Who killed Charlie Kirk?

Listen to this interview here.

One of my biggest frustrations about the current state of media (and people’s understanding of media) is that the largest critics of journalism still rely on primary reporting done by journalists. On Conspirituality, we do some primary reporting, but mostly we work as analysts. We simply don’t have the resources to travel around breaking stories. Full-time journalists provide important context for our work.

This week, a new series, The Deep End with Brandy Zadrozny, was published by MS Now. I had the pleasure of speaking with Brandy back when she was at NBC News. I’ve relied on her reporting often as she specializes in radicalization, extreme extremism, and online disinformation.

Zadrozny’s 46-minute special hits all all the high notes Conspirituality listeners know and cherish—and are absolutely infuriated by. On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to talk to her about her first special, Who killed Charlie Kirk? Inside the conspiracy theory fueling MAGA’s civil war.

Having spent 10 months working on this special, how’s your mental health doing?

Not good. I mean, it’s a real luxury to be able to sit with something for 10 months. When you look at that Charlie Kirk world and what he was to MAGA, it was this moment in my beat that broke everything apart. It really broke people’s brains; it broke apart alliances. It was a really huge moment.

So I’m pretty lucky to get all that time to sit with it, see what happens and what people would make of it, and how people would twist it for their own gains. And boy howdy, it’s been a ride.

I’m amazed by all the factions emerging now. There’s a lot of talk about Hasan Piker and the ultra-left and what they’re doing to left-of-center voters. Of course, in the MAGA world, there’s been lot of ground wars going on for a while. But you can’t tell this specific story about Charlie Kirk without doing a deep dive on Candace Owens, which you spend almost a third of this episode setting up.

And you’ve interviewed her before. How much about Candace was new to you, going into this specific angle about the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories? Why did you feel that you needed to like really do the groundwork on her trajectory?

One of the central questions is: why is this happening? And to understand why it’s happening, you need to understand who Candace Owens is. Candace dropped on my radar in 2018. This is before she was hired by Turning Point USA, when she was a YouTuber called Red Pill Black. She really popped out of nowhere.

She had had a a dust up with victims in the Gamergate saga, which was a real turning point in the internet. And it was this moment where gamers and people in the gaming journalism industry were being harassed, and in some cases targeted offline.

Basically. these right wing nerds didn’t want their video games feminized. They didn’t want women in their spaces, and so they twisted this thing into a big war against these women. Candace ended up siding with the right-wing men. She had a right-wing boyfriend, and it immediately zapped her right wing, she said. I was fascinated with her at that moment.

So I reached out to her. Before I even reached out to her in 2018, I was doing background journalism work. I texted someone who knew her, who was part of her marketing agency in New York and said I’d love to talk to you about Candace. Candace found out and went rip shit. She went wild and started attacking me on Twitter in this what we now know to be very Candace Owens way. It was wild.

I decided I really wanted to write a profile of this very strange woman. Between the time I decided I wanted to write a profile and the time that that was published, she was scooped up by Turning Point USA. I ended up going to a Turning Point event, talking with her and Charlie.

I thought she was very of the moment in this way that turned out to be very true for the next 10 years. She has always been very of the moment. To understand why she would do what she’s doing to Charlie Kirk, to Charlie Kirk’s legacy, to Charlie Kirk’s business, to Charlie Kirk’s widow, to Charlie Kirk’s friends, you have to understand who she is.

The spoiler is that she is not only willing, but always in search of the ability to say what no one else will say. Differentiation is the key for for her success. She will go further than anyone else and say it with conviction and say it very well because she’s an expert communicator for the internet specifically. I don’t say this lightly: she’s been completely out for herself at every single moment of her career and has been just climbing that ladder.

I don’t want to get too deep in her background because people should watch your video. But there is a moment when she’s at the Daily Wire, and two days after October 7th, she comes out with a very nuanced take on Israel, playing both sides and saying we need to we need to wait on this. Then very quickly she takes an anti-semitic turn, which ends up breaking her relationship with Ben Shapiro. That’s a really important hinge point for what ends up happening with Charlie Kirk.

Candace Owens has impeccable timing. There was already this natural shift and rift happening within MAGA, between MAGA and America First. You had the far right groyper Nick Fuentes crew who had long been chipping away at it. A younger generation of far-right conservatives had come to his America First platform, which basically meant “we don’t want anything to do with Israel.”

A lot of those people, including Nick Fuentes, I would venture to say the majority of those America First people, were leaning hard into anti-semitic tropes. It was not just about having a beef with a national security policy or our reliance on Israel in the Middle East. It wasn’t. It’s not a political argument. It’s we hate Jews.

So there was a long rift already going on. You had people like Marjorie Taylor Green in that America First category that was breaking apart from Trump. Tucker Carlson had been pushed away from Fox, and apparently he was still friends with Charlie Kirk.

From all the people that I talked to within MAGA circles, Charlie really was a glue that held everybody together. He believed this is a big tent, where he wants everybody to be in the tent and no Republican should say a bad thing about another Republican. That was a big thing for Charlie. But there’s a danger with that.

