Charlie Kirk was an American soldier who served in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a member of the elite elite SEAL Team Six. On the morning of September 10th, 2011, Charlie was shot to death by a sniper in a public viewing of an anti-Islamic video being broadcast to the world. Conspiracy theories have swirled around his death for years, but no one has ever been able to shake the idea that this could have been a political assassination.
00:04:02.600And some have preferred not to talk about what happened.
00:04:05.680Others have spoken up as often as they possibly can.
00:04:08.700And we can now say with some certainty, a very large number of people have concocted or come to believe highly incredible theories to explain Charlie's death.
00:04:19.000Theories that, if true, would defy any semblance of common sense and cause more international incidents than both world wars put together.
00:04:27.840These kinds of theories can, in many cases perhaps, plausibly be explained, at least in part,
00:04:34.600as a psychological defense mechanism, a way for many people who are effectively in a state of shock to make sense of something horrible and unprecedented.
00:04:43.100Conspiracy theories always pop up around tragedies of this sort.
00:04:46.640Think of the Sandy Hook theories, many other examples.
00:04:50.080And I believe this happens, and I've said many times, at least in part,
00:04:54.140because people are trying to take something ghastly and shocking and make it comprehensible by turning it into a kind of cinematic plot line.
00:05:03.160But over time, as we all know, shock wears off, and eventually the perpetrators of even the most grotesque acts of evil,
00:05:11.420through the passage of time and the arrival of more information,
00:05:14.860begin to remind us of the perpetrators of banal acts of evil, the ones we're all familiar with.
00:05:22.000Especially when they're caught, these killers lose the mystique that they had when they were on the run
00:05:26.720or when they were squirreled away in solitary confinement somewhere.
00:05:29.260The reason people still talk about Jack the Ripper, while nobody knows the name Gary Ridgway anymore,
00:05:33.960is that Ridgway was identified, arrested, and put on trial.
00:11:06.800And it's certainly not unreasonable to distrust the FBI, generally speaking.
00:11:10.980After all, we've been lied to so many times about virtually everything from Russiagate to COVID to George Floyd to the assassination attempt in Butler and so on.
00:11:19.520The FBI, as an institution, historically, has very little credibility.
00:11:32.900Tyler Robinson's father and mother both recognized their son in the surveillance images from UVU's cameras.
00:11:40.140Robinson's father also recognized the rifle as the same type of rifle that had been given to his son as a gift.
00:11:47.080But Robinson didn't provide a photo of the rifle when his father requested one after the shooting.
00:11:51.100He didn't tell his parents where the rifle was.
00:11:53.320He also didn't deny committing the crime when his parents asked about it.
00:11:55.980Nor did Robinson say that the FBI had faked the surveillance images somehow as a way of setting him up as a patsy.
00:12:03.060And even if you respond to that by saying, well, none of that is true, his parents didn't actually recognize him or turn him in.
00:12:12.060Well, if that were the case, then the parents who are alive today, you would think, would be out in front of cameras every single day shouting to the heavens that their son is innocent.
00:12:29.220Now, instead, when Tyler was asked why he had killed Charlie, he wondered aloud about whether he should kill himself and stated that Charlie was responsible for spreading evil.
00:12:42.820And then before going to the sheriff's office, Robinson also posted this message to a group of his friends on Discord, quote,
00:12:49.280It was me at UVU yesterday. I'm sorry for all of this.
00:12:53.200So we have three confessions here, one to his parents, one to his roommate, and one on Discord.
00:12:58.160And the confessions were not obtained by the FBI or coerced in an interrogation room or anything like that.
00:13:04.460Robinson turned himself in at a sheriff's office, not an FBI field office.
00:13:08.800A retired deputy sheriff and family friend brought him there.
00:13:11.700Now, those local sheriffs were the ones who took the first statements from Robinson's parents, which identified Robinson as the shooter and provided the motive.
00:13:20.160In literally any other case, for literally any other defendant, if there is DNA evidence and a confession, they will be convicted.
00:13:31.620And to say that this kind of evidence is not enough, indeed to say that this evidence doesn't even point vaguely to the suspect,
00:13:38.260is to essentially say that guilt can never be proven in a court of law.
00:13:44.540And by the way, a police officer at Utah Valley University was the first person to identify where the shooter was located.
00:13:51.180The FBI was not on the scene at the time.
00:13:53.820This officer immediately identified where the shot had come from, and he ran to the sniper's nest.
00:13:58.400According to charging documents, which were prepared by Utah's county attorney, quote,
00:14:03.400At the moment of the shot, a UVU police officer was watching the crowd from an elevated vantage point.
00:14:08.400As soon as he heard the shot, he began to scan the area for threats.
00:14:11.760Believing the shot came from a rifle because of its sound, he looked for potential sniper positions.
00:14:15.880He noted a roof area approximately 160 yards away from Mr. Kirk as a potential shooting position and rushed there to look for evidence.
00:14:23.500When the UVU officer arrived at the position, he, quote,
00:14:27.340Noticed markings in the gravel rooftop consistent with a sniper having lain on the roof.
00:14:31.540Impressions in the gravel potentially left by the elbows, knees, and feet of a person in a prone shooting position.
00:14:36.840Police reviewed surveillance from the camera covering the roof and discovered that it recorded an individual dressed in dark clothing
00:14:42.640crossing the railing from the public walkway and drop onto the roof at approximately 12.15 p.m.
00:14:47.580After a short time, which matches the known time of the shot, the individual arose and ran across the roof to the northeast.
00:14:53.940This discovery led to an intensive review of UVU surveillance recordings to attempt to track and identify the suspect.
00:15:01.580Now, notably, this UVU police officer, an unlikely participant in a grand FBI conspiracy by any measure,
00:15:09.000did not think a mysterious second shooter on a grassy knoll had taken the shot.
00:15:12.680He zeroed in on the shooting location right away.
00:15:16.180They checked the cameras, and the cameras provided images of the shooter climbing the steps,
00:15:20.580who was then identified by his parents.
00:15:22.620There's also the fact that, according to a former co-worker, Robinson always walked around with his fists clenched.
00:15:27.880Now, this is not the kind of evidence that would convict Robinson on his own, on its own, obviously.