Or perhaps clinically psychotic. I’d like to say “insane” because it better captures what I have in mind, but insanity is strictly a legal term, so I will go with psychotic. However, Owen’s babbling madness is one thing—I’ve been to parties where individuals hold forth uttering the craziest and stupidest things (I’ve even encountered this at faculty meetings and professional conferences)—but observing tens of thousands of people swallowing the nonsense that falls from Owen’s mouth is another thing altogether. That is fucking scary.
I know there are low-IQ and paranoid people in the world, but seeing so many of them in one place reminds me that stupidity and psychosis are real problems for the rest of us. Intellectually, I can explain National Socialism, to take a striking example of a mass of people collectively behaving stupidly and psychotically—and destructively—but there’s a part of me that remains shocked that such a thing as Nazi Germany is possible. It is wishful thinking to want to believe that members of my species are inherently rational beings. They aren’t. Yet I reserve astonishment to preserve my moral sensibility. I try hard to avoid being a cynic and a misanthrope. I can’t just give up. Irrationality endangers me.
I have been watching Utah’s preliminary hearing in the case of Tyler Robinson, the man who assassinated Charlie Kirk. The case is so open-and-shut that I will dispense with the pro forma “allegedly.” The autopsy report, the DNA on Robinson’s grandfather’s Mauser Model 98 bolt-action rifle modified to fire .30-06 Springfield ammunition, the screwdriver used to disassemble the rifle, and the towel used to conceal it, on which biological material from Robinson’s lover Lance aka “Luna” Twiggs was also found, the etched bullet casing, the meaning of the inscriptions, and the dremel used to inscribe them, multiple videos of Robinson on the Utah Valley University campus walking up the stairs to the roof with a rifle in a pant leg (Robinson is positively identified by Twiggs) and then jumping down from the roof, the damning note left for Twiggs under Robinson’s computer keyboard, the damning text messages and Discord chats, multiple damning interviews with Twiggs, the many eyewitnesses—it’s all there. Dude is cooked. And the defense team knows it.
I have a good imagination, but I cannot come up with an alternative theory of the case. And the reason I can’t is that I am incapable of believing crazy paranoid scenarios like “Mossad did it using an exploding microphone.” Sorry, not sorry, but my mind is limited by facts and reason. This is what makes me rational. Not that Mossad couldn’t do something like this. Remember when Israel fucked up Hezbollah with exploding cellphones? That event was wild but real. I know how and why Israel did that. But Israel didn’t kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson did. We know how and why he did. Owens and her ilk—Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, etc.—are guided not by fact and logic but by motivated reasoning that assumes Jews lurk behind the scenes. This is madness.
The exploding microphone theory is one of the more bizarre elements of the grand conspiracy. The autopsy report concludes that (1) Kirk’s cause of death was homicide and (2) the manner of his death was a gunshot wound to the neck. The medical examiner even extracted bullet fragments from the man’s corpse. I have watched video footage from multiple angles of the moment Kirk is struck in the neck—the same videos that made the judge flinch in open court and sicken the curious compelled to look at it—and there is zero evidence that the wound was caused by an explosive device. Whatever the wingnuts are seeing is not something normal people can see. Normal people see this: Kirk was killed by a bullet from a gun fired by Robinson. Confidence level that Robinson murdered Kirk? One hundred percent metaphysical certitude. Doubt in this case is pathologically unreasonable.
We know why Robinson killed Kirk. Slam-dunk cases don’t require a motive. But we have a motive in this case. Robinson murdered Kirk for his lover, Twiggs, whom Robinson refers to as “my love”—and, more than this, for the trans community Twiggs is part of. The mindset, the messages, the etchings on the bullet casings, and the target tell us this. Robinson’s handwritten note that he instructed Twiggs to find under Robinson’s keyboard confesses to his intent to murder Kirk: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it. I don’t know if I will/have succeeded, but I had hoped to make it home to you.” In the text conversation that followed Twiggs’ reading the note, Robinson confessed to having murdered Kirk. “I had enough of his hatred,” he explained. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Millions of Americans agree with him. The two then texted back and forth as Robinson sought an opportunity to retrieve the gun he shot Kirk with. But the authorities got there first. The state has his grandfather’s rifle.
