The preliminary hearings in the case of accused killer Tyler Robinson have laid out the core evidence in the murder of Charlie Kirk. Surveillance footage places Robinson on the Utah Valley University campus where Kirk was shot last September. 

DNA links Robinson to the murder weapon at a 95 percent probability. An autopsy confirms death by a single gunshot wound to the neck. Confessions exist in text messages and witness testimony. These are not presumptive assertions. They comprise evidence provided in court, under sworn testimony.

The real trial hasn't begun, and this evidence will be subject to cross-examination. But countless defendants have been convicted of murder with far less evidence than has already been presented against Robinson.

Yet a vocal segment of the Right continues to reject all of this. Fueled by the anonymity of social media, they do not merely ask questions. They dismiss concrete evidence as fabrications, insist Robinson was never there, claim the shot came from an exploding microphone, or pivot to elaborate plots.

Some involve Kirk's widow, Erika, others staff at Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the organization Charlie Kirk founded and his wife now leads. Many even point to the Israeli government as the real culprit.

On platforms like X, this process unfolds through prominent voices that seize on peripheral details and spin them into sweeping alternative theories. 

TPV Sean (@tpvsean), for example, has promoted claims of 'leaked Mossad files' allegedly obtained by Iranian hackers. Such files assert that TPUSA insiders coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces to murder Kirk as part of a calculated leadership transition at the top of the conservative movement.

They believe the Tyler Robinson evidence and preliminary hearing are merely a rigged cover-up.

Other accounts insist Robinson was never the shooter but a patsy, pointing to alleged unusual traffic at his residence before the event or supposed hand signals from security personnel as proof of an inside job.

These narratives rarely construct a coherent alternative timeline or perpetrator; instead, they loop endlessly on unverified fragments - grainy footage anomalies, procedural gaps, or speculative 'disappearing' figures - while reflexively dismissing proven facts and evidence.

The mechanism at work here is not merely skepticism. It is a dark process of psychological breakdown and reprogramming called menticide - the killing of the mind.

The term menticide was coined by Joost Meerloo in The Rape of the Mind, a seminal work on mind control written 70 years ago. Meerloo's views of menticide formed a critical concept explored in my recent book, Manufacturing Delusion, which dealt primarily with the mass hysterias of the Left. 

With the Kirk case, I now see menticide at work on the Right.

Meerloo, who studied Nazi interrogations and later Korean War brainwashing cases, described menticide as the systematic killing of independent, rational thought. It does not always require a prison cell or physical beatings, though despotic regimes certainly deploy such tactics.

In a free society, menticide operates by confusing the target audience, degrading anyone who questions that confusion, demanding the rejection of contrary evidence along with the cultivation of perpetual doubt. The goal is to render the victim complicit in the surrender of their rational mind.

The current right-wing variant relies on these tactics. It begins with the elevation of peripheral observations above central facts. In the case of the Kirk murder, this plays out in a seemingly endless list of established facts being reframed as conjecture. 

A figure in grainy campus video appears slightly taller to some than Robinson's listed height. A body camera battery dies during the rooftop search. No rifle case is immediately recovered. An unidentified plainclothes officer appears briefly. Bullet fragments yield inconclusive matches even though damaged projectiles often do.

Each detail is seized, magnified and looped endlessly online so that they become the true story. Robinson's DNA match, the timeline of his movement, his texted confession, Kirk's autopsy - all recede into irrelevance. They are dismissed as part of the cover up.

This fixation is not accidental. It is part of menticide. By training attention exclusively onto what cannot be explained to pixel-perfect satisfaction, the mind is conditioned to treat every official clarification as further proof of conspiracy.

The result is confirmation bias. New information cannot be processed on its merits, it must go through the filter of a predetermined narrative. This is classic menticidal technique - keep the subject constantly confused in the early stages, then make them complicit in their own psychological degradation.

Social media has blown all this into another dimension. Online 'investigators' and certain podcasters function as the new commissars of doubt. 

In the case of Kirk, they do not present a coherent alternative account of who fired the shot or why. They traffic in questions they never resolve. Each new fragment of footage or procedural note becomes fresh ammunition for the next episode. Followers are rewarded with the dopamine of discovery and the promise of the biggest reveal of all, coming any day now.

Dissent - accepting the court evidence in this case - is treated as moral failure or paid complicity. The cult-like online community enforces loyalty not through physical coercion but through the threat of expulsion from the circle of the enlightened, followed by a barrage of grotesque personal attacks.

The degradation of the mind worsens as this process progresses. Critical faculties atrophy when every piece of forensic or video evidence is reflexively rejected as fraudulent. Believers become so emotionally invested in the theory, that retreat becomes psychologically costly.

Nobody likes to admit they've been fooled. Admitting that Robinson acted alone would require acknowledging that months of reckless online speculation was bad thinking done in bad faith. Many true believers refuse to pay this price. They prefer to double down. In doing so, they fall further down the menticidal rabbit hole.

Inevitably, it gets darker. 

The online focus on Israel, for instance, reveals a deeper pathology. It draws on the oldest template of conspiratorial thinking: the hidden hand of a powerful ethnic or foreign cabal. This is not about finding the real killer of Charlie Kirk. It's weaponizing antisemitism behind a shield of 'just asking questions.'

At this stage, the same voices hyper-focused on the most minute detail of Kirk's murder investigation rely on gut instinct for the grand finale. Their audience, already deep in the menticidal madness, is now conditioned to replace fact with fiction as long as it comes from someone who claims to see the overarching conspiracy.

The ringleaders of this audience - whether cynical grifters or sincere but captured ideologues - gain power precisely from the confusion they manufacture. This demoralized, perpetually suspicious following is deeply committed to their leader because nobody else can be trusted. 

The clicks keep going up, and the audience grows.

Honest inquiry looks nothing like this. It weighs the cumulative evidence. It updates when new facts arrive. It does not require every minor procedural gap to be explained before accepting the obvious.

Robinson's presence, his weapon, his DNA, his movements and his communications form an overwhelming case. This week's hearings simply confirmed what the initial reports of the investigation established. For any sane observer, the facts presented leave no reasonable doubt.

It's time to confront this conspiracy insanity before it becomes a plague spreading to other areas of the Right. The cure is not more speculation or histrionic denunciation of critics. It is the disciplined return to facts, however unwelcome or embarrassing for some the truth may be.

Charlie Kirk's murderer will eventually be held to account. Our justice system is working as it should. Many honorable people, including Kirk's family, closest friends and allies, were sitting in the court room this week and watching the evidence presented.

None of them think this is a show trial. None of them have motive to go along with lies. 

Undermining public faith in this process is not resisting conspiracy. It's surrendering to madness.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​