Audio only:
In this episode Trent discusses the recent debate on Charlie Kirk’s murder between Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson and the sad state of modern debates.
Previous Episode on Debates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6z7asjta4
Should Christians “Trust the Science”?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO9I4KTBO14
Transgender Terrorism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJjtOc5Iclo
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Transcript:
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Last Friday, Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens debated the question of who killed Charlie Kirk, and this debate has been seen by over 6 million people across different channels. And while people might debate the winner of this exchange, the loser is anyone who sat through this dumpster fire thinking they’d see an edifying exchange of ideas.
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So today on the Council of Trent, I’ll be talking about this debate, how debates have gotten dumber, and how some Christians have lost their way in all of this. But to do that, you’ll need some background on this controversy.
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On September 17th, 2025, one week after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Candace Owens released an episode on her podcast called Who Ordered the Hit on Charlie Kirk, where she said some of the evidence for Tyler Robinson being the shooter did not add up or was fabricated. Owen said Kirk’s changing views toward Israel may have created powerful enemies, but at this time she did not claim TPS.
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Erica Kirk, Israel or any other group was involved in Charlie’s murder. Then, on November 17th, Owen cited an anonymous source saying that Egyptian planes were tracking Erika Kirk. But since the US gives over $1 billion to the Egyptian government each year, it’s not surprising to see their vehicles in our country for servicing. Erika also pointed out that Candace Owens has been wrong about her past travel itineraries.
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So aside from these details not proving anything. Candace Owens doesn’t explain why the Egyptian government would want to kill Charlie Kirk. She just calls it a mystery. Well, until January 2026, when she said this.
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But flashback to December, where, along with the Egyptian plane theory, Owens said the French government was also involved in Charlie Kirk’s death. She said of an anonymous source that.
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and own named billionaire Pierre Falcone as the French connection behind Charlie Kirk’s death. But then, on December 2nd, Candace Owens posted the following on X.
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I now can say with full confidence that I believe Charlie Kirk was betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA and some of the very people who eulogized him on stage.
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Yes, I will be naming names and providing evidence for my claims.
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Then, on December 18th, Candace Owens interviewed a man named Mitch who claimed to see US military officials and a woman who looked like Erika Kirk meet at a US military base in Arizona.
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Okay, so
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Egypt or Israel somehow pretending to be Egypt and France and the US government and TPTB USA are all involved in Charlie Kirk’s murder. And not only that, we’re going to get evidence for these claims. Or maybe we won’t. Because
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here’s how Candace Owens responded to Andrew Wilson when he asked her about this evidence in their debate.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Candace Owens source behind all of this was I made it up.
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You see, what Candace Owens does is she throws any fact or theory at the wall like spaghetti to see what will stick. And her audience eats this up while forgetting all her speculations and never went anywhere. And when someone calls out own speculations, she acts like she never made them in the first place. But even though her claims are absurd, Candace Owens has still retained control over what she says.
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She isn’t randomly spouting nonsense. As a result, she is morally culpable for her words because she’s smart enough to not make a specific claim like Erika Kirk Murdered Charlie or Erika Kirk was complicit in Charlie’s murder. If Owens did that, then she could be sued for defamation. Owens basically admits this in her debate with Wilson.
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But in previous episodes of her podcast, Candace Owens walks right up to the line of that accusation and says stuff like this.
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Yeah, calling a woman a black widow and comparing her to O.J. Simpson is not what you say about someone who merely says another person like Tyler Robinson is guilty. It’s an indirect way of saying that a specific woman is complicit in murder. What Owens does through hours of programing is to create guilt by association and insinuation. She just throws a bunch of scary sounding facts at the screen, hoping some of them will stick, and that the sheer number of these claims overwhelms those who are trying to process her argument.
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This allows her to make money off the claim that Erika was involved in Charlie’s murder, while protecting herself from being sued, because she never explicitly makes that claim and only spews a bunch of unrelated facts. Moreover, as a self-identified Catholic, Candace Owens should be ashamed of herself. Paragraph 2479 and the Catechism says.
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Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one’s neighbor. Honor is a social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation, and to respect, thus detraction, calumny offend against the virtues of justice and charity. And paragraph 2477 says,
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Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty of rash judgment, who even tacitly assumes is true without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor of detraction, who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them of calumny, who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.
