He asked the last question before Charlie Kirk was shot. Conspiracy theorists tried to make him a villain.
Hunter Kozak saw Charlie Kirk’s gruesome public assassination just a few feet away from him on his college campus. Within hours, he watched through his phone as strangers built an elaborate false narrative about what he’d just witnessed — accusing him of not only wanting the killing but also secretly plotting to make it happen.
Kozak was the last person to ask Kirk a question at Utah Valley University.
But for the next year, Kozak got thousands of messages from internet “investigators,” calling him a “murderer,” a “crisis actor,” “a f**king disinformation agent,” a plotter who was “practicing his reaction” to the shooting. (When Kirk was shot, cameras captured Kozak throwing his hands up, trembling, and collapsing to the ground. He looks incredibly vulnerable, but conspiracy theorists see a cold-blooded faker, and they tell him so all the time.) Some suggest he kill himself, one contacted him to say, “I hope you relive the moment that f**ker was shot every time you close your eyes.”
He has tried reasoning with them, arguing with them, insulting them. Much of his effort has been directed toward convincing them he’s not a character in a show or a meme, but a real person, with a real family and real feelings. The experience has forced him to think deeply about, basically, the nature of humanity.
Kozak felt alone. But baseless claims and relentless harassment saying you’re not a victim but a perpetrator are now second-order consequences for those connected to tragedy. Parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook in 2012 were tormented for years by conspiracy theorists who claimed their kids hadn’t really died. Lindsay Clancy admitted to killing her own children in 2023, yet conspiracy theorists have harassed her ex-husband — the father of those murdered children — claiming he’s the real killer.
Kozak’s daughter was two days old and being treated in the neonatal intensive care unit when he and his wife, Shelby, took a break from the hospital to go to the Turning Point USA event at UVU. By the time they got back to the hospital a couple of hours later, things were getting weird online. People were finding Kozak’s social media accounts and puzzling over the coincidence that he was asking about shootings when Kirk was shot.
“I felt like I was going crazy,” Kozak said. “I felt very quickly like I couldn’t trust a lot of people around me.”
Kozak, who is 30 and married with two young children, said he has moved his family, fearing for their safety. People in his life have told him to quit the internet or at least not to read what’s directed at him, like a recent message warning, “Normies aren’t on your side, Hunter, and you really need to be careful about where you are seen these days. We aren’t gonna ‘Kirk’ you, bro. You’re going to be tortured to death.”
Quitting, he said, would allow conspiracy theorists to have “a reign of terror on the internet.” Instead, he’s still making videos about politics on TikTok, still posting on X.com, still reading direct messages, and sometimes responding to those who seemingly hadn’t considered the possibility he could do so.
“It’s such a profoundly weird experience. I don’t even know exactly how to orient myself in this,” he said. He tried to imagine the inner world of the conspiracy theorists he replied to: maybe it was like they were punching a punching bag, and then suddenly the punching bag grew a face and asked, “Why are you punching me?”
He pointed to an exchange with a woman who accused him of being a “crisis actor” — a person conspiracy theorists believe is paid to be at the scene of a tragedy and pretend to be upset. He responded that she was a “dumbass,” and she replied haughtily, “no need for name calling.” When Kozak reminded her, she suggested he was involved in a murder plot, she said, “I didn’t say anything all that bad.”
Kozak laughed at the message: “I. Find. That. CRAZY. I find it crazy!!”
He knew he was replying to her with the pent-up fury of reading a thousand previous hateful messages when he told her to go to a mental institution. She responded, “Wow, I didn’t deserve that. I’m just a mom of three.” Kozak stopped laughing. He’s a father of two. The empathy she expected from him — why couldn’t she extend the same to him?
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/08/us/ch...acy-theory
Hunter Kozak saw Charlie Kirk’s gruesome public assassination just a few feet away from him on his college campus. Within hours, he watched through his phone as strangers built an elaborate false narrative about what he’d just witnessed — accusing him of not only wanting the killing but also secretly plotting to make it happen.
Kozak was the last person to ask Kirk a question at Utah Valley University.
But for the next year, Kozak got thousands of messages from internet “investigators,” calling him a “murderer,” a “crisis actor,” “a f**king disinformation agent,” a plotter who was “practicing his reaction” to the shooting. (When Kirk was shot, cameras captured Kozak throwing his hands up, trembling, and collapsing to the ground. He looks incredibly vulnerable, but conspiracy theorists see a cold-blooded faker, and they tell him so all the time.) Some suggest he kill himself, one contacted him to say, “I hope you relive the moment that f**ker was shot every time you close your eyes.”
He has tried reasoning with them, arguing with them, insulting them. Much of his effort has been directed toward convincing them he’s not a character in a show or a meme, but a real person, with a real family and real feelings. The experience has forced him to think deeply about, basically, the nature of humanity.
Kozak felt alone. But baseless claims and relentless harassment saying you’re not a victim but a perpetrator are now second-order consequences for those connected to tragedy. Parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook in 2012 were tormented for years by conspiracy theorists who claimed their kids hadn’t really died. Lindsay Clancy admitted to killing her own children in 2023, yet conspiracy theorists have harassed her ex-husband — the father of those murdered children — claiming he’s the real killer.
Kozak’s daughter was two days old and being treated in the neonatal intensive care unit when he and his wife, Shelby, took a break from the hospital to go to the Turning Point USA event at UVU. By the time they got back to the hospital a couple of hours later, things were getting weird online. People were finding Kozak’s social media accounts and puzzling over the coincidence that he was asking about shootings when Kirk was shot.
“I felt like I was going crazy,” Kozak said. “I felt very quickly like I couldn’t trust a lot of people around me.”
Kozak, who is 30 and married with two young children, said he has moved his family, fearing for their safety. People in his life have told him to quit the internet or at least not to read what’s directed at him, like a recent message warning, “Normies aren’t on your side, Hunter, and you really need to be careful about where you are seen these days. We aren’t gonna ‘Kirk’ you, bro. You’re going to be tortured to death.”
Quitting, he said, would allow conspiracy theorists to have “a reign of terror on the internet.” Instead, he’s still making videos about politics on TikTok, still posting on X.com, still reading direct messages, and sometimes responding to those who seemingly hadn’t considered the possibility he could do so.
“It’s such a profoundly weird experience. I don’t even know exactly how to orient myself in this,” he said. He tried to imagine the inner world of the conspiracy theorists he replied to: maybe it was like they were punching a punching bag, and then suddenly the punching bag grew a face and asked, “Why are you punching me?”
He pointed to an exchange with a woman who accused him of being a “crisis actor” — a person conspiracy theorists believe is paid to be at the scene of a tragedy and pretend to be upset. He responded that she was a “dumbass,” and she replied haughtily, “no need for name calling.” When Kozak reminded her, she suggested he was involved in a murder plot, she said, “I didn’t say anything all that bad.”
Kozak laughed at the message: “I. Find. That. CRAZY. I find it crazy!!”
He knew he was replying to her with the pent-up fury of reading a thousand previous hateful messages when he told her to go to a mental institution. She responded, “Wow, I didn’t deserve that. I’m just a mom of three.” Kozak stopped laughing. He’s a father of two. The empathy she expected from him — why couldn’t she extend the same to him?
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/08/us/ch...acy-theory
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
