Candace Owens accused me of being complicit in my friend Charlie Kirk’s death. One year later, this is the truth America needs to hear: JOSH HAMMER

One year ago, my friend Charlie Kirk was brutally killed doing one of the things he loved the most: engaging with his fellow Americans in the service of the country to which he was devoted.

I knew then the importance of Kirk’s mission to reach the nation’s disillusioned. Regretfully, in the days since his death, I’ve been forced to appreciate the urgency of his cause even more.

On September 10, 2025, on the campus of Utah Valley University, Kirk was debating supporters and critics alike in his characteristically calm, composed way. No topic was out-of-bounds. No point of view beyond his capacity and attention. He criticized ideas, not people. He used logic and rationality, not emotion, to cement his beliefs.

Like Socrates in ancient Athens, Kirk asked probing questions and challenged prevailing orthodoxy and, like the great philosopher, he paid the ultimate price for it.

Charlie was allegedly murdered by a radicalized young leftist leading a shambolic private life. The accused, Tyler Robinson, was in a relationship with a transgender individual when, prosecutors say, he pulled the trigger at the exact moment Kirk was answering an audience question about the scourge of transgender violence.

The irony of the tragedy is sickening, but the tsunami of conspiracy that the catastrophe unleashed is perhaps the greatest insult to Kirk’s legacy.

A few weeks after the murder of my friend, with whom I was in daily contact and had spoken to the evening before his death, I found myself on the receiving end of the worst slander I could have imagined.

A podcaster, better suited to the mental ward than a studio, began peddling a campaign of vile and utterly baseless smears, alleging that I was complicit in the murder of my friend. Messages between Kirk, me and others in a private group chat were weaponized to plant seeds of suspicion.

Shame on you, Candace Owens.

It didn’t take long for someone to single me out.

In October, a follower of Owens on X was arrested and charged for issuing online death threats against me and a few other conservative commentators. There was one common denominator among the targeted: We are all Jewish and/or publicly supportive of Israel.

Yet another disgraceful response to Kirk’s killing has been the worst onslaught of conspiratorial right-wing antisemitism in American history. That Kirk was the leading Christian Zionist of his generation was, of course, lost on the pitchfork-wielding internet mob.

In reality, he cherished the ecumenical Jewish-Christian biblical alliance and greatly valued the US-Israel geopolitical alliance. In private, he referred to Christianity, Judaism, the United States and Israel as the ‘four pillars’ on which the modern West was built. It’s no wonder that we were friends.

But it is not only Jews who have found themselves on the wrong end of the conspiracists’ bile.

No one has been slandered more than Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow. The wicked claims against her are not worth repeating.

Since then, the madness has only ratcheted up. Crackpot, revisionist historians now appear regularly on the world’s largest podcasts, conservatives-in-name-only traffic in ancient hatreds and sincere commentators are increasingly drowned out.

There has been a breakdown in the ability of many on the Right to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and lie, right and wrong.

What’s happened? It seems to me that too many reacted to a slew of genuine betrayals by American elites – the Russiagate hoax, America’s scandalous response to the Covid pandemic, the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the prosecutions of President Trump, and more – by concluding that, actually, we can’t believe anything we are told.

Everything ‘they’ tell us is a lie.

Into this vacuum have crawled opportunistic ghouls who are willing to sacrifice credibility for clicks. But there is nothing good down that rabbit hole, only suffering and immiseration, the very toxic mentality that Kirk fought against so passionately.

Kirk believed that anyone could pull himself up by their bootstraps. Anyone can go to the gym, to the library, eat healthier, study harder and ask the pretty girl out on a date. But in his absence, the message from charlatans isn’t self-help. It’s victimhood.

The question now is what is to be done about this reaction to Kirk’s death, which is so antithetical to his life.

Unfortunately, it seems we cannot look to some of America’s so-called conservative leaders to lead the way. Just last week, Vice President JD Vance was asked about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, one of the leading purveyors of conspiratorial filth circulating online.

‘Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,’ the Vice President said. ‘I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if you have a disagreement with somebody politically, even over a deeply held issue, you should still be friends with that person, because the whole republic depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.’

If this were a matter of ‘political disagreement’, I may agree. But it is not. If Carlson were just some ‘friend’ of the Vice President’s, I may let it pass. But he isn’t.

America’s conservatives cannot abandon the work of discerning right from wrong. 

More leaders of crucial conservative institutions, including the major think tanks, must come out and clearly explain that unhinged conspiracies destroy movements – and nations.

Charlie Kirk is a martyr for free speech and honest debate. His true friends and allies must continue to champion his cause.

On this one-year anniversary, there can be no greater tribute to his memory.

Rest in peace, friend.