Far-right favorite Kari Lake couldn’t help but push a conspiracy theory about Charlie Kirk’s killer during a Sunday prayer vigil for the slain political pundit.
During the event at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, the failed Senate candidate suggested that suspect Tyler Robinson was “brainwashed” at college and warned parents not to send their children to “indoctrination camps.”
“How does a 22-year-old become so filled with hate?” Lake asked. “Five years earlier, I was told he was a Trump supporter. And we sent our kids off to college, and they brainwashed him.”
The MAGA darling’s theory about Robinson’s liberal college indoctrination doesn’t make much sense when looking at the accused assassin’s actual education.
He attended Utah State University as a pre-engineering major for just one semester before enrolling in an electrical apprentice program at Dixie Technical College, according to The New York Times.
OLIVIER TOURON via Getty Images
Dixie Technical College boasts “hands-on” training opportunities for careers in construction, nursing, firefighting, automotive repair and other trades on its website.
The tiny college doesn’t appear to offer any liberal arts programs, like the ones which conservatives have accused of being channels for far-left propaganda mills for years.
Kirk’s own conservative crusade was anchored in the idea that American colleges and universities were “indoctrination zones.” In 2012, he founded a network of conservative college groups called Turning Point USA, which a kept a “Professor Watchlist” of faculty it accused of pushing “leftist propaganda.”
In a 2022 Fox News op-ed, he wrote, “I firmly believe that most—if not all—the destructive ideas that are now eating away at the foundation of American society originated on college campuses.”
When he was shot and killed at Utah Valley University last Wednesday, Kirk was in the middle of one of his signature campus political debates.
While Kirk was one of the nation’s most high-profile conservative figures, Robinson’s exact motives and political beliefs still remain unclear.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) initially told The Wall Street Journal that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology” but declined to offer any specifics.
The governor said that Robinson has “not confessed” and is “not cooperating” with authorities during a Sunday press briefing but said that family members and acquaintances been working with investigators.