election chances.

There's a lot of claims that perhaps the deep state

or others within the actual MAGA sphere

had used Charlie Kirk as a sacrifice

and that it was to kick off this idea

that Antifa and the radical left

are the real perpetrators of mass violence.

And we've seen similar things like this happen in the past,

particularly when Lincoln was assassinated

by John Wilkes Booth.

There was a lapse of security that allowed that to happen.

There was also claims that Booth had actually escaped

and that the person that was caught was actually a cadet

that looked like Booth and he was quickly executed.

[David] Right, and one popular conspiracy theory

at the time accused elements

within Lincoln's own government,

specifically the Radical Republicans like Edwin Stanton

of somehow aiding Booth

to remove a conciliatory Lincoln in order

to impose harsher reconstruction punishments on the South.

That, to me, feels like a 19th-century version

of a deep state conspiracy.

There's also, of course, conspiracies around the end

of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia.

People still believe today that Princess Anastasia

got out somehow, and there have been investigations

into different people who claim they're Anastasia

and their ears and their DNA.

On the Freemasons, there's a huge community online

that is now claiming that Erika Kirk is secretly a Freemason

and she didn't give birth to her children

because there have never been any pictures of her pregnant

or she doesn't show her children's faces.

Well, as somebody who's received online harassment,

I can understand why she doesn't show her children's faces.

What Nina's saying is very true.

One actual disinformation story that circulated very quickly

after Kirk's murder was that his wife and children

were there and they weren't, so this story that is-

I actually fell for that one.

Yeah, this story that that his daughter

was running towards him really tugs on the heartstrings.

Hard to believe someone would make up that kind of detail.

Let's talk about X a little bit

'cause that's where a lot of these conspiracies begin.

I was looking back to September 10th when this happened,

and I was trying to find when these conspiracies started,

and I found a post, I think less than an hour

after Kirk had been officially declared dead

blaming Israel for his death.

And it didn't get much engagement.

That loads of these posts were posted,

but not much engagement,

but in hours, though, they began to go viral.

Can I ask you, how does something like that go viral?

How does it get to the point or break containment from X

to the point where the Israeli prime minister

has to post a video online denying

that Israel had anything to do with the shooting?

How does that happen?

So in this case, with pushing this conspiracy theory

that Israel was involved, you had a specific actor

like Candace Owens who was close to Charlie Kirk.

It's someone that is familiar

to the Turning Point USA crowd,

someone that is, quote unquote,

trusted within those circles.

And she really came out in full force

to make these associations.

The very day before Charlie Kirk died,

he expressed that he thought he was going to be killed.

What she's been able to establish

has been very controversial, but at the same time,

she's starting to prove it out

that there was this fissure with Charlie Kirk

and Israeli donors where she had received a text message,

and a lot of people denied the existence

of these text messages until she published them.

She claims to have more.

But when you think about the actors behind this,

is that you need some kind of protagonist

to get the ball rolling.

And then it moves from X over to YouTube

where she's primarily doing her nightly show.

Then it's over on her Instagram and then it's back to X,

and then people start discussing her content

and then people share her content.

And then algorithmically,

you start to see it slowly get tied together

so that when you look up Charlie Kirk,

you end up with what's popular at the time,

which is Candace Owens's explanation

for who else might have been involved.

They said that there's probably somebody else involved.

That sounds about right.

So one of the things that comes out

with these Candace Owens tweets

about Charlie Kirk's texts to her

is these kind of underlying anti-Semitic tropes

that Jewish people run politics,

that they have a lot of money.

And even Kirk himself says that,

Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes.

So she's releasing these things selectively,

and I think it's important to note

that she is profiting from this.

It is driving up ad revenue.

And the more salacious stuff that she shares,

if she keeps the drip, drip, drip

of these text messages going,

I mean, frankly, she's profiting from her friend's death.

I'm going to throw it to some sponsors.

[Nina] And the platforms are profiting as well.

Right now, you can get 20% off your first order.

One of the things that people jumped on

in the wake of his death

were these kind of oddities, as people put them.

For example, George Zinn, the 71-year-old man

who was first arrested 'cause he told people

that he was the shooter.

It turns out he wasn't. He had nothing to do with it.

People have focused on the text messages

that were in the affidavit that the police produced

that just don't look natural.

The text messages between the suspected shooter

and his partner, they just don't read as natural.

There was a man who looked as if he was giving hand signals

being pretty close to Charlie Kirk.

Is that a key component to conspiracy theories generally,

that there is a nugget of truth in there

that something did happen that is real,

but people just take it in completely the wrong direction?

That's actually not only a nugget of conspiracy theories.

That's a nugget of the best

and most successful disinformation.