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I’m sure Candace Owens would condemn a hypothetical podcaster for the same reasons listed here in the catechism, and maybe even take legal action against a hypothetical podcaster who said something like, I think Candace Owens murdered Charlie Kirk so she could make millions of dollars promoting this conspiracy about him. And I doubt Candace Owens would buy the excuse from this hypothetical podcaster if he were to say, well, I’m allowed to think, aren’t I?
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This is why normal people will find all of this absolutely infuriating. And so I understand why someone like Andrew Wilson would want to debate and expose Candace Owens. But here’s the problem. As I noted in my previous episode on how debates became dumb, modern debates are no longer about rigorously presenting evidence for an unbiased audience to consider. Instead, modern debates are just about trying to get a gotcha moment that you can spam all over the internet.
00:09:13:22 - 00:09:36:20
Owens herself has done this with one moment from the debate, where Andrew did not know the exact nature of the criminal charges against Tyler Robinson. I hate this tactic, and I’ve seen it in many recent debates. For example, Ethan Muse recently debated Luke Hansen on whether the Book of Mormon has demonic origins, and muse brought up damning evidences of Joseph Smith’s involvement with the occult.
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instead of wrestling with all of the evidence in that debate, many Mormons have only clung to one clip where Ethan admitted he had not read the entire Book of Mormon as a way to dismiss all of his arguments. But unless Luke could show there was a part of the Book of Mormon Ethan had not read that invalidated his argument.
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This fact alone is irrelevant to the strength of Ethan’s arguments about Joseph Smith. For example, both I and Mormons would agree that the founder of seventh day Adventism, LNG white, is not a prophet, and we don’t have to read all 100,000 pages of what white wrote to reach that conclusion.
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The other problem with modern debates is that they tend to lack structure. They try to be more like a free flowing conversation, as was the case in the Owens Wilson debate. But when they’re set up like that with people who are operating in debate me mode, then you’re not able to get at the truth because people end up changing positions or getting out of issues or quibbling over terms.
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That’s what Wilson and Owens did in the beginning of their debate, and a lot of it ended up being a bunch of wasted time. That’s why a proper debate in this environment needs things like rebuttal rounds, so that the audience can properly examine the evidence that’s in question and not waste time changing the subject. So you need proper format and also a clear resolution.
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That’s why you need one resolution to debate. And so in this debate between Candace Owens, Andrew Wilson, it was unfortunate that there were multiple resolutions. And Wilson took on a heavy burden by saying there is overwhelming evidence Tyler Robinson is guilty because Wilson doesn’t have access to all the prosecution’s evidence. The debate should have just really been about Candace Owens claims that certain actors, like Israel or USA, were involved in Charlie Kirk’s death, but as you saw, Candace refuses to defend those claims.
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Another problem with these kinds of free form debates as well, is that they’re just opportunities for grandstanding and trying to win by exuding the most confidence, not the best argument. Even when someone is shown to be wrong, they can get out of it if they just have a clever insult.
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And this is behavior that Wilson himself has engaged in. So it’s somewhat fitting that he’s getting a taste of his own medicine.
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I will never be able to convince you of my worldview, Charlie. I just think, honestly, you’re too fucking stupid to understand them.
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This kind of behavior is probably the worst thing about modern debate culture, which people now call bloodsport debate. And I hope people will push back on it because it just makes everyone stupider and wastes everybody’s time. You can see that in Jay Dyer’s recent debate against five Protestants, where he resorts to insulting his opponents to score points with the audience.
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I find that when people get aggressive and snarky in debates, as Candace Owens did in her debate with Wilson, it’s because they realize they’re in a bind and they want to distract the audience. In my dialog with Kelly Powers recently, you could see him become increasingly belligerent the more my questions forced him in uncomfortable positions. And I do think also that Andrew was underprepared for this debate, and he chose not to use his more aggressive debate tactics to compensate for that.
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But it’s also a difficult situation in general, because Owens has been pushing this conspiracy theory for over a year, and Wilson didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. And given that there are so many, what about this? Or isn’t this weird non facts that a person can throw into a debate? It makes debating issues like this a nonstarter.
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This is why, in my previous episode on debates, I said I will not debate fringe positions like flat Earth theory or moon landing denial. That’s because to do that, you have to spend months researching nonsense arguments. And even if you know how to answer all of them in the actual debate, your opponent can just throw out a few dozen, explain this challenges.
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And if you fail to address even a single one of them, he’ll say that he won. Now, debates are great for engaging value questions or for helping people investigate the big questions of life, but they aren’t good at proving particular cases that involve many pieces of evidence that need to be examined. This is why legal trials aren’t decided by which lawyer gave the most based speech in court.
