Dirk Hartford: Charlie Kirk’s assassination and battle for truth in Trump's MAGA movement

A year after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the political and media fallout continues to reshape the MAGA movement. Once united behind Donald Trump, prominent conservative influencers such as Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others are increasingly challenging both Trump's leadership and official narratives surrounding Kirk's death. The case against accused killer Tyler Robinson appears straightforward, yet Owens has built a vast online audience questioning key elements of the prosecution's story. In an era when social media rivals or surpasses traditional news outlets, the struggle over what constitutes truth has become central to American politics, media and the future of the conservative movement..By Dirk Hartford.If truth is the first casualty of war, then everything happening in and around the US right now should be treated with circumspection, including Charlie Kirk's assassination.After the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, what is indisputable is that America is more divided than ever on issues like these.Both occasions added fuel to the fog of fake news, conspiracy theories, contesting narratives, messianic prophecies, and histrionic projections constantly swirling around. Not least on social media, which is now comfortably the most widely used news source in the US, according to the Reuters Institute.Let’s leave aside who was really responsible for 9/11 or Kennedy’s assassination or COVID or Epstein et al, and zoom in on the Charlie Kirk assassination and the MAGA movement.That's where the “truth” battle is being fought in real time: over who dunnit to Charlie. It's caused major divisions in Trump’s MAGA base over the past year, whose ramifications are still playing out.Charlie Kirk was Trump’s crown prince, the person whose Turning Point organisation many believe was responsible for delivering Trump’s victory in 2024. He was seen as a future Presidential successor in his own right.Soon after Kirk’s assassination, one Tyler Robinson was arrested for the crime. There was a gun, a video, his relationship with his trans furry lover, a confession, incriminating WhatsApp messages, and his parents had handed him in, according to FBI’s Kash PatelThe case seemed done and dusted. Consensus was he was a deranged leftist/trans activist. He had no previous convictions or apparent association with the left. He had a trans lover. A preliminary hearing in July decided the case must go to trial.The major divisions around truth prior to Kirk’s assassination were between Trump’s “truth” on his platform Truth Social and in press conferences, faithfully reproduced by the likes of Fox News, and what he termed the “fake news” of the traditional media of record like the New York Times and CNN.But in the year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, some of his biggest cheerleaders, who also are some of the biggest players in the conservative MAGA movement, have transformed into some of his biggest enemies. We're talking about the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megan Kelly and even Joe Rogan, the king of the podcast castle, to a certain extent. People whose social media reach is among the largest on the planet and whose offerings are now commonly the first point of entry to US news consumers and who compete directly for numbers with the biggest traditional media offerings.They feel Trump betrayed MAGA on the Epstein files and the war in Iran especially. They are by no means alone in MAGA on this.But, in different ways, they also are targeting his relationship with Israel, and now they are casting aspersions about the Charlie Kirk assassination.Candace Owens, in particular, is the standout phenomenon on the Charlie Kirk assassination. She is leading the charge with her over 6 million subscribers on YouTube alone, and many are swimming in her wake.In a time when journalism itself, as known traditionally, is busy being systematically destroyed by the dominance of social media, she is busy creating a whole new way of crafting a journalistic story, in particular an investigative journalistic story.She has an eye for detail and for bullshit. She loves patterns and is great at connecting seemingly random dots to build a story. Timelines are her modus operandi, and she constructs them with forensic detail, building them day by day in front of her engaged audience of millions, whom she entreats to help her in the endeavour for the truth.And they do. Armies of her viewers go to work to pin down more pieces of the puzzle guided by her story needs. And so the story gets built bit by bit.Her serious critics say she is a fascinating window into a mind gripped by extreme apophenia: the tendency to see patterns where none exist.The rest dismiss her entirely as an insane conspiracy theorist; a jew hating anti semite; the mad woman who is being sued in an American court soon by the Macrons for saying that the wife of the President of France is a man.Since Charlie Kirk was murdered a year ago, she has applied her journalistic mission to what actually happened then and what might be happening now. She is no small player in this task. She and Charlie were tight collaborators, joined at the hip from the early days of Turning Point, the stars of the young conservative revival in the US.She is a young, black, attractive, sharply intelligent woman who crossed over from the left to the conservative cause at Charlie's behest when Turning Point was getting going.Now she is the nemesis of that same movement. She has them and Kirk’s wife Erica and Israel and mysterious Egyptian planes and Epstein’s global child trafficking network and Trump’s FBI itself in her sights on this story..Read more:.How Charlie Kirk mobilised Gen Z conservatives and shaped the MAGA movement.And she has millions of people following every word, and a case about to go to court where she has already sown serious doubt in the pillars of the prosecution's case. Tyler Robinson, she is already insisting, didn’t kill Kirk and that if he was involved somehow, it was at the discretion of other, bigger, ominous players.One way or another, the truth is already on trial in the brave new media world we find ourselves in. And Trump will have a much harder job in the MAGA movement convincing his supporters that the likes of Candace Owen and Tucker Carlson are bearers of “fake news” like the rest..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Dirk Hartford: Charlie Kirk’s assassination and battle for truth in Trump's MAGA movement

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