It's not stuff that's just made up whole cloth.

It is things that happen in real life,

often fueled by real people's authentic grievances

that are then taken out of context, amplified,

or weaponized in some way.

One of the things that these conspiracy theories thrive on

is this drive to rationalize things that are random.

So you show this little clip

of someone doing something like this

and you say, Oh, this is instantly some kind of signal.

And maybe it is.

Maybe it's the all-clear signal because you are a bodyguard

and you're communicating to another bodyguard.

I think one of the really interesting ones

that happened in the 30 seconds after the shot rang out

is that someone jumped up and grabbed the camera

from behind Kirk and pulled that down.

And I think it was obviously to try to stop the live stream

and to make sure that if there was like, God forbid,

some kind of coordinated terror attack, you don't want them

to be able to be watching what's happening on the ground

while maybe they're laying in wait somewhere else on campus

to shoot at students or whatnot.

So there was this moment where anything anybody was doing

was interpreted as somehow trying to collude or hide.

But this notion of just asking questions,

there's some recent psychology research

that it does create a truth bias for people.

So if you see the same questions being asked

across different platforms and by different people,

you start to believe, Well, maybe this is true

because everybody's asking these questions.

[David] Right, and Joe Rogan in particular is a master

of this rhetorical strategy of just asking questions.

Here he is on his podcast,

which reaches a huge mainstream audience.

You're telling me that this kid

who's not military trained,

this guy, first of all, how did he get to the roof?

How come nobody was looking?

And so it's not just a rhetorical strategy

to quote unquote just ask questions as part

of being an online influencer and to drag the story out.

But also, it can be a way of slowly persuading people

as to what you want them to conclude.

So because people no longer believe what they are hearing

from mainstream media or even from law enforcement,

at this point, because trust in these institutions

has created in recent years,

that does then leave the way open for other people

to take advantage and to post videos showing things

that just didn't really happen.

Absolutely.

When you raise the specter of just asking questions,

Was this camera here?

Was he wearing a blood pack?

Was he wearing a bulletproof vest?

You're not only potentially driving clout

and driving views on these platforms,

but many of these folks are monetizing their videos, right?

So if you raise these salacious allegations,

you know that it's playing

right into the infrastructure of these algorithms

which rewards those salacious allegations with more views,

more clicks, more engagement, and more ad revenue, frankly.

So there's an MIT study from 2018 that says,

Lies travel further and faster than the truth

on Twitter especially.

Part of this is because it's so lucrative

to have a scoop and to be first.

And so we often see Photoshops, very weirdly cropped images.

We've seen quite a few different deep fakes

of Charlie Kirk's voice, even from beyond the grave.

[David] Right, an AI generated audio clip of Kirk

was played in various services, such as this one.

[AI Charlie Kirk] Death is not the end. It's a promotion.

Don't waste one second mourning me.

[David] But going back to what you said, Nina,

I've even seen a few altered images

that claim that Charlie Kirk was wearing a blood pack,

which also seems to have an AI voiceover.

[AI Voiceover] What's protruding out of Charlie's back?

[David] But if you compare this image

with a real photo taken by a photographer

at the same moment, you can clearly see

that this theory is false, but intentionally false.

You see these cheapfakes.

People might augment the picture in such a way

or stretch a frame so that it looks disproportionate.

And knowing that things that are novel and outrageous

travel at breakneck speed due in part to the infrastructure

of the algorithms rewarding that novelness,

it's like we've built an entire algorithmic system

on many of these platforms around the idea

that whoever has the most bizarre and outrageous information

are gonna be the ones that are circulated the most.

And we know the most engaging content online

is often the most enraging content.

So you have people searching for answers,

people who are shocked and scared and pissed off,

and that is just the perfect fuel for conspiracy theories.

When I saw the video, it was horrific

and it really upset me, but there were dozens, hundreds,

thousands of posts showing the video.

Tens of millions, hundreds of millions probably viewed it.

In fact, by the time Kirk was pronounced dead

two hours later, the videos posted by people at the rally

had more than 11 million views.

My colleague at WIRED, Lauren Goode pointed out

that we are pretty much living

in a post content moderation world.

Nina, thoughts?

Certainly with the advent of the paid-for blue check on X

where your content can be surfaced to more people

and you can gain virality, gain amplification,

gain credibility by posting the more inflammatory content

that does well on X, I think Musk has opened up

a new industry for folks to engage

in harmful and violent rhetoric

and in some cases even traffic in violent videos, right?

That's the moment that we're in.

I think a really important point from the point of view

of the shooter is that they waited

till the livestream was on, right?

And this is a really important and salient point,

which is that they wanted to spread the trauma.