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They’re decided by a long deliberation over all of the available evidence. So trying to replicate that in a few hours on a podcast is a waste of time. And along with wasting your time agreeing to debate a fringe topic gives that topic legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, and it gives its advocates the attention they desperately crave. That’s why I believe Candace Owens won this debate, even if she lost the argument.
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Several people online have run the debate through AI models, and nearly all of them say Andrew Wilson had the better arguments. But Candace Owens now has more legitimacy with her base. She may have added a few converts to her camp, and she is allegedly $300,000 richer after Andrew Wilson apparently paid her that amount to agree to the debate.
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But even if Andrew also won as moderator, Patrick beat David claims the real loser in all of this is Erika Kirk. She is still mourning the death of her husband and has to put up with millions of people treating her like a villain, some of whom are so unhinged they might kill her and make her children orphans. This is why I cannot understand how a Christian could support Candace Owens by regularly watching her show.
00:15:53:18 - 00:16:14:20
Doing that gives Owens ad revenue that allows her to engage in sins like rash judgment. In addition, Owens is causing millions of people to imitate her vibes based epistemology, where they think they can just know what’s true based on hunches rather than evidence. It’s why one of Owen’s catchphrases is we don’t know, know, but we know.
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if Candace Owens were correct, then why isn’t Tyler Robinson’s defense team using her arguments
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Instead, they admit their client killed Charlie Kirk, and they’re trying to spare him the death penalty by arguing that he did not try to hurt anyone else.
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If things like the text messages were Robinson basically confesses were fake, as Owens alleges, then why wouldn’t Robinson’s defense team show that they’re fake by introducing Robinson’s actual phone records? This is like how moon landing conspiracies make no sense, because the Soviet Union had every motivation and ability to disprove the moon landing if it didn’t actually happen.
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if Robinson’s defense team is not using Candace’s brilliant arguments because they’re also part of the conspiracy for reasons, then why doesn’t Candace Owens use the enormous amount of money she’s made pushing this conspiracy to fund her own legal dream team to exonerate Robinson and bring the true perpetrators to justice? The answer is because she has no evidence that would survive in a court of law, only wild claims from anonymous sources.
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And as I noted in a previous episode linked below, this disregard for evidence and critical thinking has led Candace Owens to say absolutely insane stuff
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like that. She can’t be confident if the Earth is round, or her claim that dinosaurs are fake and gay.
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I’m not a flat earther.
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I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science.
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As Christians, we are called to be witnesses to the truth. Second Timothy four says, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady.
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Endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry.
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It’s unfortunate that a lot of Christians who could be doing so much good for the kingdom, have been sucked into a social media black hole where the only thing they want to read about is gossip and conspiracy theories. When I think of epic debates involving Christians that have millions of views, I think of the 2009 debate where William Lane Craig absolutely thrashed New Atheist Christopher Hitchens on the question of God’s existence.
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But what are we doing 12 years later? Americans are less religious now than they were in 2009. And instead of promoting debates where we help people come to know the answers to life’s most important questions, the debates that are getting millions of views are ones on stupid conspiracy theories. That’s why I want to continue engaging non-religious critics along with Christians from different denominations.
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It’s also why I will keep debating important moral issues like abortion or transgender ideology. Even though Candace Owens has single handedly kneecap our ability to showcase the ideology of the radical left. Given that Robinson objected to Charlie Kirk’s political views which impacted his transgender lover, this echoes other acts of transgender terrorism that I’ve covered in previous episodes, but we aren’t talking about any of that, and even liberals like Hassan Piker are grateful that Candace Owens has made that possible.
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I can’t speak out against this queen because this is a queen that successfully and single handedly undermined the Republican initiative to make eyes Charlie Kirk and use that example to crack down on political dissent.
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So yeah, ultimately, this debate was bad. If it helped to legitimize Candace Owens whack a doodle methods and advertiser to a larger audience. And it was good if it helped people to see Candace Owens is not someone whose reasoning should be trusted, and encourages Christians to objectively examine evidence and not slot everything into vibe space conspiracy hunches. Finally, I want you to know that I’m donating the ad revenue from today’s episode to a charity in Erica’s name because I have no interest in profiting off the drama related to her husband’s murder.
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Instead, I hope today’s episode will encourage all of us to critically examine evidence. So that is. Ephesians 414 or 15 says, we may no longer be children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles, rather speaking the truth and love. We are to grow up in every way, and to him who is the head into Christ.
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Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.