This was in an Antifa hit job, as I show in my article on Freedom and Reason, Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa. “But Antifa is an idea?” Right, and that’s the idea that motivated Robinson to kill Kirk. In that September 12 article, published just two days after the murder, I provide readers with facts central to the case and contextualize them. Nothing that has occurred since I wrote that essay contradicts my analysis (which the news site, RealClearPolitics, picked up, driving thousands of people to my platform). This was an open-and-shut case from the beginning. In that essay, I showed that Antifa terrorism and transactivism are inseparable. I knew this even before Kirk’s assassination and wrote about it (see Understanding Antifa: Eric Hoffer, the True Believer, and the Footsoldiers of the Authoritarian Left). As soon as I learned Kirk had been shot, I immediately understood what was behind it. It was not the Jews. It was an anarchist.
Leave it to Owens and her tribe of imbeciles to imagine an exploding microphone. “Why did his chain blow upwards?” she wonders aloud on Shawn Ryan’s podcast. How about air displacement, Candace? Ryan should at least have suggested this, but he had clearly not prepared for the interview. People online are wondering, “Why did his T-shirt bulge out in the back?” As if this is a mystery. A high-energy impact can cause a rapid, involuntary movement of the torso; inertia can make a loose shirt billow, lag, or flare outward. Tissue deformation and energy transfer: a bullet impact produces rapid expansion and contraction of tissue surrounding the wound path, transmitting forces through the body. Air and fabric effects, ie., displaced air under loose clothing causing a brief outward bulge—and a chain to blow upward. All of these obvious explanations could never occur to them because they already believe they know what happened.
Anybody who has ever killed an animal knows what bullets can do. A man might watch a slow-motion video of the kill and note numerous queer things about it. Yet, however many queer things may be noted, any sane person admits that the animal was shot by a rifle. How does one determine when a person has been shot? The questions are very basic and obvious. Are there entrance and possibly exit wounds? What was the bullet’s wound track through the body? What does the autopsy show? Were any bullets or bullet fragments recovered? What do ballistics and trajectory analysis show? In other words, what does the physical evidence tell us?
We have all the answers to these questions, yet the paranoid mind rationalizes what it sees with its own eyes at roughly the same velocity as the bullet that killed Kirk. One member of Owen’s band of paranoids, whose comment received numerous likes on Facebook, expressed bafflement at the observation that Kirk was wearing a microphone while speaking into another microphone. The motivated reasoning evident in his comment illustrates basic principles found in psychology and cognitive science. I am almost certain that the commenter had himself observed Owens using both a lavalier and a handheld or standing microphone simultaneously. Yet in this case, a common practice becomes extraordinary. The eyes-wide-shut phenomenon is standard among the devotees of Owens and other far-right antisemites. Jew-hatred blinds them to what any reasonably intelligent and sane person plainly sees and admits.
What is plain before a rational man’s eyes must, in the antisemite’s world, have another explanation. Motivated reasoning from that worldview must find Jews lurking behind Kirk’s murder, even if it means aiding and abetting Antifa and its terror campaign against the Republic, because Jews are behind everything. Do they really not know they are defending a movement that wants to see truth-tellers dead? If so, they don’t care. Nor do they care that they are aiding and abetting Jihadism. Antisemites are like those dimwits who believe that the world is run by reptilians disguised as people. They watch John Carpenter’s They Live and think it’s a documentary. I would like to believe that my fellow humans are rational beings. Many of them are. But a lot of them aren’t. And so we must ridicule them.
Owens’ appearance on the Shawn Ryan podcast contains many examples of paranoid delusion. Here’s another one: she claims that authorities never spoke to Twiggs. I knew that Twiggs had been interviewed shortly after Robinson turned himself in. How could Owens not know this? It was widely reported in the news that the police had spoken with Twiggs at least twice and taken pictures of the text messages and Discord chat.
A video of Twiggs’ interview with the authorities was shown in court yesterday, after days of his defense team furiously trying to suppress parts of it (which they managed to do). In that video, Twiggs explains the case—the inscribing of the bullet casings and all the rest of it. Confronted with the video, Owens pivoted to the claim that Twiggs is an “obvious Fed asset.” And, since the federal government is controlled by the Jews, Twiggs must be an operative of Mossad. Right, Candace? The Zionists did it because Kirk was critical of Israeli policy. Why aren’t they murdering all the critics of Israel? Owens must be shaking in her boots.
