Two thousand years ago, Pontius Pilate posed a question that has echoed through history: “What is truth?”
According to the account, he asked it while the answer stood before him — and then he turned away.
A similar moment is now unfolding in a courtroom in Provo, Utah. The facts will be laid out in public, yet many observers seem prepared to look past them deliberately.
On Monday, during a preliminary hearing, Utah prosecutors began presenting their case against Tyler Robinson, 23, who is accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk.
Over the course of five days, prosecutors are expected to guide a judge through forensic evidence, surveillance footage, recorded statements from witnesses, autopsy findings and messages Robinson allegedly sent to his romantic partner acknowledging his role in the killing.
Kirk’s family, including his widow, Erika, is expected to attend what will be the most detailed public account so far of the killing of a man many considered a friend. But for some, no volume of evidence will ever appear sufficient.
Kirk was shot in broad daylight, before thousands of people, as cameras recorded the scene. His killing stands among the most publicly witnessed assassinations in modern American history, and the evidence against the accused appears, to many, exceptionally strong.
A crime carried out so openly would seem difficult to deny. Instead, in a troubling reversal, it has become one of the most fiercely contested.
Charlie Kirk was shot in broad daylight, in front of thousands, with cameras running (Pictured: Kirk speaking at Utah Valley University on the day of his killing, September 10, 2025)
On Monday, in a preliminary hearing, Utah state prosecutors began laying out their case against Tyler Robinson (above), the man accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk
Charlie’s family will be in attendance for the fullest public accounting to date of how a man so many of us called our friend was murdered (Pictured: Kirk’s parents enter court on July 6)
A cottage industry of conspiracy addicts and podcasters, Candace Owens foremost among them, have dedicated the past year to burying the facts so deeply under lies and conjecture that the truth is in serious danger of never seeing the light of day.
The conspiracies are vast, unintelligible and not worth repeating, but the animating forces behind these delusions demand illumination.
Conspiracies thrive on a technique known as the Gish Gallop wherein a speaker asserts so much weak evidence and so many misleading or irrelevant arguments in such rapid succession that it overwhelms the ability of an opponent to refute them all.
The audience is left with the feeling that the mere existence of so many charges is itself proof something must be wrong.
Humans tend to believe the adage, ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ The Gish Gallop exploits this belief by seeing vapor and calling it smoke.
The conspiracists can manage this trick because mankind has spent the last decade building an information ecosystem with no accountability, no correction mechanism and no shared consensus of reality.
The old newsrooms were flawed in a hundred ways, but when they printed something false, there was an editor to call and a retraction to demand. Online, in today’s world of independent creators, there is nothing of this kind.
This new media world creates algorithmic silos, sealed rooms in which consumers are spared anything that might trouble what they already believe. Charlie’s death was pulled into that machinery almost at once.
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An early forensic report in June found the DNA of multiple people on the alleged murder weapon – that was all it took. Each new detail became fuel for suspicion, worked with all the rigor of an amateur true-crime podcast: the slow reveal, the something-is-off hook, the tease before the next installment.
Underneath it sits an old heresy, the Gnostic promise that reality has been hidden from the sleeping masses and that you alone are clever enough to see it. It’s a product that offers not only hidden truth, but community. These communities operate like cults, complete with quasi-spiritual insight and blind faith. Each new bit of information is twisted to fit the foregone conclusion.
Did Tyler Robinson confess? He must have been coerced or covering for someone.
Is he on camera at the scene of the crime? He is a patsy.
A cottage industry of conspiracy addicts and podcasters, Candace Owens foremost among them, has dedicated the past year to burying the facts
Jeremy Boreing is host of The Jeremy Boreing Show and co-founder of The Daily Wire, where Candace Owens once worked
What actually holds such purveyors of falsehood to account? Only institutions have, but the gatekeepers lost our trust by abusing it. They existed for a reason, forcing a claim to meet proof under rules, in front of someone empowered to say no.
The courtroom in Provo is one of the last institutions we have that still works that way and that matters now more than ever. The courts are becoming the only real check left on the worst actors in this business.
The lawsuits are piling up against people who lie for a living because no other recourse is available to the victims of their lies. Free speech is a God-given right and a vital legal protection, but it was never intended to be a permission slip to slander a grieving family for profit.
Candace Owens and operators like her, I believe, are knowingly and willfully lying to their audiences because it pays. They are doing it over the body of a great man and the grief of his widow. Some strange admixture of narcissism, cynicism and self-interest drives them to embrace evil. The rest of us should have the nerve to say so.
Charlie spent his life advancing the argument that the answer to a bad idea is a better one, offered out loud, to people who disagree. He was killed in the middle of making that claim.
Those profiting from his death are exploiting that belief, drowning the good ideas beneath an onslaught of just not bad ideas, but outright deception. When challenged, they hide behind Charlie’s own legacy – the one they are actively undermining.
Charlie spent his life advancing the argument that the answer to a bad idea is a better one, offered out loud, to people who disagree (Pictured: Owen as communications director for the Charlie Kirk-founded advocacy group, Turning Point USA)
To truly defend Charlie’s legacy, you have to defend the things that made it: his wife, his children, the organization he built and the substance of his mission. That means discerning the good from the bad before you decide what you are advancing and which you are trying to defeat.
So, watch the evidence presented over the next several days and take it seriously. Step out of the silo and apply, not intuition, but rigor to the arguments made and proof presented. For this trial is about more than one victim and one defendant.
In the days after Charlie was killed, a lot of us felt something we hadn’t sensed in years, a flicker of consensus among people, who agree about almost nothing, that the country must not disintegrate into violent tribalism and political hatred.
That national unity did not survive its first contact with the internet.
But if the American public cannot, even now, regain its balance and see the evidence for what it is then we will never settle what happened, ask why and reckon with the political hatred tearing us apart.
We will each have to be our own editors until we can rebuild trustworthy institutions to carry some of the burden.