It wasn't necessarily about just killing Kirk.

It was about doing it in front of an audience.

It was about doing it in a way

that would be mediated and distributed.

One thing that I think is important to dig deeper on

is the way that these violent videos are often remixed

or even people attempt to evade content moderation

by flipping, inverting kind of the image,

changing a filter on it.

All of that generates what's called a different hash,

so it makes it more difficult for the platforms

to identify and remove these videos.

And let's be clear, posting a video of a murder

is not speech, right?

This goes against most of the platforms' terms of service.

That's an interesting point.

The platforms have stepped back in recent years.

For example, TikTok recently announced it will lay off

hundreds of human content moderators

in favor of increased AI-enabled content moderation.

Does that play an important role in the fact

that there is now zero friction, effectively, for anyone

who wants to spread not only those horrible videos

that you referenced, you know, but also any sort

of disinformation that they may choose to post online?

Yeah, and I think it's important to put out there

that the same people whose job it would be

to regulate these companies in this industry

are the ones who are also benefiting

from the spread of this disinformation.

Musk and the platform executives know

this is how their platforms work, right?

And with Elon Musk in particular,

you have something really peculiar going on

where not only is this guy profiting from disinformation

and from conspiracy theories,

he himself is adding fuel to the fire,

and I think that's totally intentional.

We know that Elon wants X to be the place

where news happens and news breaks,

so if in the moments after the shooting he's able to say,

Well, it was them.

The left did it, the violent left,

that really adds to people flocking to his platform,

using it, commenting there,

and it adds to the usage metrics for them,

which I think all of these platform executives have in mind.

But for Musk, it's particularly insidious,

given his own usage of his platform

and his recognition of how it works.

So on that point, we saw a lot of people questioning

why the video of his actual death was posted online so much.

What's the driving force? You've mentioned money.

Is there other forces there to make people want

to post about this so much that their first instinct is,

I need to go on TikTok, or,

I need to go on Instagram or X

and give my opinion to the world?

Well, even the nation's top law enforcement official

felt the need to post through it with Kash Patel.

A lot of the commentary in the days after the assassination

when they still hadn't found the shooter was,

Perhaps we shouldn't have online influencers

leading law enforcement.

But I really do think it's important to note

what a cash cow this is

for so many conspiracy theorists online.

The idea that Charlie Kirk is a psyop.

I found that through the Substack algorithm.

That was fed to me by somebody who claims

that they're just doing research.

This person has over 78,000 subscribers on Substack,

and that's all monetized.

And the more that they push this information out,

the more that they're driving subscriptions,

the more that they can continue to cash in

on these horrible events.

I think also, you know, when we get down to it,

images like this, which are something

that gets massively distributed, you get called in as a user

and as a witness into action.

You are now part of the manhunt.

This is what made QAnon so powerful.

Every day, you could be part of the analysis

and you could be making videos like this and like,

circling this little wisp of whatever is going by here.

But what's important here is that you become a detective.

I think one of the things that we really misunderstand

about the media ecosystem, especially around the right,

is that if you are a right-winger,

one of the most important things you can do

as a political participant in the world

is share right-wing media contents.

You are not the audience. You are the distribution system.

Right-wing media share

each other's information and articles.

You would just never see The New York Times

sharing The Washington Post.

So mainstream media has a different business model

than right-wing media where these kind

of narratives tend to thrive.

Is there specific phrases that are red flags

that people should be wary of and not look at that stuff

and look maybe at more fact-checked stuff?

For me, when I hear words like

100% incontrovertible proof, that's an immediate red flag.

One of the things that I think is important to recognize

is that all of us are human.

All of us make mistakes.

So anybody who is claiming definitive knowledge

in a breaking news situation is probably full of shit.

Until you see something corroborated on multiple sources

from multiple people of different backgrounds

and political viewpoints, I wouldn't trust it.

We have to be much more astute news consumers.

I also am in favor of what I call,

Everyone is a journal-ish.

So I think that most people

that use social media these days, they have to think,

How do I know if this is true

and what are the stakes if I'm wrong?

Unfortunately, that's all we've got time for today.

Joan and Nina, thank you so much for your insights.

Conspiracy theories have been with us for decades,

from Area 51 to the JFK assassination

and even the Moon landing.

But the Charlie Kirk assassination has shown us

that conspiracy theories today are not only big business,

they are instant, supercharged by the algorithmic world

that we live in and given credence by some

of the most powerful people in the world.

Sorting fact from fiction in breaking news situations

is becoming increasingly difficult.

And that's even before we have entered the era

of the AI conspiracy theory.

I'm David Gilbert. Thanks for watching.

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