Without Charlie here, nobody cares that there’s no there’s no peacemaker to to broker peace with Candace. There’s no personal lines of peace. So everybody is just really fighting. Fighting to hold onto the largest piece of the MAGA attention that’s left out there, because this is also a story about a fractured right wing media. People are trying to retain their audiences as best they can.

You feature a great graphic in the video showing how Candace is the sun, which all of these other influencers orbit around in terms of this specific Charlie Kirk conspiracy: that he wasn’t actually killed by Tyler Robinson.

I want to ask one more question about Candace. People regularly ask me if people like RFK Jr. think that dropping methylene blue actually does something for his health. I’ve always had three buckets:

• They absolutely believe it

• They don’t believe it, they just they know that’s where the monetization and attention is at

• Then there’s self-radicalization that happens where they’re like, I kind of believe it, and then they get feedback from the audience and really start to turn

Along that spectrum, where do you imagine Candace falls, as well as some of the other people that you spotlight?

I’m obsessed with this question. It’s the same thing everybody always asks me. The longer I’ve been on this beat, the less I think it matters. But I get the impulse because you want to know what’s in their hearts. Is it a grift or do they mean it? Because you almost feel sympathy if they mean it. If an anti-vaxxer thinks they’re saving babies, I get it. You would want to protect them. But if it’s just a grift, then that’s evil.

So are they evil or stupid? The answer with Candace is that Candace believes in herself. This is based on lots of her former employers that I’ve spoken to, people who know her very well. She goes on what she believes and she goes on vibes a lot. If it feels true to her, she will say it with conviction. Not because she knows something to be true, but she believes so much in herself that she’s willing to say those things with the surety that she says them with.

I’ve seen communications between Candace and people inside Turning Point between the time Charlie was killed and this moment. I’ve seen examples of where Candace comments on her viewers, that “the people want to see.” A lot of this is with her audience in mind and what her viewers think.

There’s this point where she actually had a sit down with Erica Kirk. A new widow, she said she talk to Candace when she started all this craziness. Let’s do it at Turning Point USA. You can ask me any question you want. Candace basically made Erica come to her in Nashville.

Ericka sat down with her for hours and hours and they had this conversation. And the next day, Candace said she answered my questions on her podcast. I don’t really have much else to say. All of the comments at the time were like, You can’t let Erika get away with this. Their brains are fried and looking for the evil.By the next show, Candace had flipped and was willing to give it to them. And then she went on this six-part series on Erika Kirk and went full in, basically claiming that Erika murdered Charlie or had some hand in covering it up. That sort of 180 signifies to me that she believes in nothing but which way the wind is blowing, and the feeling that she needs to be with that wind.

When you first reached out to me about this story, this is what really jumped out at me from your text:

The guy behind the exploding mic theory falls right into your wheelhouse. He’s a kombucha brewer and beef tallow renderer on a farm in Oklahoma, and in his spare time explodes pig carcasses in his shop.

Even with that warning, when I was watching the video and exploding pig carcasses came on—I was not ready for that. Who is this guy and what is this theory?

Oh, John Bray. He’s a farm store owner; I should say it that way. He and his wife and several children live on a farm in Oklahoma where they sell products. They brew kombucha. He calls himself a CO2 architect. I did a lot of Googling. That doesn’t seem like a real title.

He worked for a long time in Colorado. He did weed extraction for CBD products. He was a weed guy, extracted them using CO2 machines. He’s not a forensics anything, he’s not an expert in any way. But he watched, as we all did, Charlie Kirk’s murder. He immediately thought something’s not right, something’s weird. Within weeks he decided, hey, remember Beeper Gate? Remember that operation that Mossad did, where they put explosives in the beepers of Hezbollah fighters and blew them up all at the same time in Lebanon and Syria. What if that happened?

So he fired up Claude and Grok and fed them a bunch of papers of famous forensic whatevers. Then he started running these like experiments saying, what else could it be? Could it have been an explosive device? He vibe coded this website to further a theory that Charlie Kirk was not killed by a rifle shot to the neck, as we all saw with our eyes, but instead he was killed by something called a shape charge—basically, a little rocket that was exploded from his wireless mic.

On its face, that’s an insane thing to say. It makes no sense. It comes from nowhere. You can see him get shot. Why would they do it with a million cameras and then lie? An expert from this University in Bozeman come out and said, no, that’s a rifle shot. It’s a clear, the sound of a rifle. You have the ATF, you have prosecutors, everybody but John Bray saying that this is a a gunshot. You have medical examiner’s report saying it’s a gunshot. On its face, it’s a really stupid theory.

Yet John Bray is just a guy, like Candace, willing to say something that Candace needs for her theories, for her world building.So this fella has been on podcasts and YouTube shows that get far more attention than I will ever get for anything that I do in my life. He has mastered attention and gotten it.

I’m used to it with anti-vaxxers. But why are we listening to him? Why is anybody listening to this person? I can’t understand it.