Owens, Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, and the rest of this crowd, on the far left and the far right, are completely mental. I’m not engaging in an ad hominem attack when I write this. I am making an observation based on extensive knowledge of and experience in psychology and sociology. The delusion that Jews killed Kirk is akin to a schizophrenic man believing that, as he slept, the CIA planted transmitters in the fillings of his teeth to stop him from saving the world from interdimensional demons. Only here, tens of thousands of rubes believe the man. This is mass psychogenic illness. It’s the stuff of moral panic.
I’m reading posts by people resting their entire thesis of the case—that it was a Zionist conspiracy—on one section of a report that found inconclusive the identification of a bullet fragment. Hello? When fragments of the lead interior of a bullet are extracted from a corpse, ballistic experts typically can’t perform ballistic tests on them. They’re just pieces of lead. They carry no tool marks. Read the rest of the report. It’s damning. But wait a minute? Bullet fragments were retrieved from Kirk’s corpse? I thought it was a microphone bomb?
It is not unexpected that Robinson’s defense team would work such angles to generate reasonable doubt. Their job is to get their client off for murder or minimize the consequences of his actions (I’d be surprised if they didn’t seek a plea deal after what has occurred at the preliminary hearing.) Remember the way OJ Simpson’s defense team manipulated the jury in that high-profile murder case. It’s what lawyers do. If you had murdered a man, you’d likely want your attorneys to work every angle, however implausible, to help you escape justice.
The defense team is primarily pursuing two angles in this case. First, DNA analysts cannot definitively prove that biological materials identify a man or explain how a man’s DNA was deposited on a rifle or a screwdriver. Second, the bullet fragments cannot be definitely traced to the murder weapon. They know that the facts of the case condemn their client, so they intend to confuse a potential jury by dragging them into statistical minutiae, to make what is expected out to be disconfirmatory.
The defense team is doing what defense teams do: exploiting the fact that science is a probabilistic endeavor. What they have no intention of telling a jury is that the beauty of science is that it does not declare that its practitioners are absolutely certain of their conclusions. That is what differentiates science from religion—or a criminal trial. Science is humble that way. But justice not only seeks truth; justice seeks finality. It will fall to the prosecution team to explain this to the jury if this goes to trial. They have demonstrated it well enough to the judge, who will no doubt find probable cause to put this case before a jury.
Don’t be baffled by bullshit. When dealing with likelihood ratios of trillions-to-one, you can be reasonably confident of the conclusions the experts have reached. But DNA and ballistics aside, the circumstances of this case demand only one conclusion: that Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk. You’d have to be crazy to believe otherwise.
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Update!
The preliminary hearing is adjourned until September. Surely Robinson’s defense team will, in the meantime, convince their client to plead guilty to save his life. The evidence against him is incontrovertible. I knew this from the beginning, but the hearing made the truth clear to anybody prepared to accept the facts who was not yet convinced. Experts are suggesting the case may not go to trial for two years, so Robinson has plenty of time to decide his fate. That’s a ridiculous amount of time between a murder and a conviction.
The prosecution just dropped an enhanced surveillance video at the end of the hearing showing Tyler Robinson at his sniper perch on the rooftop of the building from where he assassinated Charlie Kirk. The public wasn’t allowed to see the enhanced footage, but we know what it showed because we have seen it before. The footage devastated Charlie’s wife and mother. No, it wasn’t an exploding microphone, Owen’s fans.
As for Candace Owens and her followers, truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is continuing the latest blood libel against the Jews. One reason for a more timely process is shutting up that stupid bitch and the imbeciles that hang on her every utterance. But that hopes for much. Robinson admitting his guilt or putting him before a firing squad would likely not shut Owens up. If Robinson pleads guilty, then Owens will say he’s a fall guy. If the state executes him, then he will become a martyr to her and her sycophants. This is the way of those who believe Jews run the world. All evidence is warped by the gravitational pull of their paranoid delusions.
freedom and reason 