I want to ask a question about coherence, but first I want to touch on influencers you cover like Baron Coleman. In my world with wellness, I see someone like Candace Owens. I get it. You’re charismatic. I get why people follow you, even though you’re batshit crazy.

One I’ve never understood is Ian Carroll. He’s very much in this story as well. Why this dude? Why is he just still around? He makes the worst content. He’s not charismatic, he’s goofy as hell, and yet people love him.

It’s so weird, isn’t it? There are a lot of people in that bucket. I find Stu Peters to be grating and dumb. There’s Jason Goodman, that weirdo, who walks around New York City and is just the worst. A lot of them are men; almost all of them. I don’t the answer.

There’s sort of a type, right? Like Ian Carroll, his type is for people who hate the Jews. And there are very few people who are doing this. I know there’s a lot of influencers in the world, but this is different.

I watched all of Candace Owens’s shows for months. Whenever she talked about someone or had someone on her show, I would put them on a spreadsheet for months and months. I created this Candace score, which is the number of times she references you on her podcast. I watched people’s subscribers jump every single time. It’s very transactional. When she mentions you, you get a stratospheric rise. It’s an easy on ramp if you’re willing to have a theory that nobody else does and you have some sort of like narrative and way to push it forward.

I don’t know who watches this crap though. I’ve been on Reddit forums that are devoted to these people. I want to talk to the people who watch it, and it’s specifically not just Candace’s shows because Candace is watchable. She’s funny. But these other folks are just not. Why are you watching four hours of Baron Coleman’s streams?

Then Baron leaves his job as a lawyer because he can now make enough money doing this. Then you show him getting donations and replying to people as they’re donating to him. That’s exactly the thought in my head: Who are these people sitting on their computer sending him money?

My granny used to watch these religious shows all day long. Tammy Faye Baker and the like. All day long, the same people saying the same things, just yakkity yakkity yak. And what we’re talking about is like a new religion. These people are the prognosticators. It’s truly weird, and I don’t think it’s good for anybody.

We finished the video a couple weeks ago, and at that time, Baron had said he’d made $350,000 just on super chats. Now it’s over $400,000. That’s the speed at which these people earn money. And that’s not counting merch. What you’re seeing is a multi-million dollar industry, a cottage industry, very specifically around the Charlie Kirk killing.

To get back to coherence: one thing I’ve done on Conspirituality a number of times is grab a transcript of Russell Brand and then actually read what he’s saying. I’ve done this with Kennedy too. There’s a number of people you can do it with, especially Gish Gallopers. When you actually see it on the screen separate from their voice, there’s no logic whatsoever.

It’s often contradictory. Sentence to sentence sometimes. But it doesn’t matter. What in your estimation, having covered this for so long, pulls people in when they actually make no sense?

I’m a former English teacher and librarian. A close reading of a text is really gratifying and important to be able to do. It’s an important skill. So I don’t know. I’ve been doing this beat for so long now, and I have to fight feeling sad.

People are not watching it closely, not thoughtfully, just sort of taking it in as infotainment that makes them feel away from it all. Like a soap opera. They’re not like really invested in the case of Charlie Kirk. They’re not reading the court documents. They’re just thinking about it lightly.

Background noise and emotionally gratifying. Final question: near the end of your video—and I know this was off the record—you meet with Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA. What can you say about the organization’s direction? How do you feel about the people behind it? Where do you think it’s going to go from here?

They invited me there. I thought I was going to go for maybe an hour. And I spoke with Erika and some other folks inside Turning Point for almost five hours. There was nothing I couldn’t ask. The reason that it was off the record, which I think is important, is they have come to the conclusion that the only way they can win is if they don’t play.

The game of conspiracy theories and being inside of one: there’s no way to win. Especially if it’s with MS NOW. We’re a progressive news network, and they’re one of the farthest right wing groups in the country. It doesn’t serve their purposes.

But because I’ve been on this beat for so long and written so much about it, they wanted to give me time and I appreciated it. I asked how the conspiracy theories were affecting them. I saw Erika cry a lot. I saw somebody trying to navigate an impossible situation. Her husband had just been killed. If you knew Charlie at all, which I did a little, then you knew he was a true believer in the president, in his far right ideology, far right Christianity. Erika is as well. She feels the weight of continuing that on her shoulders.

Will she be able to continue it? I don’t know because for all of its money—Turning Point just filed their new 990s, and they brought in 115 million last year, no doubt part in the wake of his death. How do you sustain something that was so much a cult of personality?

I don’t know if she can. Something would have to change. And the rift between MAGA and America First is so large right now, it’s hard to see how they continue on the trajectory that Charlie had. But they’ve got a lot of money. Anything’s possible, I guess.

Regarding empathy: I’ve covered the far right for so long. People often say that I’m being too kind to Erika, that I should withhold some of that empathy. And I’ve covered every major shooting in this country . I’ve watched how disinformation leads to violence. And I don’t want to see that. I don’t like it. I don’t want it to happen.

I’ll never see people only as their political ideology. This is a person hurting and someone was murdered, and that’s bad. When we start to lose the ability to say that and draw that clear line, I just don’t want to live in a world like that.